Daily Sitka Sentinel

United Action Urged on SE Climate Change

By GARLAND KENNEDY

Sentinel Staff Writer

A gathering of Sitkans shared their stories of how the changing climate has impacted their hunting and fishing activities Monday, in an informal meeting facilitated by the National Wildlife Federation and the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

The NWF director of sporting advocacy, Aaron Kindle, told the group assembled at the Harbor Mountain Brewing Co. that he has seen the impact of climate change on hunting and fishing from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska.

“As I’ve traveled around, the one thing that I hear more than anything is that things are changing, and things are different and unique. They’re not like they were not that long ago,” Kindle said.

Aaron Kindle. (Photo provided)

The NWF is a national organization advocating for protecting and restoring wildlife and habitat.

Heather Bauscher, chair of the Sitka Fish and Game Advisory Council, said it’s critically important for members of various communities to make their voices heard in government regulation-making processes.  

“The heart of the work that I try to do is to connect people who are out on the land and the water, to bring their stories and bring their concerns and help amplify that at the table so that local voices are theoretically impacting the decisions that get made at these regulatory bodies, like how democracy is supposed to work,” Bauscher said.

She emphasized the importance of collective action in dealing with a threat such as climate change.

“None of us are strong enough on our own to take on the people we’re up against on these issues,” she said. “And if we don’t stand together, we don’t stand a chance. The great unifier in Alaska is salmon and our subsistence foods. So anything we can do to perpetuate that way of life as long as possible and adapt to these changes and have more people at the table is better.”

In terms of projects on the ground, she noted that federal funds are likely to come for restoring watersheds damaged by industrial logging when the Southeast pulp mills were operating.

As part of a strategy of reducing carbon emissions in Sitka, Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz said the city is in the process of hiring a sustainability coordinator, though local government is a relatively small emitter in town.

“The hard part for me is that while everyone wants to believe that the municipality is the culprit in Sitka, we are a very small part of it… We actually cut our emissions by an incredible number. It was like 80 percent,” the mayor said. “We cut down a massive amount of our emissions coming out of the municipality. So the little bit that we had to go is actually kind of a small amount compared to all the other emitters within town.”

Looking forward, he said, it could be viable for the municipality to switch to electric vehicles

Eisenbeisz said traffic congestion and pollution from tour buses also concern him.

“Everybody also wants to talk about the buses that are running tourists back and forth,” he said. “Well, no one likes those. Everybody hates them… The yin and yang of that is we may or may not be having a lot of talks with Royal Caribbean that buses are the number one thing locals hate,” he said.

Steve Ramp, who is on the advisory council, recalled visits to Tracy Arm, a wilderness fjord south of Juneau, where he witnessed the rapid recession of the Sawyer Glacier over a single decade.

“We were up by the face of the glacier, the Sawyer Glacier and it was a nautical mile, one and a half nautical miles inland from where the face of the glacier was when I’d been there ten years ago. Tell me about climate change,” Ramp said.

Satellite images taken this year bear out Ramp’s story of glacial retreat. The photos show that both the Sawyer and South Sawyer glaciers have receded by more than a mile in the past eight years.

As an ardent sport fisherman, Ramp also noted the changes in the size of king salmon.

“The years during and after the big blob out there, the warm water block, our size of king salmon here decreased dramatically,” Ramp recalled. “You know, to catch a 12 or 13 pound king was pretty rare. They were all seven and eight pounds.”

After years of hunting deer around Southeast, SEACC climate program manager Matt Jackson said he often wondered which events were linked to climate change and which were within the norm.

“As a young person who learned how to hunt and fish in my 20s, I see things that seem really random to me or don’t check out with the stories I heard growing up,” he said. “And I have very little way to fact check that. Anytime something weird happens, I’m like, ‘Oh, damn, is this climate change? Or is this just like a random variation?’ And I think, you know, a lot has been written about this idea that everything for the rest of my life will be climate change. The climate has already changed.”

Speaking of his home state of Colorado, Kindle said the dramatic increase in wildfires has had a sizable impact on hunting in the state.

He hoped that by encouraging hunters and anglers to engage in conversations on climate change, the topic could become easier to discuss.

“There’s been a little bit of a stigma on climate understanding,” he said in a follow-up interview. He said hunters and sport fishermen “are maybe a little bit more of a conservative community on average, and don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to acknowledge it. And so one of the big objectives of this is just to get the community talking.”

 Jackson concurred.

“One of my goals for this conversation and for all of our conversations is there’s no reason that these documented, scientific changes should be politically polarized. These are just facts,” he said, “and we should all be able to talk about them… in the same way that they talked about whether or not it rained yesterday.”

Looking to the future, Kindle encouraged Sitkans to “stay informed, tell your stories, get your community involved in it, kind of normalize it. It’s one of our goals, too, to just lift that stigma a little bit.