Alaska
Wright and Eischeid face off again in a close state House race to represent East Anchorage district • Alaska Beacon
In Anchorage’s North Muldoon and Russian Jack neighborhoods, two candidates are facing each other for the second time in two years for a seat in the Alaska House.
While Republican incumbent Rep. Stanley Wright is seeking reelection, Democrat Ted Eischeid is on a mission to unseat Wright in the rematch.
In 2022, Eischeid lost to Wright by 72 votes.
This year, Eischeid said he retired early from his job as planner for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough so he could redouble his campaign efforts —“I knocked a lot of doors two years ago, I’m doubling that effort this time,” he said.
Eischeid led the race in the primaries with a 3% edge over Wright, although only 8% of registered voters turned out.
Any flipped seat could be consequential in a closely divided House, so an Eischeid victory could tip the balance of power away from the current Republican majority.
Wright is a Navy veteran from South Carolina. He followed his wife to Alaska where they raised their children. Before representing House District 22, Wright worked as a community systems manager in Anchorage’s Community Safety and Development office. His previous public service roles include work in the state governor’s office and for the state’s Department of Military and Veterans Affairs.
Eischeid had a career as a middle school science teacher in the Midwest before he, too, followed his wife to Alaska where he found work as a planner for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. His previous public service was two terms as a nonpartisan county board supervisor in Wisconsin. He said the value of listening to all viewpoints was driven home to him in that role.
“Sometimes I voted conservative, sometimes I voted progressive. I let people’s public testimony and I let the data guide me. And I listened very closely, tried to suspend my bias as much as I could,” he said.
As part of his campaign, Eischeid said he heard that the district’s main concerns are education, public safety and infrastructure. He said the value of a good education is a priority for him in part because he grew up poor in Iowa after his father died when he was very young.
“I’m a food stamp kid. I’m a free and reduced lunch kid. And because I had good public school teachers, I got a good education. I was able to earn that college degree, and I entered a good middle-class lifestyle,” he said, adding that, if elected, he will bring that history — and the sense of compassion it instilled in him — to Juneau.
That sentiment points to a similarity between the candidates. In 2022, Wright told the Alaska Beacon that a “pretty rough” childhood on a South Carolina farm and, later, in a housing project, taught him about the value of public assistance. He sought federal grants for low- and moderate-income housing as a city employee in Anchorage, according to his campaign.
Eischeid described himself as a moderate Democrat who will listen, but doesn’t want to “waste time” fighting culture wars.
“People don’t want professional politicians, and they’re not asking for much, but they want somebody that represents them and knows them and puts people over party,” he said.
Wright did not respond to the Alaska Beacon’s requests for an interview for this story. But his voting record has at least one striking example of putting concerns raised in his district over the leadership of his party: In the last session, he was one of the seven members of the Alaska House’s majority caucus who voted with members of the House minority in a failed attempt to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of an education bill that included a permanent increase for state education funding.
At the time, Wright said one of the schools in his district had been threatened with closure and that “really weighed heavy on my heart.”
In his first term in office he co-sponsored a number of bills that became law, including the measure that led to state recognition of Juneteenth, and passed a law that is intended to streamline the certification process for counselors in order to increase access to mental health care.
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – The National Science Foundation has selected the University of Alaska Fairbanks to be the site of a new critical minerals research program, making it one of 12 new technology innovation centers across the nation that received federal funding, according to Yereth Rosen with the Alaska Beacon.
The new Critical Minerals Accelerator Engine in Alaska will receive $15 million in funding for two years and up to $160 million over 10 years, the university said on Tuesday.
The organization will be located at and led by UAF’s Geophysical Institute and will work with more than 40 partners, said Steve Masterman, the university faculty member who helped lead the application for the award. Partners include private companies, Native corporations, nonprofits, other universities and other entities, said Masterman, who formerly served as Alaska’s state geologist.
UAF already conducts scientific research into minerals considered critical to the nation’s economy through its Critical Minerals Collaborative. That program is more scientific and academic-focused, said Masterman, who is its deputy director.
In contrast, the Critical Minerals Accelerator Engine will be focused on putting research to use, determining ways to commercialize resources, addressing supply needs, workforce development and other issues important to the critical minerals industry.
Though the scientific research already conducted at UAF will be helpful, the accelerator idea is industry-focused, Masterman said.
“This is quite different because it’s an economic development project,” he said.
Alaska is rich in resources considered critical minerals. The state has 56 of the 60 minerals classified by the U.S. Geological Survey as critical to the nation’s economy, UAF said in its statement.
In addition to the Alaska award, the NSF on Tuesday announced its awards for other innovation engines in different parts of the nation. The sites have different primary purposes, such as disaster prevention and mitigation, robotics development and development of advanced information technologies.
The Alaska innovation engine will be led by Lee Ann Munk, a faculty member at the Geophysical Institute and a geosciences professor at UAF’s College of Natural Science and Mathematics. Munk is currently director of the Critical Minerals Collaborative at UAF.
“Our NSF Engine is built on the simple but ambitious idea that Alaska can lead the nation not only with the abundance of its critical mineral resources, but also in how we innovate, develop and deploy the technologies needed to produce them responsibly,” Munk said in a statement released by the university.
“By bringing together researchers, Alaska Native organizations, industry, workforce partners, state and federal agencies, national laboratories and communities, we are creating an engine that accelerates discovery into action,” she said.
Editor’s note: This story was republished with permission from the Alaska Beacon.
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Yukon king salmon on their Canadian spawning grounds more than 1,400 miles from the Bering Sea/Pacific Salmon Foundation photo
Yukon king salmon rebound beginning?
After a couple of years with cooler waters in the Bering Sea, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting a Yukon River return of Chinook salmon that has, as of the start of the month, “passed the historical third quarter point and exceeded preseason projections.”
The report comes at a time when National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers have linked the extremely weak returns of the past several years to the start of “an acute marine heatwave period in the Bering Sea” that began late in 2016 and extended into 2020.
Yukon Chinook, the oversized salmon that most Alaskans simply call kings, were the big losers in this warming event while Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were the big winners. This is what happens when environmental conditions change, though you might not know it if all you read is highly subjective, mainstream media reporting on “global warming.”
The planet’s warming climate is an environmental disruptor that can cause all kinds of problems for plants and animals, and even humans, but it is a two-edged sword because that is the way environmental shifts work. There are losers, but there are also winners.
And there is no doubt the planet is warming. The big debate is about how much the future increase and how fast it comes. Scientists this year ruled out the sky-is-falling warning of a temperature increase of more than six to almost 10 degrees by 2021.
But as the Climate Directorate for the European Commission notes, the latest, ” most optimistic path – the new ‘best case scenario’ – would still lead to global warming of 1.7° C, (3.06° F) temporarily exceeding the 1.5° C (2.7° F) target in the Paris Agreement” on climate change.
What exactly this means for Yukon Chinook is hard to say, given that Arctic Ocean warming of late has focused more in the Barents Sea off the north coast of Europe than in the Chukchi and Bering seas off Alaska. The odds, however, would seem to favor a continued bounty of Bay sockeye while Chinook to the north continue to struggle.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is this year forecasting a Bay harvest of 33.5 million sockeye from a total return of 45.3 million of the fish. This is a historically very strong run, but it pales when compared to what happened during those heat wave years when Yukon Chinook were fading.
A sockeye explosion
In 2022, the Bay witnessed an unprecedented return of 79 million sockeye, according to state data, and the harvest topped 60 million. Meanwhile, there was over-escapement in almost every river system in the region because the harvesting and processing resources in the Bay couldn’t handle a return so big.
Escapement is the number of fish getting past fishermen to make it back to their spawning grounds. It is a scientifically calculated number intended to produce the greatest return of salmon per spawner in future years.
The goal in the Bay is to put about 11.8 million salmon on the spawning grounds. The escapement in 2022 was about 7.2 million over the goal even though the harvest that year dwarfed the previous record harvest of 44.3 million set in 1995.
The 16.2 million difference between the two, record harvests was bigger than the total harvests for all but two seasons in the Bay from 1938 to 1979 when the North Pacific Ocean was filled with colder water.
A so-called “regime change” at sea in the 1980s altered marine survival and sockeye harvests in the Bay – home to the largest wild sockeye fishery in the world and one of only a handful of Alaska fisheries that can claim to catch truly ‘wild’ salmon – began to explode.
By the end of the 2021 fishing season, the five-year average harvest had reached 41.1 million sockeye; the 10-year average stood at 33.4 million; and the 20-year average stood at 29.4 million, nearly double the historic, long-term average of 16.2 million.
The good, old days for Bay fishermen have come in the here and now, despite a catastrophic drop in prices paid for Bay salmon since farmed, Atlantic salmon took over global markets at the start of the new millennium.
Alaska sockeye salmon, and especially those increasingly rare Alaska king salmon, have hung onto a niche in the premium market dominated by farmed salmon, but the bulk of the Alaska harvest is now made up of so-called ‘wild caught’ salmon that compete globally with ‘wild-caught’ Russian salmon in markets for canned and pouched salmon and smallish pink salmon filets.
The ‘wild-caught’ label is used to disguise the fact that many of these fish are products of hatchery operations in Alaska and Russia. They are as wild, or not, as cattle put out to pasture to fatten. And the same applies to some non-Bay sockeye, such as those coming from hatcheries in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
Bay salmon are a different story. These are truly wild salmon, and there is no doubt that they have benefited from warming.
Not all good
The same warning, however, has proven disastrous for Yukon Chinook and the people who once depended on them for cash and food. The commercial fisheries that produced cash have been closed for years, and subsistence harvests for food have been sharply limited.
Alaska catches fell to less than 20,000 kings per year on average in this decade, and with a serious downward trend underway, the U.S. and Canada in 2024 signed an agreement to suspend “directed Chinook commercial, sport, domestic, and personal use fisheries in the mainstem Yukon River and Canadian tributaries for one full life cycle (of) seven years.”
Alaskans fishing the Yukon for chum salmon, which are comparatively far more abundant, do still harvest some kings as bycatch, but the number is small. And harvests, whether in-river or at sea, do not, according to the NOAA researchers, seem to be the key problem facing the Yukon fish.
The scientists reported finding that “elevated natural mortality in later, post-juvenile life history stages has increasingly limited population productivity and recovery potential in recent years following a protracted marine heatwave period. Collectively, our results emphasize how shifting conditions can induce, novel stage-specific survival bottlenecks in species with complex life cycles.”
Their peer-reviewed study published in Ecological Applications, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, has, however, come under fire from Alaskans who don’t want to believe the data and prefer to blame the decline on the bycatch of Yukon Chinook offshore trawl fisheries targeting pollock and bottomfish.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, from Bethel near the mouth of the Yukon in rural Western Alaska, has repeatedly dissed the science. She is now running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and continuing to do so.
“I’ve seen the decline of our fisheries firsthand. I’ve seen our families suffer. And I’ve seen our fishermen have their livelihoods threatened. I’m running for Senate because it doesn’t have to be this way. We can take on the rigged system in D.C. and begin to restore abundance to Alaska,” she has said.
She contends that “the truth is that out-of-state factory trawlers and excessive bycatch are hurting Alaska. They are sweeping up more than 140 million pounds of bycatch….But instead of reining in the trawling industry, Alaska subsistence and sport fishing are hit with crushing restrictions, punishing Alaskans while protecting the corporations doing the damage.
“Instead of holding their corporate trawler donors accountable, D.C. politicians kick the can down the road with more studies. But we don’t need more studies to tell us what’s happening in front of our eyes.”
Whatever Peltola might see in front of her eyes, the scientists say there is no evidence that it is a bycatch problem. After modeling a huge pile of historical data, they concluded that ending all bycatch would put some more Chinook in the Yukon River, but not many more.
A few hundred fish
Simulations using various sizes of salmon returns to the Yukon showed that “the greatest difference occurred in 2007, in which the median run size from the zero-bycatch simulations was 433 fish greater than that of the fitted model,” they said. “In other years, median differences in run size between the fitted model and zero-bycatch simulations ranged from 32 to 398 fish.”
Basically, the models concluded what has long been observable. Bycatch numbers go up when Chinook are abundant and go down when Chinook are scarce. The Bering Sea pollock fishery, the biggest target of the anti-trawling campaign, posted a record bycatch of 122,195 Chinook in 2007, according to the North Pacific Management Council.
That now oft-cited number was an anomaly. It reflected a year when Chinook were unusually abundant in the region. The bycatch dropped to 20,000 the next year.
For the past decade, according to NPFMC data, the average stands at just shy of 19,000 fish per year. Genetic studies have shown these fish come from rivers all over North America, but the greatest proportion comes from Western Alaska rivers.
If bycatch could be wholly eliminated, the NPFMC estimates there would be an almost 2 percent improvement in the number of Chinook returning to those streams. As for the Yukon itself, the estimated improvement is 0.63 percent.
Such a change would be undetectable. The state sonar used to count salmon at Pilot Station on the Yukon has a “confidence level” of 90 percent. What this means is that the count is an estimate that comes from within a range that could be 10 percent higher or lower than the number judged to be the total return.
The numbers make the politics of the bycatch, at least as it applies to the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea, a classic red herring. There are no doubt some king salmon die when caught in trawls in the Eastern Bering Sea (EBS), but that fishery also happens to be the most intensely monitored fishery in the state.
The NOAA researchers noted that the trawl fleet has, since 2011, “been subject to 100 percent fishery observer coverage with full census counts of all salmon caught, and paired genetic and scale samples collected from one in 10 fish.”
Most Alaska fisheries operate without observers, and Alaska commercial salmon fishermen have opposed efforts to fit their boats with video cameras to provide remote monitoring because, according to the Southeast Alaska Seiners Association, “commercial permit holders are extremely sensitive to the confidential nature of
their fishing activities. Many see this program as opening their catch data to a number of unknown entities.”
The biggest of those “entities” would be the public. The state now hides data on how much money individual commerical salmon fishermen are making by mining the ocean for a common property resource and does not require they to report bycatch – such as starry flounder in Cook Inlet – that they discard.
Meanwhile, critics of the Bering Sea fishery claim that the federal monitoring now in place isn’t perfect, which is true, and argue that the Chinook bycatch could be significantly underreported. But even if observers were underreporting the catch by 100 percent, the improvement in the Yukon return would rise by only about 1.2 percent, according to the NOAA study, leaving it still well below the ability of the state sonar to detect a change.
Not that this is likely to alter the bycatch rant.
The Covid-19 pandemic days of “listen to the scientists” are now over, and Alaska has returned ot the days of people listening to what they want to believe, and some people – Peltola among them – deeply want to believe that the Yukon River would be full of salmon if the largest of U.S. fisheries – the pollock fishery – were shut down.
That weather and climate dictate how natural systems function is a hard thing to grasp in a now very urban America, where most people are out of touch with the natural world.
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