Yes for Salmon

It’s election season and this year I’m voting for salmon.

For me, salmon are more than just a fish. They drive the rhythm of our nomadic life, feed our bodies and bring us work.  In short, my life revolves around them.

Every summer my boyfriend and I return to Alaska to operate a small, commercial fish buying station. It’s essentially a land-based tender, where we act as the middleman between the fishing boats and the fish processor. Our dock is on the Kasilof River, where people have lived along its banks and harvested its salmon for thousands of years.

Today, the mouth of the river supports a subsistence red salmon dip-net fishery, a small commercial fleet of driftnet boats and a couple of fish processing plants. We service a mostly Russian fleet of drift gillnet fisherman in the Upper Cook Inlet (UCI). They come to us for fuel and ice, water taxis between their boats and their trucks and to deliver their catch of the day. When they pull up to our dock we offload their boats with cranes, move the fish around in big totes on a forklift, weigh them, sort them by all 5 species, re-ice them and prepare the official fish tickets for the fishermen. After all of that, and before we can go to sleep, we load the salmon onto 18-wheelers to be taken to a fish processing plant in Seward.

Like us, many Alaskans set their calendar to the lifecycle of salmon and I don’t believe we should treat this cycle as a given.

Last summer we bought 169,457 pounds of wild, Alaskan salmon at our dock. It was the worst year most of our fishermen have ever seen. At some point it was reported that not since 1979 had so few sockeye returned up the Kenai River. I’ve been sad about it, hopeful, and ultimately super fascinated by these fish.

• Their massive anadromous passages are iconic and nothing short of a miracle of nature.
• It’s been shown they can even shape landscapes much like volcanoes and glaciers have. When female salmon use their tail fins to scour out redds for their eggs, they disturb the sediment and make erosion more efficient. This is enough to actually sculpt the slope and elevation of streams. 
• For a millennium these muscular fish have embodied the health and vitality of the Pacific Northwest, where in many Native American myths, salmon willingly give themselves up as food for humans. Salmon were plentiful and, because runs are predictable, fishing was a more efficient way to secure protein than hunting land animals. 
• Long before the arrival of European settlers, Coastal First Nations established harvesting agreements and sophisticated techniques to share, monitor, and fish for salmon. They traded and redistributed their valuable resources ceremoniously. One unique form of exchange was the potlatch – where status was based on the distribution of wealth rather than accumulation of it. Imagine!
• The First Nations did not give up their right to manage their own fisheries; it was taken from them.

There’s still so much to learn.

We’ll never all agree on the answers or even what the right questions are, but these strong swimmers bring us together and we can’t afford to lose them.

Political fights over salmon aren’t new in Alaska. In fact, Alaska’s bid for statehood, back in the 1950s, was spurred in part by a fight over fish traps. The fish traps were behemoth contraptions placed at the mouths of salmon streams and so efficient they drastically diminished the salmon runs. The traps were built, owned and operated mostly by outside (Seattle, WA based) fishing interests. Statehood allowed Alaskans to take control over their fisheries that were suffering at the hands of outside exploiters.

Unfortunately, the fight for salmon protection is still going on. For over ten years The Pebble Limited Partnership, now owned by The Northern Dynasty Partnership (a Canadian-based subsidiary of Northern Dynasty Minerals, Limited) has been fighting approval for what would be the world’s largest open-pit mine at the headwaters of the world’s largest wild salmon run, in Bristol Bay, Alaska. It’s so ridiculous I can’t even. It shouldn’t need saying that the risks outweigh any short-term reward.

The good news is, on November 6, Alaskans will have the opportunity to vote Yes on Ballot Measure 1.

The initiative would update Alaska’s large mine permitting process and fish habitat protection laws (Title 16), which haven’t been updated since statehood, making them friendlier to wild salmon.

The current law allows development proposals, like Pebble Mine, near salmon streams, unless the proposals are “insufficient for the proper protection of fish and game”. The problem is there are no rules that define what “proper protection” means. This vague law leaves fish habitat vulnerable to a politically driven process. The Stand for Salmon initiative would require the state to hold public hearings before permitting decisions, ensuring Alaskans a voice on projects that could have significant impact on our wild salmon populations.

One of the key points in the initiative is the assumption that all streams, unless they’ve been proven otherwise, are anadromous fish streams. Currently, Alaska Dept of Fish and Game attempts to document all waterways in Alaska that support salmon and other anadromous species in what is called the Anadromous Waters Catalog. If someone wants to develop in a waterway listed in this catalog, then they need to apply for a permit from ADFG. If that waterway is not listed in the catalog, then they don’t need a permit at all. The “assumption of anadromy” ensures that waterways that support or produce salmon, but are not currently listed in the catalog, get habitat protections. 

Naturally, the initiative is being opposed by extractive goliaths like ExxonMobil, BP Alaska and Pebble Partnership. Don’t forget, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in Prince William Sound, was the worst environmental disaster in Alaskan history. 

Wild salmon have disappeared throughout the world – in Norway, the East Coast and Pacific Northwest. It would be folly to think that can’t happen in Alaska. King salmon populations have already declined throughout the state and 2018 was one of the worst salmon runs in history on the Kenai River.

Whether it’s climate change, the blob, bycatch, overfishing, habitat degradation or development projects you want to blame: we can’t risk losing our most valuable, natural and renewable resource — Salmon.

Resource extraction and development have always formed a critical piece of Alaska’s history and economy. However, oil and minerals are non-renewable. They will and come and go. 

Salmon are the true bedrock of Alaska.

If protected adequately today, they are the resource that has the ability to last forever. This is why I will be voting Yes on 1 and Standing for Salmon on Nov. 6