Annie Goodenough spends her summers traveling the Alaska coast on cruise ships.

But she’s not there for glacier views or whale sightings. She’s a state inspector, tasked with ensuring the ships aren’t endangering Alaska’s natural marvels.

One afternoon last September, Goodenough boarded the Discovery Princess in Ketchikan for a routine review.

Once underway, Goodenough noticed a sheen on the water that she thought may have been coming from the ship’s open-loop scrubbers, a technology that’s been criticized for reducing air pollution by converting it into water pollution. The next morning, she saw sooty, black globs coming from the scrubber discharge point.

In both cases, Goodenough asked to review the ship’s scrubber data to see if something was wrong. Twice, staff denied her request — but told her everything was working as it should.

“The inspector was not permitted to review the compliance data to verify that there were no exceedances,” her inspection report says.

As it turns out, there were exceedances on those days. According to the ship’s annual report to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, published in February, the ship’s scrubber wash water exceeded federal limits at some point on both Sept. 2 and 3, the same period Goodenough was on board.

Goodenough declined to comment for this story. But more than a dozen inspection reports reviewed by KHNS indicate that at least four other ships, all operated by parent company Carnival Corp., declined to comply with similar requests.

Those reports, along with documents obtained by KHNS through a records request, show that Alaska’s largest cruise ship operator for months refused to provide state regulators with data about a major source of water pollution.

Combined with Carnival’s fraught environmental record, the move is raising concerns about the lack of transparency — and what’s really going on with the systems, which can produce more than 3,000 metric tons of wash water per hour.

“The fact that they’re not sharing (the data) leads you in a couple of directions,” said Jim Gamble, who directs Pacific Environment’s Arctic program.

“One is that there are more violations than folks are aware of. And the other one is that they’re not keeping the data as accurately or as often as they’re supposed to,” Gamble added. “Or, you know, they’re hiding something.”

Hundreds of violations a year, but little enforcement

Carnival is one of the world’s largest cruise operators. But in Alaska, it’s the biggest by a long shot.

The Miami-based company owns five cruise lines that operate in state waters: Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn and Cunard.

They make up more than 40% of Alaska’s large cruise ship fleet and can bring hundreds of thousands of tourists to the state every year. Carnival ships are also the only ones in Alaska that use open-loop scrubbers.

The dispute between the company and the state is just one example of growing tensions over the proliferation of open-loop scrubbers around the world.

The situation stems from global air pollution requirements that took effect in 2020.

The rules sought to reduce sulfur emissions. But rather than using more expensive, cleaner fuels to comply, some cruise and shipping companies installed open-loop scrubbers.

The systems use seawater to remove contaminants from ship exhaust before diluting them and releasing the resulting wash water into the ocean. That process, research shows, can be toxic for marine life — including tiny organisms that make up the bottom of the food chain.

“From the scientific perspective, there is not really a need for more data; it is already clear that wide scale use of scrubbers and discharge of scrubber effluent will contribute to the degradation of the ecosystem,” Ida-Maja Hassellöv, a researcher with Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, wrote in an email.

A permit managed by the EPA sets limits for the pollutants in scrubber wash water and requires vessels to report violations. But as it turns out, violations happen all the time. Between 2023 and 2024, 17 Carnival ships that operate in Alaska reported more than 700, KHNS previously reported.

Still, those reports don’t include details such as when and where ships are discharging or how egregious the violations actually are, which is why the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation is asking for more information. EPA, for its part, has rarely enforced its own permit.

“I can’t really speak for EPA,” Gene McCabe, the director of DEC’s water division, said in a recent interview. “But, quite honestly, scrubber discharge is a known quantity, and we have the obligation to know what’s going on in our waters.”

An EPA spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the agency “enforces vessel general permits,” but can’t “comment on potential or pending enforcement actions.”

A dispute over water samples

The back-and-forth between the company and state started with a new request by DEC.

While inspectors had previously been permitted to review data that tracks scrubber activity, 2025 was the first year that DEC asked to take direct samples of scrubber wash water while onboard.

But during inspections on at least three Carnival-owned ships, staff declined to allow sampling or to share scrubber data. In two more cases that year, inspectors didn’t ask for samples but still weren’t allowed to look at scrubber data.

Carnival outlined its concerns about the inspections in a September letter to the department. The company said the requests were “unusual and unexpected,” and that it wanted more information about DEC’s scrubber-related goals and authority “before any ships within the Carnival fleet will agree to participate.”

The company made the case that, while state law gives DEC authority over wastewater including sewage and greywater, the same is not true for scrubber discharge.

The letter also brought up the state’s Ocean Rangers program, a now-defunded program that used to place marine engineers on ships to keep an eye out for environmental compliance.

The program is still written into state law. But Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed its funding in 2019. Carnival argued that while Ocean Rangers may have had some authority to collect scrubber wash water samples and data, DEC inspectors do not.

The letter elicited a sharp response from DEC Commissioner Randy Bates. He wrote Carnival back in December and accused the company of “misreading” state law and drawing a “fictional line” between DEC and the Ocean Rangers program.

“Without question, DEC has the authority to request and review the information and data requested, and Carnival has the obligation to provide that information and data,” Bates wrote.

Bates cited a state statute that requires cruise ships in Alaska that discharge wastewater to provide DEC with information related to a long list of issues. They include “pollution avoidance, and pollution reduction measures” — which scrubbers are.

Now, four months later, DEC and the company are in talks about a potential way forward. But Carnival still has not provided data about its scrubber systems to the state.

Carnival said in an email that it directed the state to publicly available samples it provides to EPA once a year, plus several “peer-reviewed studies proving (open-loop scrubbers are) safe and effective.”

“We’re always open to sharing data and being transparent, and that starts with following rigorous scientific protocols to produce accurate, reliable results,” the company said. “We chose not to move forward with sampling that fell outside of established protocols.”

Violations, fines and felonies

Carnival has a long history of environmental violations, which have led to fines in Alaska and felony convictions in federal court.

In 2016, Carnival subsidiary Princess Cruise Lines pleaded guilty to seven felony charges, all related to “deliberate pollution of the seas and intentional acts to cover it up,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The investigation was kickstarted by a whistleblower report that a Princess ship had illegally discharged oily waste near the coast of England.

Princess paid a $40 million penalty. And as part of the plea deal, Carnival agreed to participate in a court-supervised probation program for five years.

Then, in 2019, Princess and Carnival paid another $20 million after admitting they had repeatedly violated the terms of that probation.

“This is not just a one-off,” said Anna Barford, a campaigner with the environmental group Stand.earth. “This is a group (of cruise lines) led by a multi-time federal felon for discharging illegally, falsifying records and doing things like illegally preparing for inspections.”

There’s a long list of violations in Alaska, too. They include exceedances of state standards related to air quality, sewage and graywater disposal — plus one federal fine specifically tied to open-loop scrubbers.

The company started installing the systems on its ships in 2014. In 2016, all but one of its Alaska cruise ships had violated federal acidity standards, according to federal documents. EPA took a few steps in response. The agency fined the multibillion-dollar company $14,500 and required it to undertake a $75,000 water quality monitoring project.

But EPA also loosened its acidity standards to help Carnival comply while the company worked to improve its systems. The looser limits from 2017 “are still in place and only apply to Carnival vessels operating in Alaska waters,” a spokesperson confirmed by email in September.

Gamble, of Pacific Environment, said environmental violations by the industry have become a longstanding pattern for two reasons.

“A, it is hard to get information on what’s actually happening,” he said. “And B, when you do have clear data that shows violations, the penalties are not very significant.”

‘We can’t sample the whole ocean’

Insufficient information is why the state has started asking for more information in the first place.

Wash water samples would reveal what exactly the ships are discharging. And cruise ships maintain detailed records of when the systems turn on and off, where vessels are located when exceedances happen, and how long those last. The information could help the agency pinpoint patterns — and potential problem areas.

“We can’t sample the whole ocean, right?” said McCabe, the DEC water division director.

The back-and-forth between DEC and Carnival has led to negotiations about a joint sampling program and study. Carnival confirmed in an email that the company is “still considering” co-designing a study by a “mutually agreed, certified lab with the technical expertise to follow globally established IMO and EPA testing standards.”

McCabe said DEC and the company are still working out the details, but that negotiations are “coming along” and that a joint effort would be a “win-win.”

But multiple people interviewed for this story took issue with past industry-backed studies, which they said have generally painted a rosier picture of scrubbers than independent academic research.

The Cruise Lines International Association, for instance, helped design a 2024 study focused on Washington state’s Puget Sound.

The study did acknowledge potential impact to marine life from components of scrubber discharge, including petroleum hydrocarbons. But the report concluded that, after accounting for dilution and other factors, there is “minimal potential for ecological risk.”

The Washington Department of Ecology identified a range of concerns with the report. Among them: The study relied heavily on dilution and failed to account for the buildup of toxins from many ships over many years.

“The upshot is that we didn’t fully agree with the conclusions in the draft report,” said Amy Jankowiak, who leads the work on discharge pollution. “We provided comments and concerns, and it has not been finalized at this point.”

There’s a general consensus among researchers and environmentalists that, while scrubber discharge is not a good thing for the ocean, more data would be helpful for understanding how scrubbers work in practice — and how they’re affecting different ecosystems.

For now, the state hopes to answer those questions by collaborating with the industry. But advocates say that more research shouldn’t distract from the reality that Carnival has routinely violated federal limits.

“I just want it to be clear to Alaskans — and I want legislators to also understand — that Carnival has been out of compliance since day one,” said Aaron Brakel, of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council.

Regulators should respond accordingly, industry watchdogs argue.

“This is how, unfortunately, the cruise industry behaves,” said Marcie Keever, an attorney who worked with Friends of the Earth on cruise issues for nearly two decades. “I really do believe that regulation and oversight and enforcement is the only way we’re going to keep this industry from dumping at will in our valuable ocean waters.”

This story was produced by the Alaska Desk, an Alaska Public Media project for strengthening rural reporting with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It originally appeared on KHNS and is republished here with permission.

Mary Sherbick found out she was pregnant at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Although she and her partner had planned it, the pandemic was anxiety-inducing and isolating. While scrolling on social media, she came across online talking circles for Alaska Native women, organized by Alaska Native Birthworkers Community (ANBC), who were pregnant or postpartum. Sherbick, who is Yupik, immediately signed up.

“A lot of us were also just concerned about the way that we would be treated, and some of our concerns of pain or our birth plans within a hospital setting,” Sherbick said. “I think a lot of the women that I talked to just were aware of the history of how Indigenous women, Indigenous people in general, have been treated, and the sterilization programs that have been done unknowingly to Indigenous people.”

Growing up in foster care and losing her mother at 17, Sherbick did not have the family connection to support her in her pregnancy. And while her relatives introduced her to Yupik foods such as dry fish and agudak, she also felt removed from her culture. Her mother did not encourage Sherbick to speak the Yupik language, due to safety concerns. “There was an attitude on being Alaska Native within an urban setting, specifically within Anchorage, of animosity,” Sherbick said. Because of this, being able to have an Alaskan Native birth worker who could provide an Indigenous perspective was deeply meaningful and centered in sovereignty, she added.

Before giving birth in May 2021 at the Alaska Native Medical Center, which is where the ANBC team works primarily to support mothers, Sherbick attended one of the group’s birth preparation workshops focused on prenatal plant medicine. Participants received ingredients rooted in Indigenous knowledge, including yellow dock root, nettle leaf and red raspberry, to make herbal teas and infusions. “I can control even the potency of it,” Sherbick said. “I used the herbal iron syrup quite a bit because I was already anemic. That really helped with my blood flow and circulation.”

Sherbick’s experience of having anemia during her pregnancy is one that many Alaska Native women can relate to. According to a research study, Alaska Native pregnant or postpartum women had higher anemia prevalence than non-Native women. Anemia is far from the only pregnancy-related issue that Native Alaskans face.

In 2024, Native American and Alaska Native people had the highest pregnancy-related mortality ratio among major demographic groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alaska Native mothers also have the highest preterm birthrates in the state, with rates rising over the past decade. Native American and Alaska Native women have a higher risk of gestational diabetes mellitus and subsequent diagnosis of diabetes, compared with non-Hispanic white women.

Sherbick, who also dealt with gestational diabetes, knew that she needed a strong birth plan and support from Native birth workers. “I had specific breathing techniques. I had a whole playlist. I had a plan of walking around, and I was really doing OK until my water broke,” Sherbick explained. A partial water break increased her risk of infection and pain, so she ultimately chose an epidural, despite not wanting one at first.

The birth workers “really did a good job at breaking down the medical verbiage and making sure I truly understood what was going on and what were the next courses of action, and if that was something that I agreed to or felt that I was ready to do,” Sherbick said. “I felt really supported and honored because of that. Someone who comes from the same heritage and values as me, it just made me feel that much better.” With her birth worker’s help, she ensured skin-to-skin contact immediately, she said: “There was no wiping. I think there was no bathing for the first 24 or 48 hours. We really wanted to make sure that she felt my presence.”

Abra Patkotak, her ANBC birth worker, said she “started Alaska Native birth workers community because we saw that these families were really isolated and they needed support. It was hard for them and to be alone during the most vulnerable time in your life, that of childbirth.” Founded in 2017, ANBC has provided free birth-related services to Alaska Native women, including prenatal care, labor support, postpartum care and support during miscarriage, abortion, loss, adoption and for LGBTQ2S+ people.

Mariana Dosal, who is Mexican and a member of the Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove, Alaska, also faced birth complications while in Anchorage. Her first birth was traumatic – she hemorrhaged and nearly bled out. Fearing a similar experience, she sought help from the birth workers at ANBC. “The next time I went in, I had more experience with how to prevent that, from the native birth worker community,” Dosal said. Patkotak “being in there to advocate for what I need allowed me to not lose as much blood the second time. I didn’t go into shock, and I didn’t need blood transfusions.”

Both Sherbick and Dosal worked with Patkotak, an ANBC co-founder who is Iñupiaq from Utqiagvik. She trained to be a doula in 2010 before moving to Utqiagvik, 750 miles north of Anchorage, where she ran a pre-maternal home. There, she saw the challenges that rural Native Alaskan women faced, including having to spend large parts of their pregnancy away from home, to give birth.

Patkotak believes community support was once central to Alaska Native births. “My Amau, my great-grandfather, helped deliver babies. And this role was a role that every single community had,” she said. However, when the Community Health Aid Program started, there was a move towards more westernized healthcare, and midwives and birth workers were absorbed into that healthcare system, “and the time honored, respected role of midwifery was no longer the same”, she added.

After a generation of Native midwives passed away, the knowledge died with them. “Now, there’s this resurgence,” Patkotak said. “I think about them all the time. I call them in to support me.”

“A lot of us in my generation have been separated from that traditional knowledge just through colonization, [and] the medicalization of birth,” added Margaret David, ANBC co-founder. David is Koyukon Dene, and a mom of four, three of whom she birthed at home with support from midwives.

On a day-to-day basis, ANBC’s work ranges from birth preparation groups to on-call support. Some parents seek help during the prenatal phase, while others need labor support. ANBC also runs a 24/7 call line for referrals from the Alaska Native Medical Center for mothers in active labor. Most of the ANBC team is based in Anchorage, with a smaller team in the valley, because many rural Alaskan mothers have to travel there to give birth. A 2025 study found 43.3% of American Indian and Alaska Native births occurred in areas with low access to birthing facilities, compared with just 3.1% for white, non-Hispanic mothers.

For many mothers, traveling hundreds of miles from home is a financial, logistical and emotional nightmare.

Dosal, who lives in Dillingham, south-western Alaska, spent her last month of pregnancy in Anchorage, nearly 400 miles from home and separated from her partner. The local clinic in Dillingham lacks a birthing center, so women are sent to Anchorage about three weeks before their due date to give birth at a hospital equipped to help with labor and delivery. “That’s a really big hardship for us, because it takes a lot of money to live in Anchorage away from home,” she said. Some people have to stay even longer, depending on the complexity of their pregnancy.

While some financial support exists for mothers in this situation, it often falls short. Dosal spent $500 on groceries her first time in Anchorage just to set up a kitchen. “So it’s not really ideal for expecting mother … and then spiritually it wreaks havoc on your spirit to be in the city when you’re used to rural Alaska,” she said. But while in Anchorage, Dosal prepared for labor with ANBC’s help. “They gave me a medicinal foot bath, and gave me a pregnancy massage, and they have all these nice things for pregnant women,” she said, explaining that it provided her friendship and community that she was missing.

For the birth workers at ANBC, though, support goes beyond labor and delivery. They use a “three sisters” model, where each sister focuses on a specific layer of support to ensure a holistic approach to sovereignty from first breath. One provides free services to Native families, another grows the cohort of Indigenous birth workers and the third focuses on systemic change for better maternal health.

David explained that for years, ANBC brought other Native trainers from across the country to come and help train birth workers in Alaska. “Last year we had somebody come do a really beautiful lactation training,” she said, but, as of last year, they created their own curriculum and now train those interested in birth work.

They conduct trainings in remote regions too, including a training in Nome, Patkotak said. “We have hopes to expand … we have a lot of hopes to just increase what we’re doing, because it’s so positive, and there’s definitely a good impact.”

By expanding, and bringing birth work to other parts of Alaska, too, they hope to continue connecting birthing families with their Native roots, improving birth outcomes and expanding postpartum support.

For Sherbick, who lives in Anchorage, ANBC’s birthing circles were invaluable postpartum, for advice on colic, teething and more. “I had no idea how great … Muktuk is, which is whale blubber. It’s really good for teething babies,” said Sherbick, who had some in her freezer at the time. “And my daughter loved it.” Sherbick’s husband is Iñupiaq and Muktuk is an Iñupiaq delicacy, one which she said her husband didn’t even know of when he was her age. She thinks that being introduced to this traditional food not only helped her in the early days of being a mother, but also contributed to her daughter’s love for the food.

“And it all comes from these Indigenous women or these Indigenous people who are willing to come together to help support each other in this very sacred time in your life,” Sherbick said.

RUBY — Beneath a bulbous waxing moon, we roll along on a ribbon of packed snow. The clear river ice beneath our tires is four feet thick.

That ice we can’t see is the crystal memory of so many cold days of the winter of 2025-26. The remaining spruce pile of our Tanana friends Charlie Campbell and Ruth Althoff was small enough to be covered by a single tarp.

To get to Tanana, Forest Wagner and I pedaled to Alaska’s largest river via a newish road from Manley Hot Springs.

When I first saw Forest backdropped by that massive expanse of chunky white, my jaw dropped to my chest in a real-life cliché. You forget how big this river is when you haven’t seen it for a while.

Forest and I are pedaling the White Lonely for the next week and a half, two ants crawling over a cold moon. We never get very close to shore.

In our attempt to ride from home to Nome, the section from the village of Tanana to Ruby is the one that kept me up at night in January. People just don’t travel it much. We are dependent on a packed trail, which Hudson Stuck noted was the greatest gift one northern traveler can give another.

While we float at the speed of a canoe, we shove our bikes off the trail to allow passage of a few snowmachiners each day. Between Tanana and Ruby, they all fit the same profile: one man wearing a praying mantis helmet driving a modern black machine with a plastic red jug of gas strapped behind his seat. Only one stopped to chat. Most waved or gave a thumbs-up in passing while surfing the deep snow around us.

“Travelers,” Forest said.

The 120-mile stretch between Tanana and Ruby features a few log cabins separated by many miles of frozen river and a few more structures that were once there when I skied this stretch with Andy Sterns 25 years ago. That’s long enough for floods to wash some away or for leaky roofs to collapse.

While we were in Tanana, our hosts remembered summers past during which they harvested king and chum salmon. Those fish were once so numerous beneath our wheels in their pinky-size fry stage, waiting for the river to break up so they could torpedo to the ocean.

In the largest natural-history change in recent times in Alaska, salmon numbers have nosedived to the point that no one can fish for them anymore. The spruce fish wheels anchored now in deep snow will remain at the Tanana boat landing again this summer. Ruth called it a fish-wheel graveyard.

Being out here reminds this urban Alaskan of what we have all lost with the end of those runs of swimming protein and soil nutrients that seemed infinite. Tanana, once famous for its number of dog teams that ran on dried chum salmon from the river, is down to a limited number of aging veterans whose owners can afford to feed the expensive imported-from-America kibble that my wife and I feed our dogs.

The ghosted-out fish camps we pass on this section of the river tell a story of that huge change, when we pay attention to it. But sometimes we just daydream and stand on the pedals to get off the seat. Every hour, we stop rolling, plant our boots on the trail and eat. When we pause to stop chewing, the hum of utter silence wraps itself around us like a hug.

When my satellite tracker is on, you can see our arrow creeping across the landscape here: https//share.garmin.com/NedRozell.