Net Losses

Alaskans see their fisheries as among the world’s finest — sources of wild, sustainable food that reward rural residents for hard work. But beneath that branding lies an open secret: the regressive effects of the management schemes long touted as responsible for the success of Alaska’s salmon and halibut fisheries. Since the state privatized its salmon fisheries in the 1970s, and its halibut fisheries in the 1990s, Alaska's rural, Indigenous villages have seen precipitous drops in their permit holdings, transforming communities into bystanders in fisheries that had sustained them for generations.

This project, a series of written stories with a companion podcast, explores and interrogates the privatization of Alaska's fisheries, and examines what it will take to restore access to the state's first communities and people.