As Alaska’s chinooks, cohos, sockeyes and chums swim back into our streams to spawn and die, I am saddened by an important reality which is seldom acknowledged: Alaska’s salmon fishery is incredibly wasteful and poorly managed. A cesspool of special interests, racism and greed has produced a fishing industry that is so inefficient that it struggles to compete with the inferior farmed salmon from other parts of the world.

    Our wild salmon have amazing economic advantages over the farmed salmon that have become so prevalent on the market. We don’t have to buy food for them, because they feed themselves in the wild. We don’t have to buy and administer antibiotics, because they are not cooped together in pens for their entire lives. They have low levels of toxins compared with the farmed fish. Wild salmon also look and taste far better than the farmed fish.

     One of the main reasons that our fishing industry struggles to compete against farmed salmon is because much of the technology we use to harvest our salmon commercially is extremely inefficient and wasteful. Every year, our fishing fleet takes a huge bycatch of non-target species, and much of that bycatch is dumped back in the ocean to rot.

     We use extremely expensive boats, which burn large amounts of fuel, but which only work a short period of time each year. The expense of buying, maintaining, fueling and equipping those boats makes our fish very expensive to catch.

     Some of those boats intercept fish that are bound for unknown spawning grounds. As a result, it is much harder to manage escapement levels, and ensure healthy populations in future years. Salmon fishing using boats is also an incredibly dangerous occupation, with a very high rate of injury and death among those working on the boats.

     There is a far superior technology available, but we do not use it commercially. It is the fish wheel, and it avoids all of the problems identified above.

     A fish wheel, when properly constructed, is much safer than a fishing boat. It only catches fish that are going up a particular river, so it does not intercept other salmon. It makes it easy to divert any non-target species back into the river without killing or harming them. It uses the flow of the river to run, and therefore does not use expensive fossil fuels. It is much cheaper to build than a fishing boat. It also allows very precise control of escapement levels for each river.

     Why don’t we use fish wheels for commercial fishing in Alaska? A combination of racism and greed in the early days of Alaska’s commercial fishery led to laws that banned them. It would not do to have Alaska Natives being able to efficiently compete against the non-Natives for this valuable resource, so they outlawed the technology. Without the capital to buy boats and gear, most Alaska Natives were locked out of the commercial fishery.

     Since then, a bunch of specialized salmon fisheries have developed, and they lobby the legislature and the fish board to protect their interests. But the same expensive and wasteful technology which excluded the Alaska Natives in the early days of the commercial fishery now faces competition from farmed salmon, which are more expensive to raise, but far cheaper to harvest.

     Sure, we need to do a better job of extolling the virtues of wild salmon. But if we really want to be competitive, we need to stop using an inferior technology, and put our fish back on wheels.

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