An Alaska fishing community takes care of its own

May 032012
 

When it comes to grassroots fishing organizations, they don’t get much more innovative than the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, based in Sitka and led by Linda Behnken. Behnken and ALFA are working on many fronts, supporting fish stock conservation, raising capital to buy fish quota to keep members in the game and selling fish through their own label, Alaska’s Own.

Linda Behnken directs the Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association.

Behnken, 50, draws on a rich tapestry of experiences in stewarding the group. Fleeing her native Connecticut for adventure in 1982, she talked her way onto a black cod longliner as a deckhand in Sitka. After buying her own boat and chasing halibut and blackcod for several years, she headed back East for a master’s degree in environment science at Yale, then returned and took up a position on the powerful North Pacific Fishery Management Council in 1992, just before the council begin assigning new tradeable catch allotments for halibut and black cod under what’s known as the Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) system.

Behnken’s talent has been in navigating the worlds of marine science, government policy, fishing communities and longlining all at once. We asked her where the innovative ALFA is headed and how it will leverage the newly launched national Community Fisheries Network, supported by Ecotrust.

Q.Your group now has its own label — how are you navigating selling and marketing the fish?

A.The Fisherman’s Conservation Network [boats that are engaged in marine research and resource stewardship] are providing fish and we’re selling those through subscriptions in Juneau and Sitka under the Alaska’s Own label. Premium seafood from FCN boats is processed in Sitka’s hydropowered seafood plants and then provided to community residents through a monthly subscription program.

In Sitka, the Alaska Longline Fishermen's Association is creating new markets and strengthening fish stocks. Photo by Mim McConnell.

We’re trying to support the whole industry supply chain. One of the processors we work with is a cooperative, owned by fishermen — most of us are part owners. Sitka’s processing plants are an important component of our community, providing jobs and engaging in community affairs. They are an ally in promoting sustainable seafood and the community-based fishing fleet.

We are less competitive on price than we would be if we sold direct from fishermen to the consumer, but this way we are supporting the fishermen, the local processors, and the community.

Q.Is this community-supported fish organization — CSF — taking off?

A.We are growing the CSF slowly and carefully. Packaging fish for the CSF is extra work for the processors, so we needed to convince them that the CSF created an important connection between fishermen and consumers that benefited the entire fishing industry. But we’ve tripled our volume between year one and two and intend to double volume again this year.

We provide seafood subscriptions in Sitka and Juneau. Juneau product is flown from Sitka, since Sitka is on an island. There’s a lot more room for growth in Juneau, the capitol, with a larger population and a lot less fishermen. Both in Sitka and Juneau, people have loved the quality of the fish we provide and the fact that it is locally caught. They also enjoy the info we provide about fisheries management, the seafood they are receiving that month, and the recipes we provide.

CSFs are like community-supported agriculture — you don’t dominate the market but they connect consumers to the people who provide their food and create a viable market niche.

Q.You’ve had some great policy wins with your small organization. What’s your secret?

A.We were successful in closing southeast Alaska waters to trawling, and the way we were able to do that was a total grassroots effort. The trawl effort in the area came almost exclusively from the Lower 48 — none of them were based in southeast Alaska.  We argued that the trawl fleet threatened the resource and the local economy, since the gear is destructive to the benthic community [seafloor habitat] and the trawl industry didn’t hire Alaskans and didn’t contribute to the local economy.  I got resolutions in support of closing this area to trawling from virtually all coastal communities in Southeast Alaska. We had support from the Congressional delegation and eventually won support from the North Pacific Council.

On securing fish quotas for small boat fishermen, our organization only agreed to support new fisheries law if that provision was included. And lawmakers thought they had to get small boat support to get the law passed.

The facts matter, credibility matters, and grassroots support is essential.

But there are always outside factors. In the 1990s, fisheries were less locked up — there was still room with facts and commitment to get things done. The American Fisheries Act allowed more corporate control of the fisheries, and now it requires a lot more political influence to get things done.

We always have to remind people we exist and that we provide the public with essential protein. It’s a fact that fishermen are off the radar for the average person. Fishermen go on out to sea and harvest and deliver fish to processor and they’re never seen. They’re not on the school board, not at the Chamber of Commerce meetings because they’re always away. So it’s easy to marginalize fishermen. Tourism businesses, for instance, are often a small contributor to the economy but a large voice because they’re around and engaged in the politics of a small town.

What’s in our favor is that fishermen in Alaska are the largest private sector employer in the State. I can’t imagine what they’re up against in a place like San Diego. California’s fishermen are just a much smaller percentage of the economy.

Q.Capital is always such a crucial component of community fisheries — have you been able to leverage new capital?

A.We’re now working on a grant to support the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust so we can secure equity capital to assist community based fishermen with the high cost of entry to Alaska’s fisheries.

There’s so much risk involved for these fishermen — not a bank in the world that will lend to them unless they have a lot of collateral. Most community based fishermen do not have sufficient collateral to secure the size loan required to purchase shares of fishing quota. To keep those quota in fishing communities, the Trust has to carry some of that risk. Otherwise the quota will leave the communities.

Q.And how are fishermen engaging with the conservation work of your network, to tackle the resource abundance question?

A.The concept is that if we get a group of fishermen together to identify conservation challenges and problems, the fishermen will figure out the tools to address and solve those challenges. Fishermen are the most innovative people I’ve ever worked with. So that’s the best path forward.

The issue of excess rockfish bycatch [species caught incidentally] has shut down fisheries in California, Oregon and Washington. So we needed to develop a tool that allowed fishermen in Alaska to control their rockfish bycatch levels.

We provided fishermen in the network with maps indicating areas of high rockfish abundance. The fishermen then provided us with data showing roughly where they fished and what they caught. We mapped this data and overlaid it with bathymetric [seafloor topography] data collected by the fishermen in the network. This allows them to avoid rocky, sensitive habitat and control rockfish bycatch rates.

After the first two years, FCN fishermen reduced their rockfish bycatch by 20% in the halibut fishery. Over three years, FCN fishermen have learned to control bycatch to established rates that protect rockfish stocks. The FCN includes 15% of the longline fishermen in the area, but if these fishermen develop the tools the whole fleet could use this technology when needed.

We’re also developing electronic monitoring for smaller boats, which will provide managers with the at-sea catch and bycatch data they need without displacing crewmembers on small boats that can’t accommodate an additional person.

And we’re working on whale deterrents. Whale predation on the black cod survey gear and on fish caught on commercial gear affects the overall quota and catch accounting. Whale predation is a conservation, economic and safety concern.

Q.What are the best methods you’re testing to keep whales away?

A.The first one is the acoustic “decoy” buoy which mimics the sound of fishing gear being put in the water. In a handful of tests we’ve seen them gather around the buoy instead of fishing boats.

We’re also testing a bead buoy above every hook that throws off their echolocation. We put a glass bead above every one — early indications are good. Whales are staying away. But it’s expensive.

There’s also a bubble device that puts a bubble screen around the fish.

Q.What’s the promise of the Community Fisheries Network?

A.On a small scale, it’s about sharing successes and information that will help other groups succeed and remain viable. I’m worried that we may be winning some battles and losing the war in terms in maintaining viable fishing communities and healthy oceans. It seems like there’s so much money and long-term thinking and efforts to get politics on the side of corporations and well-heeled interests. We need to work together to hold our own against those forces.

Unless we can aggregate the influence of community-based fishermen, we’re going to be ruled by someone else. We have to work together to influence policy in the long term.

Another piece of this is establishing a niche through community-supported fish (CSF) organizations.

If we can start to share products between organizations within the national network that will just diversify outlets for our own products, and it will increase marketability of our CSF if we can add in other groups’ fish.

And anything that builds awareness and educates people is great: that’s a really strong part of CSFs. When we need to rally that broader group of consumers around policy issues, we can call on them.

Salmon and resilience: Beyond simple fixes

Apr 272012
 

By Joseph Cone

Excerpted from the preface to Pathways to Resilience: Sustaining Salmon Ecosystems in a Changing World (Oregon Sea Grant, 2012).

What is the path we’re on if it’s not a path to resilience? The path of the status quo tries to get the most out of — “optimize” — some element of a system. The essays in Pathways to Resilience, a new volume about salmon challenges from Oregon Sea Grant, present views of a profoundly different paradigm — that of resilient whole systems.

steelhead at Salmonberry Falls, OR

Steelhead leaping at Salmonberry Falls, Oregon (Photo by Melissa Tatge)

Although the essays are devoted to salmon and, importantly, represent key insights by the first generation of scientific experts who have thought deeply about salmon and resilience, the reader of today — and also of the future — is encouraged to see this work in its broader significance. A time capsule from today would reveal a world fitfully struggling to come to terms with ecological and social systems that are dangerously vulnerable to major shocks: global climate change, international terrorism, polarized and fractious publics in nation-states, an interconnected global economy that rewards the few but effectively punishes the many.

Where is the wisdom of resilience, of attending to the dynamic whole that would sustain these linked systems? If such wisdom were acquired easily, presumably it would have been broadly achieved by now. But it has not been, which is one reason why the example of the essays are valuable to anyone concerned about a sustainable future.

Those who take the challenge of trying to understand our human relationship with Earth as a totality describe that totality in terms of a complex, interrelated system. This so-called human-nature (or social-ecological) system is ever-changing and multidimensional, but the problem today with this human-nature system is that we have been the perennial receivers in the relationship and nature the giver, and while our demands for what economists call nature’s “goods and services” continue to increase with burgeoning population and hu­man aspirations, nature is broadly being depleted.

Many in the United States have been concerned with this depletion over many years, and concepts of conservation, stewardship, and, more recently, “sustainability,” have enjoyed many adherents. These are good and valuable concepts, but these ideas have not shown themselves sufficient to shift our understanding, much less our collective behavior.

We tinker with pieces of the whole, trying to be more focused or more efficient, to gain from this or that component of the system some particular advantages in this or that place: more salmon for fisheries through hatchery production; better fishery management through maximum sustained yield calculations; greater timber production and profit through clearcutting and replanting monocultures… such approaches in the Pacific Northwest have had undesired consequences to the broader social-ecological system of which they are parts.

Taken as a whole, the essayists in Pathways to Resilience believe in a holistic view that embraces complex social-ecological systems and a perspective that helps those systems anticipate and avoid major shocks, and where the shocks are unavoidable, be able to respond and adapt to them. In short, the resilience of the system needs to be in view.

“Resilience holds the key to our future. It is a deceptively simple idea, but its application has proven elusive,” wrote Jane Lubchenco, the Oregon State University marine biologist who became the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under President Obama. Truly, the goal of resilient coastal social and ecological communities will not be easy to achieve. The concept is still emergent and is not well understood, appreciated, nor in the cultural mainstream. But we in Oregon Sea Grant believe resilience thinking is a good compass to guide us into the future and help us be of public service.

Joseph Cone is the assistant director of Oregon Sea Grant; this piece was edited by Rick Cooper, managing editor of Oregon Sea Grant.

Future We Want: Community-driven fisheries

Apr 192012
 

In 2005, an outspoken, gregarious San Francisco crab fisherman named Larry Collins wrote down his vision for a more prosperous future. It ran to 20 pages of handwritten scrawl but it boiled down to one idea: small-scale Bay Area fishermen boosting their income by selling directly into markets in the region. Eventually he connected with Ecotrust, which, among its many creative uses of capital over the years, has helped other community-based fishermen and local associations secure loans and grants that help with equipment costs, fish catch quota purchase and marketing ventures.

Crab boats in San Francisco are joining a national community fisheries movement Courtesy of SFCFA

Global research published last year has shown that, in both the developed and developing world, viable community-based fishermen who have a meaningful stake in management of their local marine resources create more resilient fish stocks and fishing communities. The strongest example is in Chile, where the fishery surrounding a type of snail called  the “loco,” or Chilean abalone involves 700 areas co-managed with 20,000 artisanal fishermen along 2,500 miles of coastline.

Building on work with community fishing organizations in Alaska and Oregon, Vice President Astrid Scholz initiated Ecotrust’s work with Collins and the fishermen on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

The group of eleven fishermen, running small crab and salmon boats out the Golden Gate, have scraped by for years selling to commodity fish buyers, while watching bigger boats voraciously fish out crab stocks off Northern California. They successfully fought for state limits on the number of crab pots in their region, establishing an ethic to protect long-term viability of the stocks. And then they built a business plan with Ecotrust to ensure increased economic returns on their catch.

This year, the group used a $250,000 grant Ecotrust received from the California Ocean Protection Council to secure a warehouse lease on Pier 45 at Fisherman’s Wharf and  access to a hoist and an ice machine, two simple tools that allow the fishermen new control on where and how they sell fish. It’s no secret that a handful of processors dictate the flow of seafood and the price levels up and down the West Coast; in the crab business, processors exert considerable pressure by commanding  the hoists that offload boats and the manufacture and sale of ice, both of which fishermen depend on to get crab to market.

At Pier 45 in San Francisco, the fishermen’s association unloaded 350,000 pounds of crab themselves in December 2011, and put the crab out on the live market.  By distributing it themselves, they saw a 10% higher return for their crab and their late fall salmon. The organization also sold bait at reduced cost to its members and peddled ice to other processors on Pier 45, bringing additional revenue. And it earned hoist fees for offloading other fish from members and non-members alike.  After paying out expenses at the end of the 2011-12 season, the group cleared a profit.

Last week, the association joined with a dozen other like-minded organizations to start the national Community Fisheries Network. Membership groups agree to responsibly manage fish catches around their home ports and work to ensure fishing communities and members earn a fair benefit from fishing harvests. Like the San Francisco cooperative, these organizations will also be offering fee-based services to members and other colleagues, buying product and re-selling it on the wholesale market, and building brand awareness in local and regional markets for community-caught fish.

Ecotrust will bring its experience building new social ventures over the last 20 years to support the branding and marketing of community-caught fish —  the brand that San Francisco fishermen have begun building with their recent declaration of independence. The eventual vision for Larry Collins and his colleagues is a full-service retail market on the Wharf. It will be a 21st century take on the thriving waterfront markets of old. The group is also exploring purchase and leasing of permits and fish catch quotas for groundfish on the West Coast.  And we believe that driving this sort of place-based innovation, at the nexus of social, environmental and economic wellbeing, is the best way to transform society.

How will we build the future we want? What are your ideas for radical institutional change? These are the questions the UN is asking in preparation for the Rio+20 Earth Summit in late June. In response to their Future We Want campaign, we’re curating transformative ideas for building a more resilient world. We’ll share some of the ideas we’re cooking up here at Ecotrust, but most of all, we want to hear from you. Email obrooks (at) ecotrust (dot) org.

 

When Gray Whales Return

Jan 182012
 


Laguna San Ignacio, Mexico — It’s quiet and peaceful here in a whale watching camp on the south side of San Ignacio, a 60-square-mile lagoon on the central west coast of Baja California del Sur, home to the greatest concentration of breeding whales in the world. As calm and beautiful as brown pelicans gliding over a long soft pink clam shell beach and a light breeze in a brilliant red setting sun. Half the world’s wintering population of black brant, terns, loons, grebes and miscellaneous shorebirds of every description fill the air; bottle-nosed dolphins play in the surf; four of the world’s seven species of sea turtles are found in these waters; and dozens of gray whales roll in an outgoing tide.

Silas Beebe, whaling captain

Grandfather Silas Beebe, Whaling Captain from Mystic, CT.

My great, great, great grandfather, Silas Beebe, a whaling captain out of Mystic, Connecticut and namesake to my eldest son, filled his mid-1850s ships’ logs with tales of slaughter of whales and elephant seals from both the North and South Atlantic.

It was Captain Silas Beebe’s compatriot of the same era, Charles Melville Scammon, a Maine born whaling captain (later turned naturalist) sailing south from San Francisco, who discovered the fabled nursing grounds of California gray whales in the warm lagoons of the Pacific coast of the Baja peninsula in the 1850s. Long the source of myth among the New England whalers, the nursing grounds were a place where bulls, cows, and calves were found in unimaginable numbers in shallow waters following a 5,000-mile migration from the Bering and Chucki seas. On his first discovery he took 47 whales yielding 1700 barrels of oil worth $15,000, a small fortune for the time. Scammon returned only a few years later to find the secret place a noisy camp of hundreds of whalers from all parts of the world, a sea turned red with the blood of horrific industry. Some of the whalers would target the calves with their harpoons to attract the protective mothers to their deaths. In a rage, some cows would attack the whale boats and earned the reputation as “devil fish” for their ability to wreck the boats with a slash of their giant flukes. The lagoons were soon hunted to exhaustion by the 1940s just a few thousand survived in the eastern Pacific, following the same pattern of Atlantic populations of gray whales, which had been exterminated by the mid-1700s.

Pachico Mayoral

Pachico Mayoral, the man who the whales chose.

My son Sam and I are here to record the remarkable story of the whales’ recovery and the economic effect it has created for local fishermen who now augment their income as whale-watching guides. Seven camps employ 75–100 local guides, boatmen, cooks, camp keepers and support crew from January to April each year for the past 30 years, attracting as many as 5,000 tourists and school children annually. This effort has doubled the income for many local people.

It began in 1972 when a local man named Francisco “Pachico” Mayoral was approached by a 40-ton, 50-foot-long gray whale while fishing with a friend in a small panga, a 20-foot boat. Fisherman had learned to keep their distance from the feared devil fish.. The whale approached so close, Pachico was able to reach out and touch her gently on the head, his heart pounding, not sure what might be the whale’s next move. Gently she slipped away after almost 40 minutes of playful curiosity. He was sure the whale chose him to re-establish an ancient connection. Gradually over the ensuing years, friendly individuals, particularly cows with their newborn calves, approached other fishermen and visitors, and from that, a whole whale watching industry has emerged, both here at San Ignacio and throughout Baja.

Ranulfo Mayoral

Pachico's son Ranulfo, guide extraordinaire.

Pachico’s son Ranulfo was our guide for three days, exploring the lagoon, pristine wilderness beaches and mangrove swamps in the midst of the six-million-acre Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected area of its kind in Latin America. Ranulfo is a no-nonsense, hard working fisherman-turned-naturalist who, along with his father, brother Jesus and daughter Adelina, is dedicating his life to protecting the lagoons, its extraordinary bird life and the surrounding area from exploitation. Ranulfo has taught himself to become the local bird expert, and an excellent photographer as well. Local ejidos, the peasant communities who control the land, and a variety of local fishing cooperatives for clams, lobsters, abalone, scallop, halibut, corvina, mullet and other fish, have resisted over-fishing and intrusive whale watching from large outside operators.

A baby gray whale surfaces in front of a boat of tourists

Whale watchers with a gray whale calf.

Both fishing and whale watching are controlled most effectively by local people. Whale guides have strict local rules, stricter than those imposed by federal conservation agencies, to prevent undue disturbance. They have limits on the number of fishermen, whale watching operations and guides, and restrict the movements and number of whale watching boats as well as the time the boats interact with individual whales. In the late 1990s, locals helped fight off a 120,000-acre salt mining operation proposed by Mitsubishi International Corporation and the Mexican Ministry of Trade. Their exports, they decided, would be of a different sort: Baja’s red rock lobster fishery was in recent years certified by the international Marine Stewardship Council.

Peregrine falcon hunting a Willet shorebird

Yellowlegs have more to fear from a peregrine falcon than the fishermen have to fear from devil fish.

Pachico and the whales of San Ignacio Lagoon are a small part of a much larger story, a global story of people and place and a more “natural model of development” that is emerging as a salvation not just for whales but for the well-being of communities everywhere. Across the Baja Peninsula and the entire Sea of Cortes, communities of fishermen, scientists, conservationists and Mexican state and federal agencies and institutions are working together to improve both the well-being of the environment and its residents–man and the biosphere reserves and marine protected areas proposed and maintained in large part by the people who live there. They are fighting a huge proposed Cancun/Cabo San Lucas style development by a bankrupt Spanish development company, backed for the time being by the current President of Mexico, adjacent to the Cabo Pulmo Marine Protected Area in the Sea of Cortes. They are suggesting that community-based, conservation-based development that emerges naturally and incrementally from the intimate relationships that evolve over millennia in this very particular and distinctive place, is a better, more resilient, more reliably prosperous approach than large-scale, top-down initiatives. The latter destroy both the environment and the distinctive culture of livelihoods that differentiate it from other places, and provide only transitory benefits to outside people and businesses.

Pachico and Ranulfos’ whales tell us this suggestion from the people of Baja just might be true.

Editor’s note: In 2012, Ecotrust founder Spencer Beebe is travelling the globe to discover stories of resilience. Join him and those he meets along the way in shaping —  in new and unimagined ways — resilient communities, economies and ecosystems.

Willet shorebirds taking flight

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