Alaska

In August 2010, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson stood in the same gym where we grew up, winning and losing basketball tournaments, celebrating graduations, and gathering to discuss important issues in our communities. Jackson heard a unanimous message from our region that day: “Use your power under the Clean Water Act to protect Bristol Bay, our fishery, our water, our people.”  

For years, Alaskans — myself included — have objected to federal intervention in our state. Politicians who live in the Lower 48, many in areas that are polluted beyond repair, do little to protect their own environment.

A precious renewable resource is once again under threat by a mining project that is mind boggling in scope and dangerous in potential damage to the public interest. Thankfully, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it will conduct a scientific assessment of the Bristol Bay watershed in western Alaska. Conservationists believe this review is desperately needed.

National Geographic's book "Hidden Alaska: Bristol Bay and Beyond," photographed by Michael Melford and written by Dave Atcheson, captures a fragile region's unspoiled nature. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it will conduct a scientific assessment of the Bristol Bay watershed at the urging of Alaskan Natives, sports-fishing and tourist groups, and the commercial fishing industry. EPA's decision is a good first step toward protecting Bristol Bay.

Last year, the Obama administration permanently banned oil drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, America’s richest salmon fishery and the heart of a $2.2 billion regional fishing industry. One huge threat to this extraordinary ecosystem remains...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to study how a world-class copper and gold prospect could affect the Bristol Bay watershed and that region's premier commercial sockeye salmon fishery.

In Southeast Alaska it is easy to think about the value of salmon in dollars per pound. Fish prices are as common in conversation as the weather. But most people don’t think about how the value of a salmon translates into jobs and expenditure outside the industry itself. The sport fishing and conservation advocacy group Trout Unlimited is trying to change that. The organization recently commissioned a study that attempts to measure the yearly overall economic output of the commercial, sport, and subsistence salmon fisheries for Southeast.

Salmon is an economic engine that pumps nearly $1 billion into Southeast Alaska’s economy, according to a Trout Unlimited Alaska study.

A project to restore an important salmon river in the nation's largest national forest is getting under way in what marks a new direction for the Tongass National Forest.