Imagine a huge open-pit mine is proposed in the headwaters of a major salmon stream in wild, Western Alaska. Development plans call for a sea of toxic waste to be stored behind a dam awaiting treatment. The mine presents the potential to create problems with acid runoff from massive piles of tailings. Fears are raised about the danger that poisonous cyanide could be spilled at the site. Environmentalists question whether emissions from high-temperature autoclaves could pump noxious methyl mercury into the sky to later rain down on the surrounding countryside.

And then it is suggested the revered and undeveloped Iditarod National Historic Trail might need to be torn up in order to lay a pipeline to haul gas 320 miles north from Cook Inlet to fuel a huge new electric power plant to process billions in gold at the mine.

The latter will have clued most in to the fact the mine in question here is not the well-known Pebble -- subject of incessant television and radio propagandizing from critics and proponents in Alaska. By now, even 49th state cave dwellers have heard the claims that Pebble will be either a huge source of environmentally safe jobs and business opportunities for an economically depressed corner of the state -- or an environmental disaster. "They get the gold; Alaskans get the toxic waste," as one commercial ominously portrays the future.

Suffice to say that "contentious" would be a fair way to describe the Pebble prospect not yet close to being a mine, something the Pebble Partnership keeps trying to point out as if that somehow makes a difference. The issue at Pebble is that there could someday be a mine in the headwaters of one of Alaska's major salmon drainages.

But then, a very similar situation exists at the barely noticed Donlin Creek prospect 225 miles to the north. Donlin is a tributary to the 724-mile long, resource-rich Kuskokwim River -- the longest free-flowing river in the United States. The Kusko, as it is commonly called, is home to all five species of Pacific salmon plus the fabled Alaska sheefish, the so-called "Tarpon of the North."

Development at Donlin carries many of the same risks and rewards as development at Pebble, and yet Donlin has been moving forward largely unopposed for more than a decade. Both environmentalists and developers agree on the main reason why: money.

As economist Karl Marx long ago observed, everything is economics.

Donlin has attracted little attention, said Pam Miller, executive director of Alaska Community Action on Toxins, because "unlike Pebble, there aren't the wealthy lodge owners. There's just poor subsistence residents."

Wealthy lodge owners might be the ultimate in NIMBY opposition to backyard development. They are extremely well connected, given their clients tend toward well-off businessmen and the idle rich. These are the kind of people with the connections that enable them to get major jewelry retailers to make public-relations claims they will never use Pebble gold in their products, even if it's hard to trace any gold used for jewelry back to its original source.

Take this power block, couple it with downstream commercial fishermen who hold valuable Alaska limited entry fishing permits for Bristol Bay salmon and a millionaire neighbor running an investment fund worth billions, and you have a power bloc that can make life hell for any sort of development.

Donlin faces no such opposing lobby. There are no wealthy lodge owners near Donlin, no well-off commercial fishermen downstream, and no millionaire neighbor. This, Miller said, has helped the project move forward almost in silence. She doesn't think that's right.

"It's a terrible environmental injustice," she said. "It's a terrible environmental disparity."

Stan Foo, the former manager of the Donlin development, would disagree with Miller on the issue of justice and disparity. He believes Donlin can be developed in an environmentally safe manner that could produce hundreds of jobs in one of the most economically depressed corners of North America. But he agrees about the influence of money.