Safeguarding the World’s Most Productive Salmon Fishery

Tim: When we started the land trust, our focus was on protecting privately-owned land that provides critical salmon habitat. We were concerned that if these lands changed hands they would no longer be owned by the people who live there and who have a long connection to salmon. We wanted to protect that salmon habitat to keep the salmon economy viable.

A great deal of prime salmon habitat is located on private lands owned by Alaska Native corporations established under the Alaska Native claims Settlement Act of 1971. We have been working with these corporations because they own over 7 million acres in Bristol Bay. Alaska Native corporations are profit-making entities and have no legal obligation to use their land assets to protect a public good like salmon. In fact, the opposite is true: they are obliged to use their assets to make a profit and pay dividends to its shareholders. One of the major drawbacks of the Settlement Act is that it could pit shareholders who want to develop land in conflict with shareholders who want to keep the land pristine to protect traditional subsistence resources, like salmon, that are dependent on that land. Conservation easements provide an opportunity for a Native corporation to protect its land while creating economic value that adds to the corporate bottom line.

Then the Pebble Mine project came along and proposed a major gold and copper mining operation at the top of the drainages of both the Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers and a transportation corridor that would cut through Pedro Bay Corporation land. This was a major threat to the ecological and cultural integrity of the region. Suddenly everyone, including the Land Trust, was focused on this potential threat, and we’ve been dealing with it now for more than a decade.

When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced it intended to block a permit the Pebble Mine needs from the Army Corps of Engineers, many people breathed a sigh of relief. But, as we have seen before, that decision could be reversed by a subsequent administration. We need another backstop, and that’s why conservation easements—which will legally protect this land permanently—are so important. The easement takes government involvement out of play. Pedro Bay has decided it doesn’t want the Pebble Mine access road to cross its private lands. It is a decision of the Pedro Bay Corporation, and that decision is not subject to reversal or change by the government. Pedro Bay Corporation shares ownership responsibility with the Land Trust and neither can grant permission for an industrial road to cross the property.

Taken separately, EPA actions, legislative solutions, and land protection efforts like the Pedro Bay Rivers project each make the possibility of Pebble Mine less likely, but taken together, all these actions can make the project nearly impossible.

What got you interested in this line of work? How did the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust get started?

Tim: I came to Alaska in 1978 as a VISTA volunteer lawyer and was sent out to Western Alaska. Believe it or not, when I first came to Alaska, I don’t think I’d ever eaten salmon, except possibly as a salmon patty made from canned salmon. I went out to this town called Bethel and one of the guys in my office said, “Let’s go out fishing.” And I thought, oh, okay, fishing, I’m going to get a rod and a reel. But he said I didn’t need it, and instead I went out with him and we threw a net out into the Kuskokwim River. We wound up catching about 100 silver salmon, and I was just blown away. I had never seen anything like that before. It was my first experience with the bounty of salmon and how it was ingrained in the way of life of the people I’d come out to serve.

After holding several different jobs in the state, I wound up in the Bristol Bay region around 1996, when I took the job of CEO for Choggiung LTD, a local Native village corporation organized under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The corporation had 300,000 acres of land, and a lot of that land was prime salmon habitat. The lands of the corporation were checkered with smaller tracts of privately-owned inholdings called Native allotments.

The Board of Directors became very concerned that it was becoming more difficult to manage its own lands as some of these smaller Native allotment parcels were sold and developed. A lot of that land was used by the shareholders for subsistence purposes like hunting, fishing, and berry picking. There was this fear that if too many Native allotments were sold out of Native ownership it would change the entire character of the region, and probably put too much pressure on the resources that were available for subsistence. However, as a corporation we could not spend our own limited assets to purchase land that would not be converted to an income producing asset. A real quandary…

Then one day, Brad Meiklejohn came into my office. He was passing through town and stopped by to inform me that The Conservation Fund was purchasing a Native allotment it considered critical for protecting salmon on a major river in the local State Park. I asked if The Conservation Fund could purchase other private parcels in the region. He stated it was possible, but that not every parcel we might want to protect would meet the criteria of the Fund. Brad suggested we consider forming our own land trust. I was unfamiliar with land trusts, so he offered to provide funding to send some folks to the annual gathering of land trusts in the United States to find out more. We took up the offer, and the rest is history.

The Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust just celebrated 20 years. In that time, largely with the help of The Conservation Fund, we have helped preserve just over 39,000 acres of private lands, and by December 2022 we hope to add another 44,000 acres with the completion of the Pedro Bay Rivers Project.