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This type of destructive commercial fishing is no longer just a regional issue. It now has national implications and could affect control of Congress.
Brooke Woods and Anna Lavoie
 | Opinion contributors
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As the midterm elections approach in five months, one issue is reshaping how candidates campaign across Alaska: trawling.
For generations, Alaska Native families along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers have structured life around salmon. But for more than half a decade now, these food gathering traditions have been heavily restricted and, in some cases, prohibited, due to low salmon returns.Â
This is a human rights, cultural, ecological and economic crisis. Subsistence, commercial, sport, personal-use and charter fisheries have suffered devastating losses. Families that once relied on salmon are left without a reliable food source.
In spite of all these impacts to Alaskans, the largest, most wasteful fishery in Alaska ‒ trawling ‒ continues with business as usual. And Alaskans are not happy about it, with 74% wanting to ban it entirely. Â
Where do fish sticks, fast-food sandwiches and imitation crab come from?
This is not just an Alaskan problem. Alaska's elections have historically mattered on a national stage, with our Senate and House races often determining which party controls Congress.
In 2026, as candidates conduct their campaigns for Congress, the issue of trawling is no longer a niche regional issue.Â
Trawlers, mostly out of Seattle, drag nets as big as football fields through the cold waters off Alaska's shores, looking for groundfish and whitefish like pollock, which they process into fish sticks, fast-food sandwiches and imitation crab.
In the process, they have caught tens of thousands of king and chum salmon that originated in and could have returned to western Alaska rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim.
They also incidentally catch species like herring, halibut, sablefish and crab. In recent years, trawlers have caught at least 10 killer whales.
Most of that incidental catch, called bycatch, is discarded dead.
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Trawling called ‘sustainable.’ That’s very wrong.
This waste amounts to an astounding 141 million pounds of marine life annually. Trawlers' huge, heavy gear also crushes bottom-dwelling species such as crab and cold water coral and rips up ocean floor habitat.
Although government and industry describe some trawling as “midwater,†studies now estimate this “midwater†gear is actually dragging the ocean floor a substantial amount of the time. Regardless, they're still allowed to trawl in protected areas closed to bottom trawling and other forms of fishing.
Despite this, trawl-caught fish are still erroneously labeled “sustainable†by the Marine Stewardship Council, misleading consumers enormously.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is actively changing the rules to benefit trawlers – letting them sell the salmon they catch as low-value products like fish meal, fish oil or bone meal, which was recently illegal. Meanwhile, NOAA is ignoring handwritten letters of despair from villages of the Yukon River, pleading for help to get their salmon back.
If this kind of data is being suppressed, what else is not coming to light?Â
The Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea cannot take much more of the trawl fleet's business as usual. It's time to listen to peoples who have long been silenced, and who have said, over and over again, that trawlers' enormous bycatch threatens Alaska Native and Alaskan ways of life. It is time for NOAA to include Indigenous knowledge and truly work with Alaska Native peoples and Alaskans on issues that impact them and to be more responsive to climate change and community needs.Â
The waters off Alaska's shores are not a fish stick factory but an ecosystem essential to a way of life. It is our responsibility to defend them for the benefit of future generations.Â
Brooke Woods is a lifelong traditional fisherman and a resident of Rampart, Alaska, on the Yukon River. She is the former chair of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, is a Woodwell Climate Research Center climate adaptation specialist and recently graduated with a degree in fisheries science from the University of Alaska.
Anna Lavoie is a faculty member in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. She was formerly a contracted social scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.Â
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