ReThink History: Fishing for a Solution
Alaska pollock is America's largest fishery: nearly three billion pounds a year, in every fish stick and fast-food fish sandwich in the country. On the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, king and chum salmon runs have collapsed. Families who have fished there for thousands of years are barred from catching enough to fill their smokehouses. The trawlers that catch pollock also catch salmon. In 2026 that fact helped turn Alaska's U.S. Senate race into a fight over fish. Fishing for a Solution is a twelve-part ReThink History series on the ecology, sociology and politics of pollock and salmon in Alaska. It runs from Yup'ik fish camps and the foreign factory fleets of the 1960s, through the two-hundred-mile line, the American Fisheries Act and the Community Development Quota program, to the marine heatwaves that emptied the Bering Sea's cold pool. It takes in the genetics lab in Dutch Harbor, the council rooms where the caps are set, and the campaign trail. Every episode tests one principle: policy should serve the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time. The questions are greatest good for whom, and for how long. The trawl fleet and the river villages both get their strongest case, made in good faith. Coverage of the Senate race is strictly nonpartisan and is current as of October 2026. A companion to The Long Run, our series on grazing and Gifford Pinchot's promise. New here? Start with Episode 1, The Fight Over Fish, at the top of this playlist. Researched and compiled by Nick Mackenzie. Narrated by AI from a sourced research dossier.
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Episodes
Ep 1: The Fight Over Fish
Why were the salmon racks empty on the Kuskokwim in 2026 while the pollock fleet fished on? In the summer of 2026 the silver salmon season on the Kuskokwim was closed and fish camps stood empty.
Ep 2: Fish Camp
What happens to a people when the law takes away the right to fish, and then the fish disappear too? On the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, summer has meant fish camp for longer than anyone's grandparents can remember: the nets, the cutting tables, the cottonwood drying racks and the smokehouse.
Ep 3: Foreign Fleets and the Two-Hundred-Mile Line
What happens when a country draws a line two hundred miles out to sea and says everything inside it is ours? On 1 March 1977 the United States did exactly that.
Ep 4: The Donut Hole
Can a fishery of twenty billion pollock simply vanish? In the middle of the Bering Sea, one did, and it never came back. Beyond every nation's two-hundred-mile zone lies a patch of open ocean about fifty-five thousand square nautical miles across that belongs to no one.
Ep 5: Building the Biggest Fishery
The fish in your fish stick and your fast-food fish sandwich comes from a fishery that, thirty years ago, nearly tore itself apart. Alaska pollock is the largest fishery in the United States by volume: in 2026 the Bering Sea catch limit alone is 1.375 million metric tons, a little over three billion pounds.
Ep 6: The CDQ Bargain
What happens when the villages hit hardest by salmon bycatch also own a share of the fleet that catches it? In June 1991 the North Pacific Fishery Management Council did something no American fishery council had done: it set aside a share of the Bering Sea pollock catch not for a fleet but for villages.
Ep 7: The Bering Sea Food Web
Pollock eat krill, sea lions eat pollock, and the biggest predator of pollock is other pollock.
Ep 8: Counting the Bycatch
Every salmon that comes up in a Bering Sea pollock net is counted.
Ep 9: The Heat
Some ten billion snow crabs disappeared from the Bering Sea in three years.
Ep 10: Seafloor, Halibut and the Other Interceptors
In some recent years, a June salmon fishery on the Alaska Peninsula caught more Western Alaska chum than the entire pollock fleet did. Most of the argument over salmon bycatch in Alaska is about one fleet: the pollock trawlers of the Bering Sea.
Ep 11: Who Decides
Both Senate candidates say the system that manages Alaska's pollock fishery falls short.
Ep 12: The Greatest Good, for the Longest Time
How do you weigh a modern industrial fishery against a salmon culture eleven and a half thousand years old? For eleven episodes this series has carried one sentence as a measuring stick: the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.
Explore further
Part of the listening path Water & Salmon (stop 4 of 4).
Rivers Reborn
Salmon Counting
California and Water
Salad Bowl of the World