Today I saw a new video from Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins' campaign to become the Governor of Alaska; he's traveled more miles surely than any candidate before him, and the video documents a multimodal journey through parts of rural Alaska that most don't take the time
There, done. My thesis defense happened early last month. I passed. After that I had a last little round of revisions and then a micro-edit micro-battle to get all the formatting just right so this document can live forever in perfect (arial-12) repose and I got an
...I wanted to know the secrets of the claims, to see if they held water, and why they didn't...
The Penticton Herald ran a story on January 21, 2026 describing the conflict about herring in British Columbia in familiar terms: The core issue driving the conflict is a growing divide over the science itself. Federal stock assessments classify BC herring as “healthy,” while Indigenous and conservation groups point to
Today, November 17th, is the deadline for comments to Fisheries and Oceans Canada regarding their DRAFT Pacific Region Integrated Management Plan 2025-2026 for Pacific Herring. I've submitted the comment below and would like to share it with you in case you'd like to comment yourself.
Progress on the thesis was steady and good this summer, and now I'm stranded in the uncanny valley that lies between the first complete draft and the final draft. It clocks in at 120 pages and some of the sections are a bit raw yet, but the thing exists and is right there, and I almost like it.
This certification will allow expanded access to markets and subsidies for an expanded array of herring products, and promises more pressure on herring in Alaska. It will apply to a full possible range of future herring fisheries in a variety of Alaska locales that have scarcely been studied at all.
Back in 2022, before herring scraps went online in this format, I wrote in Herring Scrap 11 about the "rule of three" which can trigger the confidentiality of commercial fish harvests if there are three or fewer fishers or processors participating in a fishery. With a new merger
You haven't heard from me for a while. I want to tell you about a series of meetings that offered dispiriting conclusions to the threads that I've described regarding Herring Revitalization Committee (which I talked about in scrap 23 and scrap 28 and, sort of, scrap
As the Southeast Alaska Board of Fisheries meeting begins, I'd like to tell you about what the Board of Fisheries did back in December at their meeting for Prince William Sound. They transformed the regulatory structure of herring fishing there through three major policy moves, and I think
Two days after the deadline for comments for the upcoming Board of Fisheries meeting in Ketchikan, Alaska Department of Fish and Game quietly revealed last week that they now believe that last year's forecast biomass of Sitka herring was an overestimate by double. ADF&G buried that
As I wrote in the previous scrap about my Alaska Public Records Act request, 1984 was the only year for which I received most of the information needed to make sense of the nature of the spawn deposition surveys in the years with suspect data. Notably, '84 was the
Back in Scrap 30, I sent a letter to ADF&G about why I think the recent Unfished Biomass study is falsely premised and needs revision - I'd noticed a signal in the data that suggested that the data might not have been based on observational studies for
Hello scrappers! I haven't posted anything in awhile, but I've written a whole lot since you last heard from me, so much that the scrap machine got a bit clogged. I've got several mostly done scraps in the hopper, but there's been
The other day I was poking around in a bookstore and I spotted John Williams' novel Butcher's Crossing (1960), a grisly novel depicting an 1870's buffalo hunt. A young academic from the east coast travels west, inspired by Emerson, looking for a connection to nature,
A letter to ADF&G staff describing the low quality and inconsistent historical data serving as the foundation for the Simulation Study to Determine Unfished Biomass of herring in Sitka
This scrap is dedicated to the volunteer members and meeting-goers of Sitka's Local Advisory Committee to the Board of Fisheries. They've been meeting every week for a few weeks now (mostly about salmon so far) and will be meeting every week for a few weeks
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Back in March, I posted a scrap explaining the emergence of a State of Alaska policy vehicle called the Herring Revitalization Committee (HRC). It seemed that the point of the committee, before it even began, was designed to promote the "restructuring of the Alaska herring resource." I was
In Scrap 26, I explained that Unfinished Biomass doesn't actually factor directly into the math driving this fishery, but is conceptually linked to the threshold level (below which fishing won't happen). What I didn't make clear is the jurisdictional reason for this flimsiness: while
A new ADF&G report imagines that these are unparalleled times for herring abundance in Sitka. Can they really claim that?
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... about herring spawning season as I witnessed it this year in Sitka...
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Tales from the Channel Light...
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The Herring Revitalization Committee and "The Restructuring of the Alaska Herring Resource"
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OR Swim Bladders of The Sky