Red Alert for America’s Wild Arctic Fishery in Alaska | #alaska | #politics

Alaska’s obsession with fish began to dawn on me before I even got there. On a flight to Fairbanks some months back, I sat by chance next to Clinton Cook, a tribal president from Craig, a village in the state’s panhandle. A lively, friendly character, his conversation ranged across land sovereignty, logging and propane logistics. Mostly, and most animatedly, he talked fish: the alluring taste of raw halibut cheeks; how to gather herring roe using hemlock branches; a hack for drying filets on copper pipes.

Checking into a forgettable motel along the Seward Highway on a later trip, I was warned by a sign propped against the television to not process fish in the room. (Who does that? Enough people to warrant laminated signs.) At Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, I see groups of tourists outfitted with new-looking fishing gear. Gift store shelves are stacked with tinned and smoked fish. Then there’s the leaping fish on the bronze relief of the state seal out on the concourse. Sitting close by is a statue of the eponymous late senator himself. What’s that pattern molded into his tie? Guess.

Alaska’s commercial coastal fishery is an Arctic giant. More fish is caught in the waters around the 49^th state than from the rest of the US coastline combined. If your tastes run to king crab, wild sockeye salmon, halibut or even just a Filet-o-Fish from McDonald’s, chances are you’re eating Alaskan. This is one of the most productive wild fisheries at a time when supply and demand are increasingly out of kilter, with farmed fish on the cusp of accounting for most of the world’s seafood for the first time ever.

America’s great northern fishery is now gripped in a gathering crisis. Fish runs and populations of several iconic species, such as king salmon and snow crab, have suffered crashes while pressure mounts on others. The politics of Alaskan fishing has soured amid a scramble to preserve access and ascribe blame. Perhaps most strikingly, Representative Mary Peltola scored an upset election victory in 2022, making her the first Democratic member Alaska has sent to the House in half a century. Her motto: “Fish, family, freedom.”

Peltola was raised in Western Alaska, where the obsession with fish turns existential. An entire people there risks losing their food and livelihood and, more than that, their very identity to this crisis. As with so much that happens at the edge of the map, whether in the Arctic or the Amazon, the trials of those in faraway places have a way of reaching us all.

In off-the-grid villages that most Americans will never see in person, fellow citizens are grappling with food insecurity. This erosion of their way of life is not only a moral challenge to the country at large, it is a destabilizing force in a state that is, once again, a strategic frontier for the US.

For the wider world, it also offers a glimpse into a future disrupted by environmental pressures, chiefly, but not only, linked to climate change. We have seen fisheries collapse before, traumatizing communities and economies dependent on them and robbing the world of rich sources of nutrition and biodiversity. Abstract as dots on a map of Alaska may seem, there’s an early warning in these villages’ crisis: We urgently need to rethink how we manage fishing fleets and apportion rights to a resource that is, globally, on the defensive. We should begin by expanding our concept of an ecosystem beyond just fish to include the well-being of those whose fate is bound to it.

Twilight of the Salmon People

Midway through the flight, I saw the eggs. A box of five dozen was wedged under the seat in front of the elderly lady next to me on a packed airplane heading west from Anchorage. She wasn’t alone. When we land at Bethel, a hub of about 6,300 people in Western Alaska, coolers and boxes packed with food and groceries easily outnumber suitcases on the carousel. A trip to the local supermarket that afternoon explains why. When a loaf of bread goes for almost $15 and a box of diapers for more than $80, airlifting your own essentials is the smart choice (Costco is just a 10-minute drive from Anchorage’s airport).

The Yukon-Kuskokwim delta is a South Dakota-sized mosaic of tundra, wetlands and mountains facing the Bering Sea. It is the frontier of America’s last frontier, home to about 30,000 people, the vast majority of them Yu’pik and Athabascan, who fish and hunt; not for sport but to eat. To live. This is the epicenter of the fishing crisis. Vivian Korthuis, chief executive of the Association of Village Council Presidents, compares the impact to a disaster familiar to everyone in Alaska: The Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, from which some marine species, and local communities dependent on them, never recovered. “It has a ripple effect. We can’t see it right now but it’s happening.”

Catching and killing your own dinner is one of the many things that sets Alaskans apart from the residents of most other states. Rural residents there harvest almost 300 pounds of food per person per year, which is higher than average US consumption of meat, fish and poultry. The most banal reason is logistics. Drive around Bethel and at multiple points, you simply run out of road. Whether it’s food, fuel — gasoline was almost $7 a gallon when I visited — or whatever, villages up and down Western Alaska rely on planes and boats to deliver it at great expense. Even Amazon gets finicky this far north.

From the Delta to the Panhandle

Alaska’s waters are home to rich fisheries and numerous communities that depend on them

• City
• Village
• Salmon hatchery
• Island
• Kuskokwim River

Weights and other data offer only a superficial sense of what fishing means here, though. Korthuis, from Bethel, states simply “We are salmon people.”

King salmon, or chinook, is the largest of the five Pacific species found in and around North America, prized for its high fat content. Numerous villagers in and around Bethel regale me with tales of the beasts they caught back in the day weighing 50 pounds or more. That isn’t just typical fisherman’s recall. Chinook caught on the Kuskokwim averaged about 19 pounds in 1970, but less than 10 pounds in 2020. There were also drastically fewer of them.

Chinook runs, meaning the number of adult fish that return from the sea and swim upstream to spawn, have cycled up and down over time. But the past decade’s collapse is different because there was no rebound. In 2011, the chinook harvest on the Kuskokwim fell below the state’s estimated minimum level necessary for subsistence needs. It hasn’t reached anywhere near that threshold since. Now runs of chum salmon, another big species in the delta and an alternative to chinook, have also crashed. Silver salmon, or coho, joined in last year, with restrictions on fishing that species imposed for the first time. This looks less like a lean cycle and more like an ecosystem disintegrating in real time.

Food insecurity is a powerful destabilizing force. In Western Alaska, it is overlaid with a long, dark history of colonialism. When regulators imposed closures to subsistence fishing in 2012, tribal communities often defied restrictions, sparking clashes with US Fish and Wildlife agents, nicknamed “brownshirts.” Subsistence fishers caught during restricted periods or those using prohibited types of net can have their catch and equipment confiscated, leaving them with neither food nor the means to get it. Replacing fresh salmon with processed foods from the supermarket is both expensive and, several villagers tell me, detrimental to their health.

Alissa Nadine Rogers, a local activist who sits on the regional advisory council to the Federal Subsistence Board, recalls the period around 2013–14 as “when all hell broke loose.” Reported violent crime in Bethel more than doubled between 2014 and 2016, according to police department data. Besides fear of empty bellies, fishing restrictions inflicted psychological and emotional stress on those who usually provided for their families and friends with a net and now found themselves subject to the control of remote agencies. Rogers recollects the suffering of her own family. “The last time me and my dad went out fishing together, he was intoxicated,” an experience that “scared the living crap” out of her. The coda: “That’s when he left and became homeless in Anchorage.”

Salmon here isn’t just nutrition for villagers. It also sustains animals — which means, for those who still use dogs for sledding in the Arctic, it’s also transportation fuel. Salmon is also currency in a place where sharing and bartering of goods plays a vital economic role: One recent transaction I was told about involved kippered salmon being swapped for orthopedic shoe inserts.

It’s also a kind of social glue, bringing people together with shared purpose at the fish camps that line the wooded banks of the Kuskokwim and its lattice of backwaters. And it’s a time machine, preserving ways of life dating back thousands of years in what is an oral and practical culture. As I watch Harry Alexi, a retired Alaska Army National Guard sergeant, alongside his wife Sharon hanging strips of freshly caught sockeye salmon in a smoking shed at the back of his house in Bethel, he says quietly, “You know, I feel sorry for my kids. They won’t see the type of fishing we grew up with.”

This summer has brought some measure of relief. A seasonal ban imposed in early June on fishing for salmon using gillnets, the typical method here, was lifted temporarily several times to allow for subsistence harvesting, then altogether a few weeks early in August. One afternoon, Rogers took her boat out with several friends and, as Abba’s “Dancing Queen” blared from a portable speaker, the net floats bobbed and very quickly more than a dozen salmon were hauled in. Within hours, they were gutted and sliced into strips in her backyard, ready for smoking.

But this feels like a respite, not a recovery. The forecast chinook run this year, even at the high end, looks subdued compared with levels before 2010. To my untrained palate, the chum and coho salmon strips displacing the scarcer chinook are delicious; smokey and unctuous like a fine whiskey made flesh. Yet when I visited the nearby village of Kwethluk that week, one villager referred dismissively to those as “imitation strips.” When the dozen or so people in the room that day were asked if enough salmon had been caught for the winter, only one hand went up.

Liz Dillon, a Kwethluk Elder herself, told me: “Our Elders used to say: ‘Fish will be always living in the waters…They will never disappear until the end of the world.’” A message of hope now sounds more like an omen.

Farmed Fish and the Real Thing

When breeding salmon, bring a good supply of Coke cups. In “Sockeye Module 2,” a room of tanks, pipes and the constant gurgle of water at the Trail Lakes Hatchery, fish culturist Nick Demers, sporting a salmon tattoo on his forearm, is pouring bright orange roe, or eggs, into the sort of giant disposable cups found in movie theaters. The roe is mixed with milt, or sperm, and a saline solution, and left for a short while before being checked and transferred gently into the tanks for incubation. After the resulting salmon fry hatch, they will be released into the wild. Earlier that morning, I watched the Trail Lakes team harvest the roe and milt from shockingly scarlet adult sockeyes, netting and gutting them on the pebbled edge of a nearby lake two hours drive south of Anchorage.

This may not be your idea of “fishing,” but fishing as currently conceived depends on it. Alaska’s hatchery program got going in the 1970s after a steep decline in salmon runs, and there are now 30 of them. Last year, they released 1.9 billion juveniles, and hatchery-spawned adult salmon accounted for a quarter of the state’s commercial catch, about 40 million fish (commercial fishers pay a small tax to support the hatcheries). For some regional fisheries, such as chum salmon in southeastern Alaska, roughly nine out of 10 caught begin life in something like a Coke cup.

Hatcheries are keen to distance themselves from fish farming, where fish aren’t just incubated for a short period and released but raised and fed in pens or other enclosures, like chickens with gills. Today, roughly half the world’s seafood is farmed, up from a fifth in the 1990s, and that proportion will keep rising. As with so much that is manufactured in today’s world, so to speak, 57% of farmed fish derive from China, which is also the world’s largest consumer of seafood, at more than a third of the market. Fish farming has boosted the global haul by 60% since the 1990s, but it carries costs in terms of ecological damage, including to wild species, and heightened risk of disease and parasites. Alaska bans the practice for finfish.

Alaska’s hatcheries are also keen to distance themselves from those elsewhere, which have a long history of failure to restore salmon populations ruined by overfishing and industrialization. Worse, they were often used as a Band-Aid to resist doing things that might really help salmon runs recover (but also curtail profits); namely, restricting commercial fishing and protecting natural habitats.

“The process of destroying a fishery by overfishing takes so long that individuals have little incentive to stop catching the fish” sums up the fate of so many once-thriving wild fisheries, as documented in David Montgomery’s book The King of Fish. In it, he chronicles how the damming of rivers, clear-cutting of forests and ever more efficient techniques and technologies for capturing salmon devastated ancient runs from Scotland to California.

Alaska has thankfully preserved more of its essential element of wildness. For example, the Kuskokwim, meandering for more than 700 miles, is the longest undammed river in the US. Salmon like disorderly, troublesome waterways that wander as trees fall and silt shifts, creating the sheltered, gravelly pools just right for spawning. We humans more often prefer water that knows its place. Salmon prize true rivers; we demand canals.

“A lot of what we do here is take pressure off the wild stock,” says Dean Day, executive director of the non-profit that runs Trail Lakes, making a distinction between supplementing as opposed to rebuilding the population. Ordinarily, only a few percent of all wild spawned salmon make it to the ocean and then back to rivers. Hatchery salmon returns are generally higher, as much as 12% for sockeye, Day says, effectively supporting a higher level of commercial fishing than would otherwise be possible. “I call it head-start for fish,” chimes in colleague Lisa Ka’aihue.

John Muir, the iconic American naturalist, surely never imagined fish beginning life in something like a Coke-branded test tube. But this is, nonetheless, several large steps removed from intensive aquaculture.

Yet even this hatchery is an outgrowth of the long-running conflict between sustaining fish populations over generations and satisfying immediate human appetites for protein and profits. Hatcheries are, in a sense, the carbon capture of fishing: a means to offset damage done to natural systems rather than to stop us from doing the damage in the first place. That doesn’t make them bad or negate their role. Rather, their necessity reminds us that the history of modern fishing is replete with man-made disasters. Alaska’s brewing crisis is also widely agreed to be man-made. The consensus ends there.

Deep Sea Mining

There’s a lot of junk on display in Bethel’s front yards: dilapidated cars, beached boats and other bric-a-brac. Or rather, there’s a lot of stockpiled parts to be mined in this isolated empire. “People go to those villages and think, wow, this is a huge mess,” says David Bayes, who operates sport-fishing charters out of Homer, on the Kenai peninsula. “But if you talk to the people, they rely on those junkyards.”

Alaska has been running a circular economy since long before that was even a thing. Waste is a touchy subject. One villager in Kwethluk, a woman named Rachel, grew audibly angry as she recalled the sight of tourist fishers reeling in and then throwing back salmon on the Kuskokwim, contrasting that with regulations forbidding her from throwing out a net for her own dinner. Subsistence fishing practices have supported indigenous communities throughout the Arctic region for thousands of years in large part because they fish only what they need, preserving a foundational resource.

Bayes hails from a very different part of Alaska, but waste is also his scourge. Three years ago, he started a Facebook group called “STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch,” which now has more than 26,000 members.

Bycatch is marine life caught by fishing boats that they either don’t want or aren’t allowed to keep. When you’re deploying a net as wide as a football field, as the largest trawlers do on the high seas, bycatch is inevitable. So-called midwater trawls are used primarily to scoop up pollock, while bottom trawlers, which run a net on or close to the seabed, target ground fish, such as black cod. In theory, other species can be separated out on deck and thrown back, though it’s questionable how many really survive or thrive after being hauled up cheek-by-gill with a hundred tons of other fish.

Alaskan pollock trawling, the economic heavyweight in the state’s industry, has long been dominated by boats from elsewhere. Foreign trawlers, primarily Japanese, developed the fishery until concerns about overfishing and bycatch prompted legislation in 1976 that pushed US jurisdiction out from just 12 nautical miles offshore to 200 miles, the so-called Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (the latter being he of the bronze fish necktie, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens). With foreign trawlers excluded, a domestic fleet developed, plying waters off Alaska but also based Outside primarily in Seattle. The biggest boats are so-called factory trawlers, which can operate 24/7 for weeks at a time, hauling in tons of fish and processing it, too, right there below deck.

Trawling, with its gigantic nets, sonar, extended range and ability to operate in rough conditions, is to fishing as a tourist hunter, with a jeep, night-vision and high-powered rifles, is to hunting. These are facsimiles of ancient practices, with efficiency displacing the essential element of chance. The industrialized economy demands this, including for food production.

Unlike farmers, though, who reap but also sow, industrialized fishing is a process of simply extracting resources, more akin to mining. And as with mining, it can be done in a measured way or a heedless rush, producing spectacular immediate gains followed by collapse, a pattern familiar in prior fishery disasters such as with North Atlantic cod or Peruvian anchoveta. Fears of a repeat in Alaska have sharpened as various fisheries, though not pollock itself, have come under stress.

Climate change is widely regarded as a factor in all this, cited by federal scientists and local fishers alike. For example, abnormally warm temperatures in the depths of the Bering Sea in 2018 and 2019 are thought to have played a big role in the disappearance of 10 billion snow crabs, or 80% of the estimated population, forcing an unprecedented closure of that $200 million-a-year fishery — which just extended into its second year.

Fish, occupying one of the least understood parts of our planet, are inherently enigmatic. Even just estimating their numbers is difficult and can be controversial, given the potential for optimistic figures to encourage overfishing. Fish are also part of complex ecological chains of habitat, prey and predators. Now marry that with the epochal, complex and evolving impact of climate change.

In the delta, whatever impact climate change is having on salmon extends to the landscape. The name of Kwigillingok, a village on the edge of the Bering Sea, means “no river”; grimly ironic for a place that seems to be sinking into the water, which in summer bubbles up through the boardwalks that serve as roads. Chunks of riverbank sit like irregular gravestones where they have dropped into encroaching waves. At a meeting there, I realized I was leaning my elbows on a map of the patchwork of land allotments surrounding the village — research for a potential shift to higher ground.

In this context of cascading pressures, bycatch has drawn renewed focus. Trawler bycatch around Alaska averaged 141 million pounds per year in the decade through 2021, according to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. That is only a small fraction of the total catch: The pollock fishery’s annual harvest runs about 3 to 4 billion pounds. Yet in relation to other parts of Alaska’s fisheries, that level of bycatch is still a big number.

Bayes, hailing from the self-styled “Halibut fishing capital of the world,” found himself restricted this summer to fishing only five days a week. In a 100-day season, that’s 28% of potential business gone. He points out that in 2019, charter boats in the Gulf of Alaska, which includes those based in Homer, were allowed to catch up to 1.9 million pounds of halibut. That same year, however, trawlers in the region caught just over 2.4 million pounds as bycatch, with an allowed limit of almost 3.8 million.

Over in the Pribilof Islands, volcanic outcrops in the Bering Sea that are home to a small community of mostly Alaska Native fishermen, the disparity is even more stark. Halibut bycatch on the trawl fleet has run at more than double the level of landings over the past decade. Overall, the average annual catch of halibut in Alaska this past decade has dropped by half. While trawl bycatch has also declined in absolute terms, as a share of commercial and recreational landings it stood at 16% in 2022 and averaged 20% over the past decade.

Calls for trawling to be shut down altogether have picked up but face significant obstacles. While pollock is a relatively low value fish, sheer abundance makes it the biggest money-spinner of any Alaskan fishery, as well as a big employer. Its inoffensive, cod-like flesh goes into everything from McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish to school meals in a world where demand for fish protein is rising fast; besides the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China are major export markets.

Moreover, since the 1990s, a portion of the Alaskan pollock quota taken by trawlers has been assigned to so-called Community Development Quotas, or CDQs. These distribute revenue to dozens of coastal communities in Western Alaska, an important source of funding, and have become a major economic force in their own right — as well as a source of division. While those communities benefit financially from trawling, villages further upriver do not and blame trawlers for dwindling salmon runs. Such tensions echo those around the costs and benefits of oil development.

Yet a basic imbalance in Alaska’s burden of conservation now demands reform. As so often with environmental and ecological disasters, the highest cost tends to fall on those with the fewest resources, like the villages along the Kuskokwim. Even if climate change is the primary threat here, does that really mean bycatch is irrelevant? No. Rather, while this or that fishing regulator has no control over the man-made crisis of climate change, they can alleviate other man-made stresses compounding it.

A bombshell analysis released by regulators in April 2022 estimated that mid-water trawls on factory vessels in the Bering Sea make contact with the seabed a majority of the time. Exactly how much impact that has on crashing crab populations or the marine life that feed salmon and other species is, as with so much about the depths, unclear. The more important implication is that our perception of midwater trawling was quite wrong — and we should, therefore, reconsider whether our current understanding is up to the job of ensuring a fair deal for everyone involved.

One proposal currently circulating is a cap on the amount of chum salmon that trawlers can haul as bycatch before they face being shut down. Unlike other prohibited species, chum salmon has no bycatch cap; it has run to hundreds of thousands of fish in recent years, peaking at about half a million in 2021. Even if only a small percentage of that can be assumed to return to rivers in Western Alaska — genetic analysis cited by the trawling industry indicates the majority emanates from Asia — that still matters when every fish counts. After all, the Kuskokwim’s non-chinook salmon subsistence harvest — mostly chum — collapsed to less than 10,000 fish in 2021, down from more than 50,000 a decade before.

We should think of climate change as representing a sea change in our understanding and approach to fisheries management. Bayes uses the analogy of driving down a road at 75 miles per hour and keeping the pedal floored even as you hit a rough stretch full of potholes. “You blow out a tire or break a shock or whatever. And as you’re sitting on the side of the road with this broken car, you say ‘that’s not my fault.’ And part of that’s true, but part of it isn’t true.”

Rewriting the Ten Commandments

“Food security” is an abstract concept when you can summon groceries from surrounding stores with your smartphone. One resident of Kwigillingok, Andrew Beaver, a child welfare worker who kicks off our discussion by proudly noting he’s pushing 80, put it in terms I could understand. Criticizing the restrictions on subsistence fishing, he posed this question: “What if they started controlling people going to grocery stores in urban communities? Saying ‘things are getting low; we’re going to close that now.’”

I thought immediately of that bewildering spring of 2020, when local supermarket shelves cleared and Instacart came up empty. Now imagine New Yorkers accepting that experience for several years in a row (if you can). “Out here, WalMart is the ocean” as one village Elder puts it.

Perhaps more than food security, these villagers prize food sovereignty. This desire for agency among indigenous people in Arctic regions, with long histories of resource colonialism and outside interference, applies as much to salmon as it does to forests, ores or oil deposits. When the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 abolished indigenous land title, it also extinguished Native fishing and hunting rights. There has been a struggle over the place and legitimacy of subsistence harvesting ever since, complicated by clashing federal and state laws, with the salmon crisis providing fresh fodder.

One challenge is that, by its nature, the value of subsistence fishing — nutritional, emotional, social — is harder to quantify than, say, the revenue generated by a commercial fishery. Like avoided carbon emissions or a forest kept rather than cleared, such worth can seem amorphous and thereby invisible in Westernized economies. As with addressing climate change or habitat destruction, shifting our mindset toward the natural capital embedded in conserved ecosystems, as opposed to just extracted resources, must be the foundation for addressing this crisis.

A decent place to start is a proposed update to the guidelines of the Magnuson-Stevens Act’s National Standards, sometimes called the “Ten Commandments of Fishing.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the regional fishery councils set up under the act, has been taking public comments on revising the language to strengthen equity and environmental justice elements. Doing so could mean giving more priority to the needs of small and, especially, subsistence fishers when, for example, allocations are being set. That includes bycatch specifically, the subject of National Standard No. 9, which currently only calls for it to be minimized “to the extent practicable” — a caveat that, while reasonable in intent, leaves trawl-size wiggle room in regulatory terms.

Ultimately, the act itself should be overhauled for the 21^st century (not least because an East Coast fishing-related case taken up by the Supreme Court may yet upend federal agencies’ scope to interpret the law writ large). Magnuson-Stevens was conceived when the priority was Americanizing coastal fisheries, maximizing domestic revenue, and when climate change was a scientific curio. The guiding ethos with fisheries regulation has been to avoid imposing too high a cost on commercial fishing interests.

Commercial fishing must be supported, of course, but that concept of cost must be widened beyond merely weighing a markup on the price of a fish sandwich. The industry must bear its fair share of externalities, recognizing that these have changed over time — similar to the argument over how much of the climate-related costs of fossil fuels should be internalized in a gallon of gas or electricity bill. The crash in salmon and other fisheries, and the ripple effects from this, call for taking an ecology-wide approach that accounts fully for subsistence, and other small fisheries.

Conflict over who can access resources always intensifies amid scarcity, and fishing has a history of sparking international spats. The so-called Turbot War saw a Canadian patrol vessel fire across the bow of a Spanish trawler in 1995, forcing it to dock in Newfoundland. That clash was rooted in the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery due to industrialized overfishing, and the resulting trauma to coastal communities in eastern Canada. When both Canadian and Spanish fishermen identified nearby stocks of Greenland halibut, or turbot, as a replacement, a diplomatic row over rights and quotas spiraled into gunfire on the high seas.

Likewise, fishing sovereignty is a potential flashpoint in a changing Arctic. The retreat in sea ice and the warming of waters both entice fleets and stress existing fisheries across the top of the world.

In Canada, indigenous fishers in far northern communities like Rankin Inlet, Baker Lake and Naujaat report that Arctic char fishing is currently stable and plentiful. However, warming water and retreating ice threaten to change the char’s diet or push it further from shore as it seeks cooler waters. Longer seasons of open water may also invite new competing fishing fleets. In Finland, an important salmon fishery on the River Tana has been closed due to low runs, putting indigenous Sámi subsistence fishers in a similar position to those on the Kuskokwim.

As part of its revised Arctic strategy, released last year, the Biden administration highlights the importance of indigenous communities’ well-being and “equitable inclusion,” giving the subsistence fishing crisis a national security dimension. Moreover, the Alaskan pollock fishery may suffer substantial impacts itself as warming water shifts that population of fish elsewhere.

Given existing strains on the world’s fish stocks, with the proportion deemed sustainable dropping from 90% in 1990 to 65% in 2019, the desire to stake claims to potential new resources will likely increase — just as it did in the North Atlantic three decades ago. Warming Arctic waters, particularly those beyond exclusive economic zones, will ultimately invite in fishing fleets. As it is, a recent study of fishing vessels that intentionally disabled their location transponders identified the northwest Pacific and offshore Alaska as two of four hotspots raising the potential for illegal fishing and potential conflict.

As with its recently reinvigorated Arctic military planning, the US must balance reasonable deterrence with acceptance of the legitimate claims of other powers with a regional presence, and that includes fishing rights.

An international concord to prevent unregulated fishing in the High Arctic was signed in 2018. However, it is due to expire in 2034; worse, it was agreed in 2018, prior to the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sharp deterioration in relations between the US and China. The latter’s fishing fleet, the world’s largest, is regarded with suspicion in Washington already, having played a dual-use role in extending Beijing’s influence over its claims in the South China Sea and waters disputed with Japan. As fishing boats migrate north, including those flying the US flag, the potential increases for mere commercial adventurism to escalate into a militarized dispute.

From the banks of the Kuskokwim to the depths of the Arctic ocean, currents are shifting, perhaps irrevocably, and we are both exacerbating this and struggling to adapt fairly. Montgomery’s pithiest insight in The King of Fish is that the key to restoring salmon lies not in our knowledge of fish or streams “but our ability to manage ourselves.” Subsistence fishing communities, 10,000 years ahead of the curve and now unwilling microcosms of humanity’s gathering clash with the planet, would agree. Their fate will offer a clue as to whether the wider world gets it.