Alaska Dispatch
Lillian Person, April 4, 2014
As lifelong Alaskans, we have always been proud to be able to live here, work here and provide a lifestyle for our children that they could someday provide for their children, too. We work hard and have tried to teach our kids the same work ethic while enjoying the beauty, bounty and renewable resources of our state.
My family represents three generations of setnetters in Cook Inlet. Our story is like so many other Alaskans — harvesting our renewable, natural resources while trying to meet our financial responsibilities. The recently proposed setnetter ban initiative would put us — and 500 other Alaskan families just like ours — immediately out of work. The group behind the proposal, the Alaska Fisheries Conservation Alliance, is seeking to ban all setnetters in urban areas, which means my family and hundreds of others stand to lose our lifestyle and core identity, not to mention means of financial support.
The alliance and its cohorts, the Kenai River Sportfishing Association, are pushing a hypocritical conservation agenda. This attack on our industry is put forward by proponents as a conservation issue, but ultimately it is an attempt to monopolize a productively shared resource. The only thing they are “conserving” is their ability to represent their own interests and line their own pockets at the expense of others.
Due to copyright law, the Alaska Salmon Alliance cannot repost full articles. You can read the whole article here.
Because the Alaska Salmon Alliance wish to provide a wide breadth of information, we sometimes provide links and documents that may conflict or present only one perspective on an issue. Because of that, we feel it is important to note that none of the content provided on our website necessarily represents the views or opinions of the Alaska Salmon Alliance, excepting, of course, those articles authored by us.