
A gillnet float/Craig Medred photo
Inadvertent though Pebble’s role might be, the hugely controversial, proposed, copper mine near Lake Iliamna clearly deserves some credit for inspiring at least a small effort to pick up some of the most common litter in Bristol Bay.
Nakek fishermen Nels Ure last week told Alaska Public Media he has collected dozens of styrofoam gillnet floats, or what the story called “corks” in deference to what kept the nets afloat, since seeing a social media post about how other fishermen are using the floats to send anti-Pebble messages to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, in Washington, D.C.
A decade ago, a University of Alaska Fairbanks report on “Marine Debris in Alaska” made two key observations about where the flotsam and jetsam comes from and what needs to be done.
- ‘The bulk in weight and volume of marine debris collected on shore
is derelict fishing gear.” - “Incentives for fishermen to collect marine debris at sea and dispose of it on land must be developed.”
Pebble appears to have offered up an incentive to at least pick up the litter the U.S. Postal Service will accept as mail. What to do with the rest of it remains a problem.
Old fishing gear almost daily accumulates on beaches from Bristol Bay south around the Alaska Peninsula into the Gulf of Alaska and east and south along the Gulf Coast.
“Commercial fishing debris from all over the North Pacific is the greatest contributor by both weight and volume to Alaska’s plastic marine-debris problem,” Gulf of Alaska Keeper, a non-profit engaged in a beach clean up, says in its latest report.
“Derelict commercial fishing lines, nets, and packing bands are deadly to marine life and are the most difficult and expensive to remove of all the
plastic marine debris. They become entangled in logs and rock and
buried in the beach substrate making extraction extremely challenging.”
Alaska is not alone with this problem.
U.S. efforts
Fishing waste reduction efforts in the U.S. have largely focused on sport fishermen. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, various state governments, and the BoatUS Foundation along with other non-government organizations have been heavily involved in trying to get anglers to recycle used monofilament line instead of just toss it.
The bins have cut down on litter, but anglers still find discarded monofilament along the Russian and almost everywhere else people fish in Alaska.
And it’s not just anglers tossing fishing litter.
Almost anywhere along the Copper River from the McCarthy Road bridge downstream for about 20 miles to Haley Creek – the lower boundary of the river’s popular, personal-use dipnet fishery – broken and discarded aluminum dipnet poles, hoops and nets.
There is more, too, from empty soda and beer cans to worn-out tents to folding camp chairs someone decided were just too much trouble to pack out.
Environmental ethics generally seem to be evolving for the better in Alaska, according to most of those who spend a lot of time outdoors, but it’s a slow process.
Americans have for decades been conditioned to life in a throwaway society. It is always easier to throw out the broken old and buy the new, and it is often cheaper as measured by time, money or both.
If you’re a fisherman, you could spend hours mending a badly torn net, or you could toss it and go buy a new one.
Steven Gorelick at The Ecologist has the near perfect anecdote:
“A friend of mine from India tells a story about driving an old Volkswagen beetle from California to Virginia during his first year in the United States. In a freak ice storm in Texas he skidded off the road, leaving his car with a cracked windshield and badly dented doors and fenders.
“When he reached Virginia he took the car to a body shop for a repair estimate. The proprietor took one look at it and said, ‘It’s totaled.’ My Indian friend was bewildered: ‘How can it be totaled? I just drove it from Texas!’
“My friend’s confusion was understandable. While ‘totaled’ sounds like a mechanical term, it’s actually an economic one: if the cost of repairs is more than the car will be worth afterwards, the only economically ‘rational’ choice is to drive it to the junkyard and buy another one.”
Plenty of Alaska litter is spawned by perfectly rational decisions. If the sockeye salmon are running thick on the Russian River today, as they have been all week, someone who doesn’t know how to properly operate a spinning reel (see proper operation here) will twist up her monofilament, and it will lead to a nasty bird’s nest.
About the only thing to do then is cut the twisted line off the reel. At that point, you can run to find one of those line recycling bins. But if the fish are on the move, as they usually are in the Russian, the rational thing to do is keep fishing and deal with the discarded line later.
Thus it gets tossed on the bank or a gravel bar to be picked on the way back to the car. Only later you’re half a mile downstream with a limit of sockeye to haul back, and it just isn’t worth your time and effort (or so you believe) to divert back to pick up the discarded line and haul it out.
You need an incentive as Pebble has given the commercial fishermen of the Bay.
Now, if only there could be found a political way to incentivize everyone to pick up not only their own litter but that of others.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
Lived in AK 20 years ago and used to fish the Russian regularly. I would purposely wear an empty back pack while fishing and pick up garbage along the way as I fished. I’d always come back with a full backpack. Disheartening to see the trash people would leave. They should have exorbitant fines for littering. Other idea is to reserve the closest overnight lot to those willing to fill up a large garbage bag with trash. Once you come back with the bag – you get the permit (hell – two day permit if you step up to do that).
Commercial fishermen that are anti-Pebble are the utimate hypocrites. Their industry pollutes the ocean with certainty. Mining might polute the ocean. No certainty. Fisherman use boats thar are the products of mining. But they are anti-mining. Commercial fishing should be required to be done from dugout canoes and with hemp nets and gourds for floats. Then maybe their anti-Pebble dribble would have substance.
During my years in Chugiak (1973-1982), on National Trash Day I would roam the gravel roads around my house picking up trash. There was always more than I could carry. Then I would list the liquor brands in a letter too the Eagle River newspaper. Most of the trash was glass bottles, broken glass and aluminum cans.
Americans in general are far too wasteful as a modern culture.
I personally like to find older vehicles that the owner is “finished with” and feels they belong in the junkyard…
Then I rebuild the vehicle with the help of a mechanic and parts from local salvage yards.
There are so many vehicles and parts lying abandoned throughout the country in front yards and commercial lots that I always wonder how so many car “dealers” in America manage to keep so many people locked into 5 year car loans?
“The concept of interchangeability was crucial to the introduction of the assembly line at the beginning of the 20th century, and has become an important element of some modern manufacturing but is missing from other important industries.”
(Wikipedia)
Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose…
This is the way to a less cluttered world.
the world is complicated Steve-O, but people want simple solutions. blocking Pebble is a simple solution to maintaining Bristol Bay water quality.
dealing with all of the human inputs that damage water quality is not easy. a lot of those Bristol Bay fishermen go home to Puget Sound where they and their neighbors are now the leading cause of Sound pollution.
i’d suspect few, if any, are active in trying to do anything about that:
https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/toxics
I commercially fished in the Bay, I know the pollution I left there. I also know that most left way more than I did. If anyone has been to the North Line at Egegik or even seen the pictures…
Nobody stores or treats human waste on board, except maybe the tenders who store it until they can dump it. Diesel spills happen multiple times daily during fuel transfers from every boat that transfers fuel. Bilges dump Coolant, oil, and diesel directly into the water. Trash is thrown overboard all day every day all over the Bay.
I’m by no means a greeny, but when commercial fishermen from the Bay play the greeny card, I call BS.
So what’s worse? Being the guy who throws their garbage on the ground or in the water, or being the guy who walks (boats) by and says something like ‘People are such pigs…” and doesn’t make a recovery of said garbage?
Cheers!
The answer is simple Jack, both.)
i picked up a fair bit at the Copper River last time we were dipnetting. but it was aided by some people who were good enough to bag theirs, and then leave the bag. and another group that deposited most of their garbage around and in a 5-gallon plastic bucket, and then left it all.
and it was a perfectly good bucket. sometimes it is a little hard to fathom just what people are thinking.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they value buckets.
Interesting choice that a group of mostly outside interests are choosing to use some of their waste (manufactured and available only thanks to mining and that kills marine mammals) to protest mining that might maybe possibly could kill some of the marine sealife that they mine from the ocean. Guess they hadn’t thought about it that way…