Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [37]
And yet the abundance of resources had been changing. Those days, the main commercial fisheries in the region were for salmon, halibut, cod, and herring. But what was harvested for profit and for the pantry had changed drastically over the years. By the late 1920s, when a handful of homesteads had been staked out around Homer, twenty herring salteries hummed busily on the south shore of Kachemak Bay. Soon after, the foot-long silver fish that were caught by net when they came to shore by the millions to spawn disappeared. They had been over-fished, and their spawning grounds had been ruined by offal from fish packing plants. Although no commercial herring fishery has existed in the bay since then, fishermen still net them up Cook Inlet. A stable shrimp industry once existed in the bay. Using nets and trawls, fishermen harvested shrimp commercially until the fishery went bust in the mid–1980s. These days, the most readily available shrimp were from farms in Southeast Asia and came in one- or two-pound frozen packages at the warehouse grocery store. People around town talked about the time, as recent as the mid-1980s, when you could wade off the tip of the Spit during low tide and pull a king crab with two-foot-long legs out of the bay. Now, there were no king crabs to be found. Tanner and Dungeness crabs, smaller but tasty species, had also been harvested commercially in the bay, but these fisheries had been shut down too. A few years before John and I moved to town, people would drop crab pots off the ferry dock on the tip of the Spit to catch a few Dungies for dinner. Because of scarcity, this too was now forbidden.
Researchers attributed the fluctuation in fisheries to something called “regime change,” which referred to long-term cycles in weather, ocean currents, and temperatures. The regime, they said, had shifted from shellfish—crab and shrimp—to finfish, namely salmon and halibut. A local scientist, however, had found that a few of the region’s rivers had gotten warmer in recent years, making conditions less favorable for salmon. People were beginning to suspect the rivers were getting warmer for good, and it was clear that fishing regulations could only do so much. They might be able to save a single season of fish or protect a faltering market, but they couldn’t bring back the past, couldn’t stem the hunger, couldn’t stop the oceans from changing in ways no one could fully understand. But standing in the river, we didn’t think about any of this. It seemed that this run of red salmon would last forever.
This sense—that almost nothing could be used up—gripped the state. There were no contingency plans for when the oil and gas tap dried up, and regulations on development were lax and enforcement was even laxer. There were always so many more wetlands, so many more miles of shoreline, and so many trees, that individual transgressions often went overlooked.
And Alaska’s plenitude fed the hunger; its resources were hankered for all over the world. Japan took the state’s natural gas. China bought Alaska’s raw logs. Taiwan sought the state’s coal and Mexico bought fertilizer made out of Alaska’s natural gas. Canada dug its silver, zinc, and lead, and Alaska’s seafood was snatched up all over the world: choice king crab in Japan, pink salmon in Korea, and halibut and cod in Germany.
We all were romanced by this sense of bounty. Even people who considered themselves conservationists didn’t think twice about scraping a level pad in