Alex Gimarc: Has Alaska Outdoor Council lost the bubble?

By ALEX GIMARC

“Lost the bubble” is a nautical / aviation term meaning losing one’s bearings, control or understanding, often under pressure.

I have been an Alaska Outdoor Council (AOC) member for over 30 years, and they have done reasonably well representing and pursuing my interests.  But things change over time, and I received one of their monthly e-mails which led to some head scratching and concern about their direction.

Their Nov 30 e-mail entitled Salmon Declines are happening all across Alaska has links to a pair of videos.  The first entitled Trouble at Sea discusses ocean ranching from an environmental perspective.  The other is a screed against bottom trawling in the ocean with a link to Ocean with David Attenborough.

I don’t mind pointing out problems.  What I take great exception to is pointing out something without proposing a solution.  The two videos linked are little more than one group of commercial fishermen blaming another for the availability of salmon here in Alaska and the greens piling on.

Worse, they both take advantage of the documentary effect, in which documentaries are always, without fail, completely persuasive.  Why?  Because they never present the opposite side.  They simply make the case that whatever they think is bad is bad, never how nor why the Bad Thing keeps being done.

https://youtu.be/pkg_yfStg6s

The first piece entitled Trouble At Sea is a 14-minute attack on the Alaska hatchery ocean ranching system authored by the Food & Environment Reporting Network and Alaska Public Media.

It starts on the Yukon River, with the crash of king returns over the years.  The blame quickly points at hatchery fish being released into the North Pacific out competing wild species for biomass.  Conclusion is hatcheries bad, wild good.  Unmentioned is that the vast majority of hatchery fry released are pinks, the least valuable salmon.  The video concludes that the hatchery pinks are out competing wild fish for food, which is the right conclusion.

Sadly, this is a conclusion rejected by ADF&G commfish biologists flying top cover for state commercial fishermen, who are not quite sure there is a problem.  This refusal to acknowledge a problem which in turns allows an unwanted solution is called regulatory capture.

Solution?  Start moving the release of 2 billion pink salmon fry into the North Pacific to offshore fish farms or onshore Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS), self-contained, onshore systems that will move production into the 24/7/365 world enjoyed by 85% of all other salmon production worldwide.  Of course, this will require a necessary change to the state constitution reversing the ban on fish farming for finfish passed in 1991.

In parallel, start working with the Russians, who are also dumping billions of pink salmon fry into the North Pacific to move to the same fish farming / RAS model quickly being embraced by China and Japan.  Get the 5+ billion hungry pink mouths out of the North Pacific and wild runs will be back with us in a decade, even less.

The second piece was by Outdoor Life.  It attacks trawling as the cause of declines in king salmon and halibut due to indiscriminate trawling and barely controlled bycatch.  The piece claims that in 2024 industrial trawlers were responsible for catching nearly 39,000 kings, 40,000 chum, 4.5 million pounds of halibut, 3 million pounds of herring and one killer whale as bycatch.  All of this bycatch is being caught in pursuit of 3 – 4 million pounds of pollock caught yearly (their numbers, not mine).  It goes on to advocate legislation at the state and federal levels to control certain types of trawlers.

Once again, we are futzing around with the problem and completely ignoring the solution.

Want to eliminate bycatch?  Get as many of the bloody nets out of the water as humanly possible.  Simple.  As with the hatchery pinks, the solution is right in front of us with fish farming via offshore and RAS systems.

Another related change for mixed fisheries like Cook Inlet might be to take a long, hard look at repealing the ban on fish traps passed in 1959.  Fish traps allow salmon to live while confined until they can be separated.  The ban on fish traps was passed in response to ownership being concentrated in Seattle rather than Alaska, which would be an easy enough problem to solve.

Alaska commfish is being ground into economic dust by the worldwide move to fish farming, now responsible for 85% of all salmon sold.  Alaska intentionally decided not to participate in that marketplace 35 years ago, which was a huge economic mistake.  Commfish has successfully captured the regulators at ADF&G to the extent that they are not even able to acknowledge there is a problem, so they are no help.

Solution to this mess is to get out of the protectionism racket, get out of the ocean ranching business, and start a quick transition from a hunter – gatherer model to a aquaculture model.  The longer we as a state wait to do this, the fewer kings there will be, and the kings are just the first of salmon species to be destroyed by what we are doing today.  The longer we wait, the longer the resource will take to recover.  Time to stop waiting.

As to the Alaska Outdoor Council who started this whole discussion:  Come on, guys.  You can do better.  You have in the past.

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.