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3 Salmon Fishing: From Open Access to Limited Entry In 2008, Alaskan salmon fisher Bert Bender looked back over his thirty years of gillnetting in Cook Inlet, near Anchorage. He noted that “the thought of any commercial fishing in the twenty-first century arouses our fears for the endangered seas.” However, he further observed that, “thanks to our marine biologists and management programs that have existed for many years in Alaska, the wild sockeye has not been and probably will not be driven to extinction by the commercial fishery.” In fact, he concluded, “Most fishermen know quite well that we must be restrained.”1 Bender was correct. Moving from open-access to limited-entry fishing in the mid-1970s saved the Alaskan salmon fishery from possible self-destruction by over-fishing. Governmental agencies—driven by fishers and representatives of fish-processing companies, who feared that their natural resource might disappear—set sustainable limits on the total catches of salmon and allocated those catches among well-established fishers, especially in Alaskan waters. This shift fundamentally altered the nature of the salmon industry. No longer could anyone who wanted to pursue salmon enter the fishery. No longer was unsustainable harvesting allowed. Salmon’s fate in Alaskan waters was consequently very different from that of cod and blue-fin tuna in the Northwest Atlantic. Salmon was long the premier fishery in the waters of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.2 In 1974, fisheries expert Robert Browning labeled salmon “the single most valuable fish of the North Pacific.”3 Canned salmon had become especially popular as a relatively inexpensive source of protein for workingclass Americans (and was recognized as such at that time), especially after many soldiers were introduced to the fish as part of their rations in World Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_TX.indd 59 10/25/11 8:12 AM 60 Chapter 3 War I. Salmon later lost its leading designation to pollock, a bottom fish that emerged as a new type of mass-consumption food processed in the forms of surimi (fish paste), fish cakes, and fish sticks in the 1980s and 1990s. Even so, salmon remained important for fishers, processors, and consumers. Salmon was repositioned in markets as a “prestige” dish in the 1970s and later, as new technologies allowed an increasing proportion of the catch to reach consumers fresh and frozen. Between 2000 and 2010 or so, some salmon, such as “Copper River” salmon, even achieved branded, boutique status, and sold fresh at retail for as much as $38 per pound. In this chapter I focus on the development of new state regulatory regimes for salmon by looking at two closely related issues. As in the following chapters on king crab and bottom-fish harvesting, I examine especially the development of limited-entry regimes for fishing, analyzing how fishers pursuing salmon achieved sustainable fishing through this new form of government regulation. Limited-entry fishing was, I argue, essential to the continuing health of the salmon fishery. I also investigate how changes in regulatory regimes affected the day-to-day work and lives of fishers and people in their communities. My investigation of salmon fishing proceeds in two steps. I begin by examining salmon fishing in the Pacific Northwest, where, as in California, sustainable fishing proved elusive. Next, I turn to Alaskan waters. A boom-time fishery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alaskan salmon fishing suffered acutely from over-fishing by the 1950s and 1960s. The failure of the federal government to adequately regulate Alaska’s salmon fishery before the territory became a state in 1959 contributed greatly to the growing scarcity of fish. Conversely, state laws establishing a limited-entry regime for salmon in Alaskan waters in the mid-1970s made the fishery sustainable. No one person or small group of people drove these changes. Rather, substantial numbers of fishers and fish-processors, alarmed about the future of their businesses and with the negative example of the Northwest Atlantic cod fishery on their minds, pushed the formation of a new, sustainable salmon-fishery regime. Among salmon fishers who found their work altered by the movement to limited-entry fishing were Francis Caldwell, Bob Durr, Joe Upton, and Steve Fink, whose life stories I tell in this chapter. Like those denied the chance to become taxi drivers in New York by that city’s medallion system, sustainable fishing entailed social costs, I conclude, as many women and Alaskan Natives were excluded from the fishery. Blackford_MakingSeafoodSustainable_TX.indd 60 10/25/11 8...

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