Are We Asking Too Much of the Yukon River? Food Security, Human Values, and Policy in a Changing North

2009 was a particularly devastating year for rural communities of the Yukon River in Alaska. For a number of reasons, including annual variability in Chinook and Chum salmon runs, imperfect monitoring and information, 'best practices' management decisions by regulatory agencies, and international treaty obligations related to conservation and total allowable catch allocation, the smokehouses and freezers of many Alaska Native families, particularly those in up-river communities in the Yukon Flats region, are empty; a problem that has prompted Alaska's Governor Sean Parnell to ask the US Federal Government to declare a disaster. However, depending on whom you ask, this year's management of these resources, which provide food security and enable self-reliance in rural communities, may be evaluated as a failure or as a success. How can we reconcile an institutional assessment that claims success as defined in terms of internationally-agreed upon conservation and escapement goals, with the negative economic and health impacts on communities?

We use this case to illustrate how the whole Yukon River watershed and drainage, including Alaska and Canada, provides an elegant, geographic context for organizing the discussion and analysis of the human dimensions of environmental change and regional sustainability. Policymakers have arguably gone to great lengths to reconcile competing 'uses' of the Yukon River, including commercial and subsistence uses as well as conservation goals, but while managers continue to strive to be 'adaptive learners' in their approach to balancing these goals, the annual and cumulative impacts on rural communities is immediate, synergistic, temporally and spatially scaled, and directly related to rural livelihoods, community health, well-being and sustainability. The cost of this 'adaptive' process may be too high, both for the ecosystem and for the people who live there. Are we asking too much of the Yukon River? Are we asking too much of the regulatory agencies and managers? And are we asking too much of local communities who depend on the fishery for subsistence and security? The answers to these questions, though regionally-scaled, have great importance for how we define and address sustainability and conservation goals at pan-Arctic and global scales.