In Bethel, Alaska, the Kuskokwim River is the heart of the community, providing food, transportation, employment, and community throughout the year.
The only way to get to Bethel is by plane, which can be very expensive — or by the river. In the winter, snow machines zip through town, heading up and down the frozen river to the dozens of villages that depend on Bethel for food, supplies, health care, and much more. In the summer, people travel by boat to spend days at their fish camps on the river, smoking salmon to eat throughout the rest of the year.
In between, when the ice is forming or beginning to break up, the river can be dangerous: too frozen for boats, but too unstable for snow machines and cars.
Lately, those shoulder seasons have been shifting, extending, and becoming terrifyingly unpredictable.
Every year, flooding and erosion get worse, fish are dying, and the winter ice is becoming more dangerous. Kevin Whitworth, the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, says declining salmon populations are especially concerning. "It's hard times," he said. "Our people are subsistence-based people. They're not economy-based people. They rely on the river as their grocery store. Their life is the river."
Fifty-six percent of the statewide subsistence harvest is made up of fish. Beyond its cultural and community importance, subsistence is crucial for Alaska Natives because of the high cost of groceries. In a study of 261 urban communities across the country, the Council for Community and Economic Research found that the three most expensive places for groceries were Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. Prices in more remote communities like Bethel are often even higher.
Salmon's drastic decline can be attributed to a number of causes, including warming waters and increased offshore trawling. Every year, ocean trawlers fishing primarily for pollock catch, kill, and discard about 141 million pounds of salmon, halibut, and other species, an extraordinarily wasteful practice that Indigenous people and other groups in Alaska have been rallying against. Meanwhile, communities upriver are severely limited in the number of salmon they can take from the river.
So, facing declining salmon populations and a dangerous river, Indigenous people in the region are shifting their norms, too. While chinook and chum salmon are restricted, sockeye salmon, a less traditionally popular and available fish, has become an increasingly viable alternative.
Traditional salmon fishing techniques make it hard to separate different species of salmon, so Whitworth and the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission have been encouraging local fishers to use dip nets, large circular nets that allow people to target sockeye.
In the commission's 2023 end of season report, sockeye made up about 40 percent of the estimated total salmon harvest on the lower Kuskokwim, a number that Whitworth says is much higher than it used to be.
These shifts may sound like tiny changes in the face of global climate trends, but these are the kinds of local adaptations that will help communities thrive in a warming world. Outside of Alaska, planting trees to create more shade in urban heat islands or hiring more lifeguards for public pools could have a similar impact.
But these solutions are within reach and meaningful — they literally save lives.
Read more here.
