By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
A diverse panel of six spoke at the Odess Theater Tuesday evening about their involvement in, and hopes for, the new bioregional initiative Salmon Nation.
Speakers hailed from Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon and California, and are engaged in careers from theater to ranching to fishing.
Salmon Nation founding member and Canadian journalist Ian Gill told the Sentinel that Salmon Nation is “an emergent network and of people working on a variety of complex responses to complex problems, of which environmental issues are a part, but we’re not restricted to them. We’re just as interested, if not more so, in economic and cultural health as components of whole and healthy communities.”
At the program Tuesday night, Sitka longliner and panel member Linda Behnken said the objective was “building resilient communities that are working within the scope of natural systems that respect all cultures across all boundaries to achieve a new balance with natural orders, and regenerate the planet.”
Iñupiaq language advocate Cordelia Qiġñaaq Kellie, of Anchorage, added that the goal is “building a network of people, so we know other people with intention… there’s no problem that’s man-made that cannot be solved by man.”
Theater director Patrick Walsh, of Portland, Oregon, said he hopes Salmon Nation can push for “decentralization of power to edge communities … how are we going to empower those communities?”
Social entrepreneur Donna Morton, from Oakland, California, agreed that a centralized solution was unlikely. “I don’t believe that our current government structure and current elected officials are going to solve problems like climate change,” she said.
Panel member Arzeena Hamir, an organic farmer and local politician from Courtenay, British Columbia, argued that Salmon Nation could aid in “creating new systems that bypass the agriculture system that we all know is broken.”
Keeping with the panel’s theme of sustainable food practices, Behnken said “we see fish farming as wrong on every level, wrong for communities, wrong for the planet.”
Other panel members agreed.
Becky Hatfield Hyde, who runs a regenerative ranch in Oregon’s Klamath Basin, noted that in the 16 years she’s worked on her ranch, the river’s channel, that had been very down-cut and degraded, has narrowed by 20 feet due to re-vegetation.
“We are holding millions of more gallons of water in our uplands again” she said.
In addition to ecological conservation and restoration, Morton added that she’s participated in the institution of a carbon tax in British Columbia. “People are afraid of taxes, and we demonstrated that people’s overall taxes didn’t have to go up, it could be revenue neutral,” she said.
Behnken saw a “need to be working across all disciplines.” She argued that “taking care of your own corner of the ocean, your own forest, or your own ranch, or your own farm, is not enough.”
On its website, salmonnation.net, the organization states its goal “to build an accelerator that seeks out regenerative development throughout the bioregion,” the west coast of North America, “an area of land and sea etched by 50,000 miles of coastline and constantly washed by the Pacific Ocean.”
It states its goal is to “spark systemic change by defining, re-naming and celebrating our nature state.”
