Chinook lawsuit threatens Southeast Alaska shing communities

BY LINDA BEHNKEN AND AMY DAUGHERTY

Alaska’s troll-caught Chinook salmon is prized throughout the world as the highest quality salmon in the marketplace, thanks to the extreme care that trollers use when they catch each individual salmon with their hook and line. Troll-caught Chinook is also the poster child for Alaska’s sustainable small-scale sheries due to its low impact on the marine ecosystem and minimal bycatch.

Additionally, Alaska’s troll shery keeps many of Southeast Alaska’s rural coastal communities economically a oat, providing year-round shing jobs for families who have few income alternatives. Southeast Alaska’s archipelago contains 24 small communities, often with populations less than 500 souls.

But these days this small-boat, Alaska-family based shery is under attack by the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, which sued the National Marine Fisheries Service over the impact of Alaska’s troll shery on the Paci c Northwest’s Chinook salmon and Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) populations. e recent court ruling in favor of the Wild Fish Conservancy’s lawsuit doesn’t just threaten the future of Southeast Alaska’s troll shery, it feeds a dangerous narrative that jeopardizes the future of shing communities throughout the U.S. It also distracts from the real issues that threaten the sustainability of our wild sh populations, such as habitat loss and changing ocean conditions.

Since 1985, Alaska has been party to and is committed to upholding its end of the Paci c Salmon Treaty even though Alaska’s Chinook harvests have been consistently reduced with each renegotiation of the treaty. Despite Alaska’s investment and hard work to manage in compliance with the Paci c Salmon Treaty, the Wild Fish Conservancy deliberately promotes the story that Southeast Alaska’s troll eet causes harm to the Paci c Northwest’s Chinook and SRKW.

Making the situation even more frustrating is the fact that Alaska’s trollers have been on the frontlines of salmon conservation for decades, advocating to stop old-growth logging in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, block large-scale mining in the U.S. and Canada’s transboundary rivers, and take down the Columbia River’s four lower Snake River dams. Conservation is our bottom line. Shutting down Alaska’s troll shery would eliminate some of the most active and vocal salmon advocates, putting the Northwest’s Chinook

at even greater risk.

To go after Southeast Alaska’s Chinook troll harvest as the way to increase the SRKW’s principal prey also perpetuates the false narrative that commercial shermen are causing the decline of wild salmon, when much bigger unaddressed threats, such as destruction of critical salmon habitat, are the major culprits. Likewise, it is well known scienti cally that industrial toxins, water pollution, vessel tra c, and noise disturbance are the threat to SRKW – not sheries, and especially not Southeast Alaska’s hook-and-line troll shery that operates 1,000 miles away from the SRKW’s territory.

ere are no shortcuts when it comes to restoring wild salmon. We have seen everywhere else in the world that without healthy habitat and free- owing rivers and streams, you cannot have healthy wild salmon. As shermen who spend countless days on the water out in the elements observing the natural world, we know this, and we know it will take working together to address the complex issues that drive salmon declines throughout the Paci c.

We should be leaning into the threats of habitat damage, dams, urban development, toxic water pollution, and climate change rather than ghting over who’s catching whose sh. And rather than letting the Wild Fish Conservancy paint misleading narratives about Alaska’s sheries, we need to talk to our decision-makers about real solutions to help ensure our sheries are sustainable for generations to come.