The Salmon State Revisited

A talk with Tim Bristol of Alaska

I’d like to share a recent conversation Vicki Nichols Goldstein and I had with Tim Bristol, Executive Director of the Juneau-based Salmon State, an initiative to protect and sustain Alaska's wild salmon.

David Helvarg (DH) –Tim, how'd you first get to Alaska?

(TB): I was working for my college newspaper and saw an ad in the back of the Buffalo State Record that said make a lot of money working in fisheries in Alaska. And my best friend, Jim and I took a bus from Buffalo to Bellingham, Washington and got on the Alaska Marine Highway and sailed the Inside Passage and we were essentially out of money at the first stop in Alaska, Ketchikan and hitchhiked our way downtown and got jobs at a cannery and lived in a tent for three months. And I can't say that it was my favorite job I've ever had, but I certainly learned a lot, and I just fell in love with Alaska. The sights and the sounds and the smells and interesting people and Ketchikan at that time was a very interesting place.

Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VN): Where did you go to college? Did you leave Alaska or did you stay?

(TB): I finished up at Buffalo State, went home, and I just could not get Alaska off my mind. And I wanted to be an environmental journalist. And, I thought, what better place to do that than Alaska, where conservation issues and natural resource issues are not in the second section of the paper, they were front page headlines almost on a daily basis. But pretty quickly after moving here, I just fell into conservation. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

(DH): So, not only on salmon, but on other issues?

(TB): I cut my teeth in the Tongass National Forest at that point, the Tongass, which is the largest national forest in the country, a huge salmon producer and a very unique landscape, this temperate old growth forest was the site of a really bitter conflict over the scale and the scope of logging that the Forest Service administered.

When I showed up, the mill in Ketchikan was demanding more and more of the forest. There were a lot of calls for reform and the controversy was starting to become sort of a kitchen table backyard issue for many people and I was kind of thrown into it. I got to travel throughout the region, meet all these very interesting people that were pushing back against this weird alliance between government and corporate interests. Eventually I'd say we were successful. The contracts were canceled. They reformed the forest service management plan.

And the year I came to Southeast Alaska and started working as an organizer for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, they cut 358 million board feet of the Tongass National Forest. They probably logged another half a billion board feet off private lands. And last year on the Tongass, they cut somewhere between 3 and 5 million board feet and the regional native corporation has completely changed the way they manage their lands. They've gotten out of the timber business and they've done some carbon credit deals and they've really kind of refocused on investing in sustainable business opportunities for the communities that depend upon them.

(DH): And most people don't realize that salmon are also forest creatures. That they're going upstream there and they're getting eaten, dying, providing the nutrients to all those trees. Every Cypress and Douglas fir in Alaska has some salmon soul in it.

(TB): The estimate now is there might be upwards of 13,000 coho salmon systems throughout the Tongass. Essentially every stream that connects to the ocean in this archipelago, this forest of islands has at least a pink salmon run. It's just overwhelming. When you get into July and August, just everything is choked with salmon.

(DH): You've sort of done your own little salmon cycle. You went from Southeast Alaska to Homer (on the Kenai Peninsula) and then back. It's a huge state. One of the few commonalities of all the parts however is salmon. Tell us how you came to Salmon State.

(TB): I was working for Trout Unlimited running their Alaska program, which was just a great experience. While I was working there, I worked with a few consultants and researchers to sort of try to measure Alaskans affinity for salmon. And we did some focus group work. We did polling, and we realized that salmon was up there with jobs and education as the things that unite people more effectively than anything else in the state. So, we decided that, ‘let’s just put salmon in our name and our mission’ to help broaden out who we talk to and how we talk to them and work across different geographies. So, I left Trout Unlimited almost 10 years ago now and started this new initiative, Salmon State. There's 13 of us here working for salmon throughout Alaska.

(VN): Let's, let's jump into the state of salmon. Tell us the big picture story about how the salmon populations are doing?

(TB): I'd say the state of salmon in Alaska is mixed. There are success stories, but there are some real causes for concern, leading with the negative, the Yukon, the Kuskokwim rivers are in really rough shape. There's not going to be any fishing for Chinook for King Salmon in the Yukon for the next seven years. The entire river shut down. And that's not just for commercial, but also recreational and, most impactful, customary and traditional harvest by Alaska native people. So, there's no fishing on the Yukon.

Clearly, climate is one of the big culprits and there's a lot of different theories as to, particularly with Chinook, what's led to the demise of the Chinook runs including the timing of food availability for juveniles when they out migrate, predation from killer whales and mammals. And then on top of that, there have been many years where the trawl fishery, the largest commercial fishery in the state and the most indiscriminate, which targets Pollack, which goes into fillet of fish sandwiches, inadvertently caught tens of thousands of Chinook.

And back in the nineties, it was hundreds of thousands of Chinook. So, you wonder about whether whole age classes of these returning Chinook and feeding Chinook just were wiped out. You can't point to one thing with Chinook, you know, they have this very complex life cycle.

(DH): So, some of Alaska's other industrial activities include there's mining, there's logging, there's oil drilling and pollution. I was recently up in Bethel and I met one of the ‘Mothers of the Kuskokwim’ who are fighting a gold mine upriver. And she talked about how this group of lawyers from Salmon State arrived and helped them out. And I, I almost get the impression that you're kind of like a SWAT team for salmon. How is it that you work with these different groups on these different issues around this very large state?

(TB): SWAT team for salmon. I hope you don't mind if I steal that, but we're not lawyers, but we help connect local people with lawyers. And, I'm really proud of my coworkers who spend quite a bit of time in these villages and we realized pretty quickly that what the corporate interests advocated for wasn't necessarily what people who still lived on the land and manage their tribal governments wanted. So, we started to look a little more closely at the Donlan (gold) mine and we realized that the state of Alaska was willing to sacrifice wild salmon habitat to a mine proposal.

So that's, that's become a much more controversial issue. These people in these communities have found their voice and organized themselves into a Kuskokwim coalition. And we have tried to help connect them with environmental law firms, earth justice, members of the media and to help them connect with elected officials.

And, you know, I think one of the things that's really important to point out, this is a gold mine. There is no critical mineral component, no Antimony, nothing like that. It is a gold mine. And I know gold is worth a lot of money for some reason but I don't understand it. But we don't need it. And I think it's important to keep that discussion, out there in the public sphere.

(DH): I think every decade or so, the nation as a whole hears about one of these issues in Alaska, the Tongass forest, the Pebble mine, but the largest fishery in America is the Seattle based trawlers for Pollock. And maybe you could talk a little bit about the trawlers and their political power and why so many Alaskans seem very upset with them at this point.

(VN): It's astounding to me that there's over 141 millions of bycatch over 10 years and that's just dead and dying animals thrown back into the ocean.

(TB): It's an issue that we've really started to grapple with over the last couple of years. And it's one that's finally starting to reach the attention of the average Alaskan. I, I would say that it hasn't yet been presented very effectively to the United States, to the public across the country.

Because you have a fishery that targets pollock, which is this very versatile whitefish found in enormous amounts in the Bering Sea. It's usually turned into fillet of fish sandwiches, fish sticks it's turned into fake crab, surimi. And over the years, the pollock harvest which is done using these very large nets that are dragged through the water catching everything in their wake, some of these nets are up to 300 feet long, and that has led to a lot of waste, tp what we call bycatch.

Everything except the Pollock is discarded, thrown overboard, most of the time dead. It’s a high volume, low value fishery. I think that managers from the federal government will tell you that the population of pollock is healthy and you can catch an enormous amount of it and still have great abundance. But it's the bycatch that is really what concerns us. and has really inflamed the passions of people throughout the state. You know, we've been saying that bycatch has become the new four-letter word up here.

Unfortunately it has become a very lucrative fishery. They're politically powerful. It's managed by the. National Marine Fisheries Service and the Department of Commerce basically. Guidance and decision making is in the hands of the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, the trawlers have done essentially everything they possibly can to try to avoid Chinook salmon. But when they avoid one species, they oftentimes end up hammering something else. And more recently it's been Chum salmon which are also in really rough shape. Their numbers are very low on the Yukon and Kuskokwim. They're also an important subsistence food in those places. The other thing that happens is these trawlers are supposed to be mid water or pelagic. So, they're going through the middle of the water column in the ocean. But oftentimes as they fill up with fish, they sink and end up on the bottom. And that's where, they end up catching halibut and crab and other species.

The amount of bycatch associated with trawlers in relation to halibut right now is probably the biggest concern and the one that is really alarming Alaskans. I talked to a couple of very successful commercial fishermen who throughout the years, you know, had directed harvest of halibut. And they're just saying that they've never seen the levels of halibut this low in the North Pacific.

(VN): And there’s been nine Orcas in the bycatch in recent years. Why isn't that all over the news?

(TB): It is it is a little frustrating right, because you look at the plight of the southern resident pod in Puget Sound and all the press around that and this Seattle-based fleet has caught and killed nine orca over the last few years in trawl nets and that just seems to go unreported.

(DH): What's the state's role in this? Is the governor participating? And let's talk about the new congressman too, what he might do.

(TB): Our governor gets to appoint the majority of participants in the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council. And our governor right now, Mike Dunleavy, has done, in our opinion, a pretty poor job of appointing people that are going to look out for the long-term interests of Alaskans.

(VN): Isn't there a mandated environmental seat on the councils?

(TB): No. Maybe on some of the other councils, but not the North Pacific, which manages the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. As a matter of fact, governor Jay Inslee from Washington nominated a woman who worked for the Ocean Conservancy to sit on the council. She used to live in Alaska, is incredibly knowledgeable really and well respected. Her nomination was eventually rejected by the head of Department of Commerce and they just put the same old, same old representative back on there.

(DH): That was (Washington democratic Senator) Maria Cantwell’s doing?

(TB): I don't know for sure, but there's been, you know, I think there's been a lot of speculation that Senator Cantwell was pushing for the status quo. I think one of the things that's going to be really interesting in the coming year is this doesn't necessarily break down along the old traditional ‘Democrats are good on the environment. Republicans are bad.’ I think it's way more mixed.

(DH): So people may not know that Alaska has two senators but because of its small population only has one congressperson. But it was interesting your last congresswoman, who is a democrat, got elected on a ‘Fish, Family and Freedom’ platform. And in this latest election, Nick Begich, a republican got elected saying that he was going to do something to protect salmon and, and what's his position and what's your hope?

(TB): During the campaign, he said that he wanted the people of Alaska to help sort out the policies and the platform associated with reforming the fisheries management and federal waters off of Alaska. So, hopefully there'll be a series of meetings with Representative Begich and hopefully we end up with some kind of push for significant reform because that's definitely what we're going to need.

(VNG): We always are very curious with new leadership. And speaking of new leadership, how do you feel President Trump may help or hinder your efforts to protect this region and its salmon?

(TB): We'll see, you know, I think there's real potential to maybe rein in some of the excesses on some issues. I think we're going to have some real trouble when it comes to protecting the habitat that salmon depend on. We're guardedly optimistic that President Trump will follow up on what he did rejecting (the Pebble) mining permits during his first term and maybe help us shore up protecitons for the headwaters of Bristol Bay. But in other places, I think it's going to be challenging.

(DH): Unlike almost any other state I can think of you've got a fish that's sort of key to the political economy of your state.

(TB): It really serves as a good indicator of ecosystem health because just about everybody participates in the salmon harvest in some way, shape or form. And it's a real uniting thing here. It can be very controversial, right? Cause people also fight over who gets to catch which salmon where, but at the end of the day, I think there is at least a baseline of love for salmon and an ethic of conservation when it comes to making sure that we have them for future generations.

(VN): I do have a question about pinks. Why are there so many pink (humpback) salmon?

(TB): They don't live as long and their survival strategy is to reproduce in big numbers. And right now with climate change that has winners and losers, pink salmon are a winner even as Chinook are in real trouble.

There's also been some really disturbing returns with coho salmon, especially in South Central Alaskan systems. Pink salmon numbers are really high. Sockeye salmon seem to be doing pretty well right now, especially in Bristol Bay. It’s a mixed situation. One issue that is really important to us and is a little bit under the radar is mineral development in Northern British Columbia. There are these big rivers that flow out of British Columbia and into Southeast Alaskan salmon rivers. And while there are thousands of salmon systems throughout Southeast Alaska, the big drivers are these rivers that come from British Columbia and then empty out into the inside passage and the Tongass National Forest.

British Columbia has just essentially decided that these watersheds are going to be for mining. They've kind of renamed the area the Golden Triangle. They have Spent enormous amounts of Canadian taxpayer money to, to send an electrical transmission line to this region of the province. And right now there are upwards of 100 mineral claims and mining projects at different stages of development or operation in these three big, wild, very productive watersheds. We are trying to create some kind of international framework to bring Canada to the table and ensure that we manage these things between the two countries. There's a treaty, the Boundary Waters Treaty that says we're supposed to do such things. We have an effort called Salmon Beyond Borders that’s working every day on that. And so that's a big one for us.

In Bristol Bay we have protections in place. The Environmental Protection Agency put them there. And this Canadian-based mining company has gone to court trying to sue to overturn those. We're hoping that the Trump administration's Department of Justice will continue to defend those decisions (to protect salmon taken under the first Trump administration on the advice of his son and a wealthy advisor). So, we're guardedly optimistic there.

And then one other issue that's really near and dear to, dear to our hearts…We worked to carve out safeguards for 28 million acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management throughout Alaska. Quite a few of those lands represent highly productive salmon habitat and are really important to rural people, Alaska Native people. We had a good decision that came out in August from the Biden administration that will be challenged by the state of Alaska. But hopefully we can have some conversations with the new administration to explain to them that this is really important to local people their way of life, the jobs that they produce and those kinds of things. And well, we'll see what happens.

And then of course the final salmon issue is continuing to push for reform of federal fisheries management associated with trawling and bycatch.