First, though, the public, including outdoor sportsmen, has a chance to weigh in on this deeply anti-wilderness plan in a comment period that ends June 29. It would be beyond the scope of this short essay to detail all the ins and outs of the Pebble project. (All four of us fisherman-authors have followed this story closely for over a decade.) Suffice it to say that Pebble would be an out-of-place industrial juggernaut, financed by a Canadian mining company, to dig an enormous gold and copper mine (1.3 miles long by 1 mile wide and dug to a depth of 1,970 feet), replete with vast collecting ponds of sulfurous liquid waste in a roadless, earthquake-prone sweep of forest and tundra in Southwest Alaska.

Five years ago, Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, warned after three years of study that the Pebble Mine “would likely have significant and irreversible negative impacts on the Bristol Bay watershed and its abundant salmon fisheries.” But in 2017, the Trump administration reversed course and opened the way for the mine now under consideration. This move has been opposed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Ms. McCarthy’s predecessors from the Nixon, Reagan and two Bush administrations denounced the administration’s actions on Pebble in a recent full-page ad in The Washington Post, saying: “We oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to sweep nearly a decade of science and Clean Water Act review under the rug.”

The network of roads and industrial infrastructure needed to haul out the millions of tons of Pebble Mine gold and copper-laced rock would be a stake driven into the heart of Alaska’s wilderness, opening miles of untrammeled territory to exploitation. The proposed mine would store toxic mine wastes behind earthen dams. This technique has failed in the past and is even more risky for the streams and creeks upstream from Bristol Bay. The substrate surrounding the mine site is so sulfurous that the administrators of the pre-Trump Environmental Protection Agency noted in an assessment of the project that if the site were developed as the Pebble Partnership outlined it, on-site remediation would be required “in perpetuity.” In other words instead of pristine salmon runs, we’d have toxic-waste management, forever.

More than all that — if more is needed — the photograph above lays bare the larger gaslighting of American sportsmen and sportswomen under President Trump. In the past two years, the real estate developer turned president has arguably done more to harm the future of hunting and fishing grounds in this country than any president in history. The rescinding of the Obama-era rule on disposal of coal tailings poses imminent risk to trout streams throughout West Virginia and other trout-rich states. The gambit to open offshore oil drilling along the East Coast and the seismic testing that would accompany such a boondoggle has the potential to damage fisheries from redfish off the Carolinas to bluefish off New England. The administration’s potential gutting of the so-called Waters of the U.S. regulations would remove federal protection for half of many states’ wetlands, which are vital for the propagation of waterfowl so many American hunters love to pursue.

The mine being rushed by the Trump administration has such glaring disregard for the interests of hunters and fishers and nature lovers who back the president, that even the interests of such ardent Trump supporters as his own son and grandson are cast aside in this rush to industrialize one of the planet’s last great wild places. Also cast aside are values the angler, his son, and most American outdoor enthusiasts presumably share. Indeed it seems almost fraudulent that the present administration should brand itself with the same party affiliation as the most conserving of American conservatives, Theodore Roosevelt.