On the Edge of the World and on the Brink of Losing Nature’s Gifts

A hand-lettered sign outside the old seal-skinning warehouse where they sell beer reads: “Will open after Father is done walking around. Listen on channel VHF #9 for an announcement. Thanks.” Signed, “Tribal Office.”

The occasion was a Russian holiday called St. Peter and Paul Day, celebrated in the United States by Aleuts--people whose ancestors were shipped here long ago as indentured laborers, people whose way of life was later outlawed as barbaric, people with Russian names and American TV and native heritage who now fend for themselves on this distant island halfway between East and West. No wonder they’ve got an ear to the VHF for word that the village priest has finished his blessings so the beer can flow.

The Pribilofs are not the end of the world. But, the joke goes, you can almost see it from here.

As curious as the past has been for such a place, its future promises to be equally so. Here in the Bering Sea, on St. Paul Island--14 miles by 8, human population 650, fur-seal population 750,000, breeding ground of the breaded fish stick and buttered king crab leg, realm of storm and ice--a new millennium in the conservation wars has dawned.

Can America and its Pacific Rim neighbors reconcile the opposing forces of economics and Mother Nature short of another oceanic collapse? Or will overfishing, pollution, haphazard development and get-it-while-you-can shortsightedness plunder the edge of the world too?

One of the most powerful of all conservation organizations, the World Wildlife Fund, has joined the fight to force the issue. And in a big way. It surveyed the globe. Of all the places in the world, the group says, this one must be saved.

Maybe, by outracing crisis, it can be.

“I have a feeling this is the year everything is changing,” says Aquilina Bourdukofsky, a rising young leader among the Aleuts.

America’s Last Ocean of Plenty

Located in the far North Pacific, shared by Russia and the U.S., with a “doughnut hole” of international waters smack in the middle, the cold and storm-tossed Bering Sea is small as seas go. It comprises only 1/75th of the Pacific.

Yet, 6 of every 10 packaged fish sticks come from its waters, and most of America’s fast-food fish sandwich filets. Also the succulent king crab for those Mother’s Day dinners out, the surimi that is the foundation of California rolls at sushi bars. Some halibut too, and sockeye salmon in numbers so great as to clog bays and entrances to rivers.

In total, somewhere between half and 60% of the fish landed in the U.S. are pulled from these waters: $1.1 billion worth, before processing. Market value is many times that. By comparison, the Pacific coast produces only 13% of domestic landings, and the famed New England fishery 8%.

This is America’s last ocean of plenty.

Per capita, there are more scientists, regulators, watchdogs, cops, politicians and dedicated do-gooders out to keep it that way than in any place its size. On paper anyway, they face hardly any identifiable opposition. The fishermen and the communities that depend on fishing, and the Aleuts and Yupiks and other natives whose villages ring the sea, as well as the Russians, all profess a common goal: Breaking the historic cycle of arrogance, disregard and desperation that has brought crisis to America’s other seas and to many of the world’s.

So naturally, with all that going for it, the Bering Sea is in trouble.

Searching for Answers By Studying Fur Seals

Clues are hard to come by in the realm of open ocean. Right now, Michael Ross has a chance to stare one in the eye: the bloodshot fury of a 600-pound bull fur seal.

In the full roar of mating season, the bellow of a territorial bull fur seal explodes with a hydraulic vapor cloud, like smoke from a cannon. The blast dimples one’s eardrums.

Michael Ross is on his hands and knees. He is looking down upon this yellow-maned bull and about 10,000 or so other squirming seals gathered along just one of the Pribilofs’ many seashore rookeries. These are riotous, bloody, violent beaches for two months of summer, when 80% of all the world’s fur seals lumber out of the water on St. Paul and its smaller neighbor, St. George Island, to bicker, fight, mate, fight some more and nurse a new generation of young.

Ross is spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund. He is here trying to build public interest in the Bering Sea. There is only one way to get close to the subject--by crawling out on weather-beaten plank catwalks, built 10 feet high on a scaffolding of 2-by-4s. The narrow, slippery-wet beams sway in the breeze and shiver with the roaring of the bulls, whose height closes the distance between you and their dog-like snouts to only a couple of feet.

Scientists use the catwalks to survey fur seals each season. These animals offer evidence of what may be happening in the aquatic world beyond.

Just to get to the ramp that leads onto the catwalks, one must bluff dozens of younger bulls out of the way. The more persistent of the seals need a jab with the tip of a long wooden pole. The mature bulls on the prime beachfront real estate cannot be bluffed, however. For 45 days or so, they do nothing but hold ground for the right to claim any female who chooses to birth her pups and mate there. Scarred hides and blood splattered over rocks are evidence of their resolve.

Although people are bitten on the periphery of the rookeries from time to time, as far as can be determined no one has slipped off the catwalk or felt the aging planks give way underfoot, so the fate of a potential human intruder down there remains a matter of imaginative speculation. Very imaginative when one is sniffing clouds of seal breath.

Ross gingerly picks his footing down the ramp and off the catwalk and looks around for any aggressive seals. He collects himself.

Normally as quick as anyone in the Capitol with a sound bite, he is momentarily speechless from this encounter with the wild. What words could match the spectacle? He pauses. “Amazing,” he says. As in wonderful.

Amazing and not so wonderful are the memories of the old-timers on the islands and their photographs of these beaches a generation ago. Back then, fur seals were hunted commercially for their pelts, as they had been for 200 years. Yet even when pursued, seals were four times as numerous on this same beach.

In 1983, commercial sealing was ended by international agreement. Fur seals were listed by the federal government as “depleted” with about 900,000 to 1 million left, most of them here. Even with protection, the seal population has not rebounded. The fur seal’s larger cousin, the stellar sea lion, is in far worse shape. Its population has declined 80% in 30 years. It is listed as endangered in the Bering Sea, and its extinction is feared.

Scientists cannot say why with certainty.

Many experts suspect the obvious: Fishermen with their gigantic floating factory-cities and their modern pinpoint fish-finding electronics are out-competing other animals for food.

Today, the debate over the Bering Sea sounds monotonously familiar.

“We think we are harvesting conservatively. We believe we are on to sustainable management,” says Clarence Pautzke, executive director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, one of the most important of several government bodies responsible for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea.

Pautzke was interviewed in midsummer at a round-table meeting in Anchorage. He was surrounded by representatives of the federal agencies entrusted with protecting the Bering Sea. Asked if any would disagree with Pautzke, none said a word.

A week later, however, a federal judge in Seattle ruled that the government had not lived up to its obligations to protect the stellar sea lion in allowing nearly 4 billion pounds of pollock and cod--food shared by seals and people--to be netted from Alaskan waters without adequate environmental assessment.

But wait. What about jobs? Within an hour, fishermen and processors and suppliers, the whole formidable fishing industry, were predicting economic disaster and vowing a fight. Those caught in the middle, like politicians, retreated and called for more millions for research.

Just the same as those teenagers who went back again and again to see the movie “Titanic,” Americans know this script inside and out.

It has played out to an unhappy conclusion in places like Grand Banks and Georges Banks off New England, where both fish and fisherman are now out of business. Region by region, all of the water around the contiguous 48 states produces less fish now than 10 or 20 years ago, despite--or because of--great leaps forward in the technology of fishing. Substitute logging for fishing and the same tale has been told for a generation about the public forests of the West.

What makes the reruns bleak is that they never produce a winner.

The Bering Sea is even more complicated. While the largest section falls within the 200-mile territorial limit of the United States, a significant portion belongs to Russia.

There, economic pressures are great, conservation organizations weak, government corruption said to be vast and enforcement practically nonexistent. U.S. authorities say they have no idea how much pollock, the cod-like fish that is the foundation of prepared fast food, is taken each year in Russian waters. It is assumed to be more than the official quotas, which are already more generous than allowed in the U.S.

“God help us,” says Gennady Smirnov, an independent Russian scientist and conservationist.

One final piece to the geographic puzzle: In the center of the sea, just outside the U.S.-Russian boundaries to the east of the Pribilofs, is a unique no-man’s land of international water. This doughnut hole, as it’s called, constitutes 14% of the Bering Sea and only recently was one of the most competitive fishing grounds in the world, attracting vessels from all of Asia, the U.S. and Russia and as far away as Poland.

By the early 1990s, pollock were picked clean and fishing nations agreed to put the area temporarily off limits until the fishery rebounds. Conservationists say there is little sign of recovery yet, but fishermen continue to send scout boats into the region, hungry to resume.

Balancing Human Needs With Nature

“We cannot save everything. So we must ask ourselves, what do we save? And then we’ve got to save it,” says Margaret Williams, the Bering Sea coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund.

After an interval of soul searching and then a global study, the well-known conservationist organization with the panda logo identified a handful of places in which to make a stand. It would not go to bat for one species. It would not fight for the sake of larger wildlife habitat. It would try to develop a plan, in stages of five years and even 50 years, that strives to balance the needs of a growing human population with nature.

Then it would try to convince all the doubters that they will be worse off without a plan.

In grossly oversimplified terms, the idea is to divide up a region as a farm family might divide up its homestead. There would be pasture for food, a quiet nursery to raise the young, yards to play in, workshops and kitchens for industry, a grove of wild lands that you left alone for the sake of . . . well, for the sake of peace of mind, for the diversity of nature, for the songs of the birds and the glimpse of a fox crossing a dewy trail on its morning rounds.

The Bering Sea is a grand test of the idea.

You could call it a retrenchment, perhaps. Because any priority list means that places get left out. You could call it obvious. Isn’t this exactly why we band together as states and appoint some of us to be leaders? Isn’t that why government has devised such a thick web of environmental law already, with more than 200 separate fishing seasons in Alaska alone, each with its own quota and rules?

You could also call it pie in the sky.

Except that the World Wildlife Fund is not only big, but it also draws support from an international base that includes business executives as well as environmentalists. In this case, it also has an ally in history: Who can argue against any idea that promises more than has been achieved by the status quo?

“We are painfully aware of what has happened in the North Atlantic and the gulf,” says Richard Zacharof, vice president of St. Paul’s Aleut tribal government. “It’s frightening to think that we could lose what we have here. It’s critical that somebody comes up with a plan.”

Scientists Devise Maps of Hot Spots

One of the largest buildings on St. Paul is the barracks that houses government scientists. They are men like Chuck Fowler, program leader of ecosystem and ecology assessment for the National Marine Fisheries Service. Much as we might ask of Fowler and the others, they simply cannot prove that resources are being managed well.

It bears remembering that scientists, almost by definition, are people whose doubts are greater than their certainties. They cannot prove that catching 25% of the Bering Sea’s pollock each year is the proper quota. Neither can they disprove it.

“The history of management worldwide has produced a large fraction of failures,” Fowler says. “So you can say we don’t know what we’re doing. Sure, I think there is a risk here. But if you ask me to assess that risk, we can’t. Science isn’t capable of it.”

So what is the alternative?

The World Wildlife Fund is collecting ideas.

In partnership with the Nature Conservancy, another powerful organization with long-term views, it has brought together scientists to devise maps of hot spots in the Bering Sea. That much scientists can do: identifying those areas critical for birds and seals and juvenile fish, pinpointing sources of pollution and danger zones where shipping or industrial mishaps would have gravest impact.

These maps are now being circulated among a larger circle of researchers and academics for review. They are to be published later this year.

It has attempted to win over and rally Alaska’s many energetic but beleaguered environmental groups. Although spread thin by constant battles, they are being asked to rally to this cause.

It has undertaken that next step in any campaign: trying to spread the word--to its members, to the larger conservation and environmental community, to politicians and the public.

It has reached out to fishermen, particularly the small operators who are rooted in the region and who distrust the behemoth factory trawlers from the Lower 48. Like farmers, fishermen of all stripes usually stand together--mom and pop alongside the corporations. And like the budget writers at the Pentagon, they ask for everything in hopes of getting a decent share.

But what if local fishermen were put on the spot and asked to play their knowing hunches for the long-term sake of the Bering Sea?

“I think we’re treading on thin ice in some areas, and historically we haven’t found out until it’s too late,” says Pete Hendrickson, a part-time fisherman from the Aleutian Island port of Dutch Harbor. “You can study the stellar sea lion right into extinction. I think we need to put the brakes on a little bit.”

Native peoples of the far north likewise are crucial to any successful conservation campaign. Politically powerful enough to block things, they nonetheless feel their understanding of nature is usually overlooked in resource management.

“Everybody knows there is something wrong,” said Aleut leader Aquilina Bourdukofsky during a meeting with the World Wildlife Fund in St. Paul. “People here say there is less of this, less of that. But nobody wants to hear them.”

Fewer Volunteers for the Seal Hunt

The sound of a wooden club crushing a seal’s skull is softer than you might think. The skull is thin. Thunk. A knife is driven into the stunned animal. The skin is stripped off, the meat butchered and put in a plastic bag. The entrails are packaged separately.

Two minutes later, all that remains is a stain of blood on the grass.

Twelve seals today. Robert Melovidov, sealing foreman, has orders from villagers of St. Paul for 42 seals. But he is short of crew. One man slips and is nipped on the boot by an angry seal. Too dangerous. Melovidov calls it quits.

Seal meat, nature’s combination of surf-and-turf, is primarily consumed by elders. But fewer of the able-bodied villagers volunteer for the hunt anymore. Many are too busy trying to earn money catching halibut.

The Aleuts of the Pribilofs are allowed to kill 1,000 or so juvenile male fur seals a year for food. They haven’t filled their quota lately.

Sealing is an uneasy matter in the Pribilofs. Men like Melovidov are proud of the tradition, and he brings five boys on today’s hunt, hoping they will carry on for the next generation. However, the Aleuts are wary of public backlash. They screen observers and forbid photographs.

In truth, sealing for food is not much different from butchering cattle. The animals are rounded up and swiftly dispatched. There are not many pictures allowed in a slaughterhouse either. But seals carry a profound emotional stigma on account of the fur trade. Today, the hides of these St. Paul fur seals are not sold, although the Aleuts could if they wanted to.

Anyone, by contrast, is welcome when villagers head into the rookeries each day, carrying binoculars and long poles with nooses and knives on the end. This is the “entanglement” crew, or, more properly, the disentanglement crew.

Seals are curious animals. The plastic packing bands, nets and tangles of rope that wash off fishing vessels are irresistible playthings. Every day, sometimes several times a day, the Aleuts discover seals that are bloodied, weak and choking to death from a noose of debris around their necks.

Rescuers stalk into the rookeries, lasso the huge beasts, wrestle them until they are quiet. Sometimes a seal has suffered for years, the bands constricting as the animal grows, a deep lacerated necklace chafing open on its throat. A curved knife on the tip of a pole is plunged into the gaping wound and cuts the band. Having witnessed the event, even cynics believe they can see gratitude as the liberated seal hops away, stops and stares back at its rescuers before disappearing into the multitudes.

By saving some and eating others, the Aleuts of St. Paul believe they are holding onto harmony with the seals and nature.

But prosperity beckons. Fourteen years ago, a port was built here. The community now has a fish cannery. Some village boosters are promoting a much larger harbor, more development and commerce to support the fishing trade.

They know, however, that growth needs fuel, and fuel means tankers, and tankers inevitably hit rocks. Even a modest oil spill at the wrong time would wash onto the rookeries with devastating consequences. They know every new boat that touches their island brings with it the threat of predatory rats--and rats each year kill more birds than the Exxon Valdez ever did, a possibility that sickens people here, for these are among the most productive seabird nesting grounds in the Northern Hemisphere.

Like so many things here, even the future they envision for themselves endangers what the Aleuts hold dear.

So they listen eagerly when conservationists from Washington, D.C., arrive with the promise of a whole new plan for the future. They accommodate the swarm of scientists who live among them and profess to share the interests of the Bering Sea. They elect no fewer than three of their own governing bodies to try to conceive of tomorrow.

Then they climb the tall hill at the back of the village on St. Peter and Paul Day and stand together under the dome of their small church. They pray for themselves, their island and this sea. They sing their prayers in three languages, English, Aleut and Russian. They hope God understands one of them.