August 5, 2024 –A new bill from U.S. Representative Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) would ban U.S. agencies from permitting or supporting offshore aquaculture in federal waters without authorization from Congress.
The Domestic Seafood Production Act (DSPA) would specifically put a halt to ongoing governmental efforts to foster and encourage finfish farming in federal waters as Congress considers the future of offshore aquaculture in U.S. waters.
August 1, 2024 — Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola (D-AK) this week introduced the Domestic Seafood Production Act (DSPA), legislation to help address food security in communities historically reliant on coastal and marine resources by helping them build seafood processing capacity for local use.
Peltola’s bill would prevent rapid offshore finfish aquaculture permitting and its harmful effects on the environment and local ecosystems by prohibiting permitting or construction of offshore fish farms in U.S. Federal waters in the absence of Congressional authorization.
The bill encourages research on the effects of finfish aquaculture on the ecosystem and potential offshore locations that may be least impactful to the marine environment and commercially important fish stocks.
“In Alaska, so many communities rely on fish and seafood production both for subsistence and good-paying jobs,” Rep. Peltola said. “My bill would support our local fishing and maritime communities while strengthening our domestic seafood supply chain.”
July 31, 2024 — Concern spread across Canada after a cyanide spill at a gold mine in the Yukon Territory. The incident happened at Victoria Gold’s Eagle Mine, where a heap leach failure and landslide occurred. Energy, Mines, and Resource Minister John Streicker said four water samples were taken from different areas near the mine and had come back positive for cyanide, but levels were primarily low.
According to Alaska Beacon, Alaska salmon advocates say the spill isn’t just an issue for Yukoner. The spill happened upstream of a tributary of the Yukon River, and concerns spread because the Yukon is the state’s biggest transboundary waterway.
The spill happened in late June, and officials from Canada and the U.S. said it was too early to know its full impact and advised residents that there weren’t likely any associated health risks. Still, salmon advocates fear that the pollution that hasn’t been fully contained could worsen matters for the Yukon River’s struggling species. Residents along the area’s shores have depended on salmon for generations. Brooke Woods, a tribal member and salmon advocate in Rampart, told Alaska Beacon, “Now, we have a new threat to our salmon.”
July 30, 2024 — A cyanide spill at a major gold mine in the Yukon Territory, high in the Yukon River watershed, has sparked widespread concern in Canada.
But Alaska salmon advocates say the mishap isn’t just a problem for Yukoners. The spill happened upstream of a tributary of the Yukon River. The Yukon is Alaska’s biggest transboundary waterway, and residents along its shores who have depended on salmon for generations are already suffering amid crashes of multiple species.
Officials on both sides of the border say it’s too early to know the full impact of the spill, which happened in late June. And they’ve advised that there likely isn’t a health risk to residents along the Yukon.
Still, some advocates fear that the pollution, which has not been fully contained, could make matters worse for the Yukon River’s struggling fish.
Still, some advocates fear that the pollution, which has not been fully contained, could make matters worse for the Yukon River’s struggling fish.
“Now we have a new threat to our salmon,” said Brooke Woods, a tribal member and salmon advocate in Rampart, an interior Alaska village on the upper Yukon River.
July 30, 2024 — This year in Bristol Bay, fishing crews have noticed that sockeye salmon were on the small side — an observation confirmed this month by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Fish and Game officials say that at this point in the 2024 season, the sockeye returning to Bristol Bay are on average the smallest they’ve ever seen. This continues a decades-long trend.
So far, the average weight of Bristol Bay sockeye was 4.2 pounds this year. Fish and Game biologist Stacy Vega said that’s the smallest average weight on record.
“Fish are smaller, weigh less than, than they have in the past and against our historical averages,” Vega said.
July 26, 2024 — The U.S. government will invest $240 million in salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest to boost declining fish populations and support the treaty-protected fishing rights of Native American tribes, officials announced Thursday.
The departments of Commerce and the Interior said there will be an initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization made available to 27 tribes in the region, which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.
The hatcheries “produce the salmon that tribes need to live,” said Jennifer Quan, the regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. “We are talking about food for the tribes and supporting their culture and their spirituality.”
Some of the facilities are on the brink of failure, Quan said, with a backlog of deferred maintenance that has a cost estimated at more than $1 billion.
July 24, 2024 — A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision could have important implications for fisheries in Alaska.
Last month, the Supreme Court overturned a legal principle called Chevron deference, named after the case that established it. For 40 years, that principle gave federal agencies wide authority to interpret the gray area in laws passed by Congress. Now, more of that authority will go to judges.
The decision came after a legal battle over who should pay for bycatch monitors on trawl boats. The potential effects extend to all federally regulated industries — including fisheries.
Many trawl boats are required to have bycatch observers onboard. And in Alaska, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council can have trawl boats pay for those observers. That’s the law. It’s spelled out in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which governs commercial fishing.
But that act is not clear on who should pay for bycatch observers elsewhere. In the Atlantic, a federal agency created a similar funding program and a trawling business sued.
“And so (the National Marine Fisheries Service) used its agency authority to interpret the statute and fill in the gap and say, ‘Well, you know, we’re going to do what we do in the North Pacific region here in the Atlantic region.’ And the court said, ‘Nope, you can’t do that,’” said Anna Crary, an environmental lawyer at the firm Landye Bennett Blumstein LLP in Anchorage. She’s been watching that court case.
That Supreme Court decision, in a case known as Loper Bright, was a reversal of policy the Court formed in a 1984 environmental lawsuit called Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council.
That doctrine said that when federal laws are vague, federal agencies should fill in the gaps, and courts should defer to the expertise of those agencies. Crary said that understanding of agency power has become a baseline assumption.
“Administrative law, unbeknownst to many people, really forms the backbone of what we perceive as our everyday life, as modern society. But the extent to which this decision destabilizes that, I think is quite profound,” Crary said.
July 23, 2024 — On Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard cases for and against a lower court ruling that threatened to halt Southeast Alaska’s troll fishery for king or chinook salmon. Although there’s no decision yet, a panel of judges expressed sympathy for the coastal communities that could be hurt by the order.
With an opener the first week of July, Southeast Alaska trollers already got to fish for kings this summer. But the future of their fall season is in the balance at a courtroom over a thousand miles south, in San Francisco, California.
The Alaska Trollers Association, the State of Alaska, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — or NOAA — and other entities appealed a lower court ruling that found NOAA broke the law by letting Southeast trollers catch too many kings — to the detriment of a population of endangered killer whales.
The Washington District Court order would have effectively stopped Southeast trollers from fishing for kings. But the case is now on hold in the appeals process and in the hands of judges Mark Bennett, Anthony Johnstone, and Milan Smith Jr.
Attorney Laura Wolff, who represents the State of Alaska, argued that keeping Southeast king trollers off the water wouldn’t only injure the region’s economy. She said it could demolish an entire way of life.
July 22, 2024 — Alaska’s fishing industry has faced major challenges this past year. Low fish prices and high overhead costs have led some of the industry’s biggest players to sell or shutter their processing plants, sending shock waves through the coastal communities that rely on those canneries.
Perhaps no other community has been harder hit than the small city of King Cove, near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula, 600 miles from Anchorage, the closest major city.
Its only seafood processor closed almost overnight this spring, and the city is reeling, not only from the loss of 75% of its revenue, but from the larger questions of the city’s survival.
King Cove didn’t even exist until 1911 when a seafood company, Pacific American Fisheries, opened a salmon cannery and Alaska Native folks moved in from surrounding villages to work there.
That fish processing plant grew to become one of Alaska’s largest. Peter Pan Seafood Co. employed about 700 seasonal workers at its King Cove facility during a typical summer. That meant housing 700 people in company bunkhouses and feeding those people daily.
July 22, 2024 — On 6 and 7 July, the United States Coast Guard encountered three Chinese military ships in the Bering Sea near the U.S. state of Alaska in the U.S.’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
The U.S. Coast Guard Kimball vessel reported detecting three Chinese vessels about 124 miles north of Amchitka Pass in the Aleutian Islands, and an HC-130J aircrew from Kodiak Air Station detected another vessel about 84 miles north of Amukta Pass. All four of the Chinese vessels were transiting in international waters but still inside the U.S. EEZ, which extends 200 nautical miles from the U.S. coast.