Jan Konigsberg

Jan Konigsberg established Trout Unlimited's Alaska field office in 2000 to direct the Alaska Salmonid Biodiversity Program. Prior to his Trout Unlimited work, Jan served several years as executive director of Alaska Conservation Foundation. He has a Masters in Philosophy from the University of Montana.

Valuing Salmon: Who Gets to Decide?

Jan Konigsberg, Director, Alaska Field Office, Trout Unlimited, 1399 West 34th Avenue, Suite 205, Anchorage, AK 99503-3655, email: jkonigsberg@tu.org

Alaska has long wagged its finger at Canada and the Pacific Northwest for their failure to sustain their wild salmon populations. Alaska resents having to accommodate its salmon fisheries to manage for the mistakes committed elsewhere. Now the State of Alaska has been wringing its hands over the danger salmon farming down South poses to wild salmon populations, all the while turning a blind eye to the more significant danger posed by its ranching of 1.5 billion juveniles annually.

With the extirpation of wild salmon populations throughout the Pacific Rim, the Alaska region is now the greatest collection of geographically diverse refugia for Pacific salmon and the largest reservoir of genetic diversity. The problem is that Alaska's salmon fishery managers manage for abundance, not for biodiversity. Ironically, Marine Stewardship Council's blessing of Alaska salmon fishery management may have created greater demand for Alaska salmon in the market place, but it has inhibited demand for the changes promised by the state's Sustainable Salmon Fishery Management Policy. This is because MSC subscribes to the traditional paradigm of sustainability in which the conservation algorithm is fit to the fishery rather than to the complex of salmon and their ecosystems. The choice of paradigm is fundamentally about who decides how salmon are to be valued. Generally salmon are esteemed for their pecuniary function and this way of valuing salmon is the same path-dependent behavior common to other natural-resource industries in which the management agency inevitably conflates its public trust role with serving industry.

The State of Alaska brags about its salmon and its salmon industry. No doubt about it, Alaska has a lot of salmon. In fact, of all the major salmon-producing regions, it produces the most, with a record harvest of nearly 218 million in 1995 with an ex-vessel value approaching $500 million. With numbers like these and certification from the Marine Stewardship Council, the State of Alaska claims bragging rights for its salmon fishery management. Trout Unlimited's Alaska Salmonid Biodiversity Program doesn't dispute that the state's management thus far has been better than Canada's and the Pacific Northwest, but TU contends that Alaska is heading down the same path that led the Pacific Northwest to the Endangered Species Act. Alaska and its admirers can no longer afford to measure its success by comparison with others. This presentation is suffused with the caution that those of us who live in glass aquaria should not throw stones.