Marine Ecosystem – Water Policy Consulting LLC

Get Hal Shepherd’s new book “Return to Ekeunick’s Time – Defending Waters and Tradition in the Arctic”

One of the primary motivations

behind the campaign for Alaska’s statehood was the impact of large canneries on salmon that used fish traps and wheels to drain returning runs. At the same time, due to the lack of the Territory’s regulatory authority and because federal authorities were under the control of corporate interests, these canneries avoided paying taxes and laws to protect the fishery.

Return to Ekunick’s Time looks at how, as the 49th state to enter the union, Alaska had the benefit of observing the mistakes made by other states that were beginning to experience environmental degradation due to industrial extraction. As such, in the early years after statehood, the State was a leader in creating and enforcing environmental policy which, together with the emerging activism of Alaska Native communities, played a part in the birth of the nationwide environmental movement.

Eventually, however, the lure of the riches, particularly from the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, became too much for Alaska’s political leadership, and over the past 50 years, the extraction industry has dominated state policies. Today, under a series of conservative politicians in power at both the federal and state levels (as championed particularly by the former Trump administration), resource extraction corporations are once again having substantial impacts on water and subsistence resources relied upon by Alaska Native communities.

At the same time, after a campaign led by powerful industrial interests and conservative politicians to discredit the environmental movement, today tribal leaders and everyday citizens in Alaska are hailing a new era of protecting water resources by emphasizing traditional values and management strategies in the face of existential threats from climate change and politics. According to Alaska Native author William Oquilluck, during the time of Ekeunick – the legendary leader of the Inupiat people in ancient times – “the Eskimo’s ancestors did not use their minds like later times when they invented tools, clothes, houses, boats, and weapons. They had no worries about living.”

Could the return to traditional values as a means of addressing the impacts of climate change and mismanagement of natural resources, help to move the needle towards a return to times when Alaska Native people will no longer have to worry about the survival of their traditions and culture?

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Our Anti-Environmental President

Op-Ed by Jessica Shepherd

President Trump’s claim in September that he is “the number one environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt” is as ironic as it is galling. In truth, it would be more appropriate to call Trump the number one anti-environmental president of all time for his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the greater environmental community.

Trump has consistently thumbed his nose at environmental protections by withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, his ongoing attempts to reinterpret touchstone environmental laws like the Migratory Bird Act, and through his appointments of climate-change denier Scott Pruitt, and then coal and oil ally Andrew Wheeler to head the EPA.

Kowtowing to Trump, the EPA, in defiance of their name and mission “to protect human health and the environment”, has steadily given in to industry interests — waving away concerns about pesticides, reducing constraints on toxic emissions in our air and water, scrapping requirements for mining companies to set aside cleanup funds, and loosening stream-side dumping regulations on the coal industry. Moreover, Trump has signed off on watered down EPA regulations intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions by reducing fuel economy standards and doing away with limits on methane flaring for oil and gas production on public lands. And let’s not forget Trump’s push for oil and gas leasing here in Alaska with the opening of the Arctic Coastal Plain to drilling and expansion into previously off-limit areas in the National Petroleum Reserve.

Talking advantage of a dire situation, in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic diverted our attention, the EPA suspended enforcement of environmental regulations on companies that were deemed unable to comply with emission standards due to the pandemic. At the same time, Trump signed an executive order scaling back the review process for new projects under the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Also, in March, the Department of Justice (DOJ) scraped the longstanding use of Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) to fund environmentally beneficial projects. According to the EPA “A SEP is an environmentally beneficial project that a violator voluntarily agrees to undertake in settlement of a civil penalty action, as an option to offset some portion of the monetary penalty. One goal of the SEPs is to improve the environmental health of communities that have been put at risk due to the violation of an environmental law.” SEPs were frequently used by the EPA to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy. Examples include investments in local wind and solar power generation, retrofitting diesel-powered school buses with pollution control devices, the purchase of hybrid vehicles for a National Park, and funding for energy-efficient building technology for public buildings.

Thanks to the Trump Administration, the air we breathe now contains higher levels of mercury and other toxic particulate matter from vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and CO2 levels, despite a downturn at the start of the pandemic, are once again trending upward toward an ill-fated future. Faced with another four years of Trump, we’ll need to rename the EPA the “Environmental Destruction Agency” (EDA) and rewrite its mission to better reflect its new role in destroying human health and the environment.

Mind you, this is just an overview of Trump’s egregious environmental rollbacks.

If there is any good news, it’s that Trump has not been completely successful in his vendetta against established environmental safeguards. For example, his attempt to water down the Migratory Bird Treaty Act would have resulted in a reinterpretation of the law to apply only to the intentional killing of birds, laying blameless those whose actions cause the “incidental” killing of millions of birds annually through industrial activities like power line electrocutions, toxic tailing ponds, or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that killed more than a million birds. A federal court overturned the policy revision in August of this year.

In contrast to Trump’s crusade against the environment, Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan would invest in net-zero emissions while creating new, green energy jobs. His 110-page plan will benefit first those communities who have been most directly affected by environmental violations, especially communities of color and the Native community. The comprehensive plan promises to “take immediate action to reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous and destructive rollbacks of critical climate and environmental protections.”

Trump Puts the Pause on Pebble Mine

A reprieve in the contentious Pebble Mine project came from an unlikely source, when President Trump paused the permitting process for the gold, copper, and molybdenum mine in Southwestern Alaska after previously backing the project. Located in the headwaters of the lucrative Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishery, the project is slated to include the largest earthen dam ever built, despite being located in a seismically active region. The 20 square-mile pit mine would require roads and a gas pipeline through pristine wilderness near Lake Iliamna and Lake Clark. Brown bears, wolves, moose, caribou, waterfowl, and all five species of Pacific salmon, along with some 7,500 people, mostly traditional Natives, live in the region likely to be most impacted by the mine.

Trump is calling for additional information from the Pebble Limited Partnership about environmental mitigation from the degradation caused by the project. In a letter to the Partnership, the Corps listed new requirements that would need to occur in order to mitigate the impacts of Pebble to the Bristol Bay ecosystem including compensation for impacts on 2,825 acres of open water and 129.5 stream miles within the Koktuli River watershed and on 460 acres of wetlands, 231 acres of open water and 55 stream miles along the transportation corridor and port sites. The agency gave the partnership 90 days to update their plan to address these impacts. This sudden about-face appears to have been prompted by statements made by Trumps eldest son, an avid fisherman who has fished in the region, as well as other influential Republicans who have Trumps ear.

Radical transformation of the Pacific Arctic Includes Impacts to Freshwater

Scientists from multiple agencies, working collaboratively to supply data to the Arctic Integrated Ecosystem Research Program, are detecting rapid changes in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. These changes are driven by abnormally high water temperatures and rapid loss of sea ice (on par with climate predictions for 2040), and include high numbers of Pacific cod and pollock expanding into Arctic waters, higher concentrations of harmful algal blooms, and a sea bird die-off that began in 2014 impacting puffins, common murre and, most recently, short-tailed shearwaters. At the base of the food web, larger, high-fat copepods are declining while smaller, copepods with a lower-fat content are flourishing. This means less nutrition for Arctic cod, while, at the same time, more competition for these resources as pollock expand their range northward.

But these troubling changes are not limited to northern ocean waters. Inland, freshwater rivers in the Arctic are overheating. Record-warm temperatures in July, 2019 caused heat stress and a mass die-off in returning, pre-spawned salmon. Read more.

Unprecedented Numbers of Pink Pacific salmon are showing up in the Arctic

In the latest indication of the rapidly warming waters in the western Arctic, Pink salmon were recently caught in the western Nunavut waters of Cambridge Bay. According to Karen Dunmall, an aquatic biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, due to diminishing sea ice, Pacific salmon have been following food sources, which include plankton to jellyfish, shrimp and smaller fish. This is another indication that climate change, which results in thinner sea and fresh water ice that forms later and breaks up earlier, warmer rivers, milder winters, longer summers and changes in wildlife and vegetation, is affecting the Arctic more dramatically than anywhere on the globe. It’s n across the Arctic

In total, the Arctic research salmon program estimates that in 2019 roughly 2,000 salmon samples have been provided to them – almost triple the number from 19 years of monitoring harvesters and this number appears to be rising.

Similarly, Pink salmon have spread to parts of northern Europe after being released into rivers in Russia in the 1960s. Unprecedented numbers of the fish were found in Scottish rivers in 2017 and they were seen again in 2019 on the Dee which flows through Aberdeenshire, the Tweed which passes through the Borders, Kyle of Sutherland which is an estuary in the east Highlands and the River Ness which flows through Inverness and into Loch Ness when in September, a lone male was captured on one of our underwater surveillance cameras.”

Fishery managers in Scotland are concerned that the Pinks which are voracious eaters and which have already become established in rivers and streams in Norway, could colonize Scottish rivers and out compete native Atlantic .

Whales, Seals, Salmon and Walrus Die-offs Indicate Collapsing Arctic Ecosystem

On August 1, Greenland lost more than 12 billion tons of ice in a single day. Due to a heatwave the struck Greenland last week, Greenland ice sheet lossed of 197 Gigatonnes in July alone is enough to raise sea levels by half a millimeter.

Alaska is also on the front lines of climate change where July 2019 set a record for the state’s hottest month on record. Scorching temperatures illustrate that not only, are humans, for better or worse, making history but because sea ice in the Arctic is critical to life, we are witnesses to the first visible signs of a collapsing arctic ecosystem including gray whale, ice seal, salmon and reindeer die-offs.

Temperature also impacts arctic marine habitat through melting sea-ice. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the July heat wave in Alaska contributed to continued melting of Arctic sea ice which reached a record low in July. According to the NSIDC, since 1979, September sea ice extent has declined 12.8 percent per decade.

Sea ice is critical to Pacific walruses who use it for resting between the search for food and for rearing their young. The Unprecedented loss of ice in the Chukchi Sea, this summer, however, once again, forced Pacific walrus to congregate on Alaska’s ice free northwestern coastlines and away from the important off-shore food-foraging areas.

While walrus, sometimes congregating in the tens of thousands, they have been hauling out on the beach at Point Lay, Alaska almost every year since 2007, due to the disappearance of their usual sea ice habitat. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, thousands of walruses hauled out on the beach in late July – the earliest ever. The walrus congregations can number in the tens of thousands, with up to 40,000 animals estimated at a time.