“Who Will Speak for the Fish?”

Some years ago, a great salmon scientist lay dying. He had given his entire long life to understanding the fish and the ocean that sustains them. He had watched every conventional remedy tried — and every one fail. In his final days, as I listened at his bedside, he asked the question that should haunt every candidate running for Governor of Alaska:

“Who will speak for the fish?”

Not study them. Not count them. Not close another fishery or fund another five-year academic research initiative. But speak for them — with the courage to say what the fish cannot say for themselves: We are dying out here. Not in the rivers. In the ocean.

Right now, 18+ candidates are running for governor. Alaska’s fishing industry is the state’s largest private-sector employer. And it is collapsing.

The Kenai River — America’s most storied salmon fishery — is closed to king salmon for another year. Across Alaska, eighteen Chinook stocks are listed as Stocks of Concern. On the Yukon and Kuskokwim, runs have collapsed so completely that Indigenous communities have been shut out of their ancestral food harvest. Since 2015, mass seabird die-offs have killed up to 1.2 million birds in repeated single events. Ten billion snow and king crabs vanished from the Bering Sea.

The cause, in case after case is perfectly established: starvation.

The ocean pastures that feed everything — salmon, seabirds, crabs, whales — have lost their productivity. The phytoplankton, the grass of the sea, has been declining for over fifty years. We close fisheries. We restrict gear. We reduce bag limits. We spend $30 million on research. None of it addresses the root cause.

As my open letter puts it: It is as if the grass on every ranch turned brown and died and the pasture became a desert, and our response was to say we don’t know why we have fewer cattle.

The ocean is not broken. It is hungry.

Hungry for the natural iron-rich mineral dust that once blew naturally from the Asian continent, feeding the phytoplankton that powers the entire marine food web. Note that China’s once-famous dust storms, which used to blanket Beijing for 60+ days per year, now blow for only 6-8 days per year. Rising CO₂ levels have made grass grow thicker on land, covering the bare soil that once released its dust into the wind. More grass growing means less dust blowing in the wind. Less life in the sea. No amount of fishery management can change that equation.

But we can change it. And we already have.

In 2012, the core OPR Alaska team restored a mid-sized ocean pasture in the Gulf of Alaska — replenishing life-saving dust to 15,000 square miles out of 600,000 square miles. miles of the Gulf of Alaska. The following year, Alaska recorded the largest pink salmon catch in its entire history: 226 million fish, when 50 million were forecast. Processing plants couldn’t handle the volume, and the catch stopped, but the fish kept swimming into rivers and streams, with perhaps 500 million returning!  The following year, after special legislation was passed in Washington, the USDA stepped in to buy surplus salmon to make room for the next year’s catch, and 200 million meals of Alaska salmon reached the neediest of Americans, all children in food aid programs.

The economic stimulus to Alaska as reported by the state: over $600 million. The cost of restoration: about $5 million.

Nature herself confirms the pattern. When the Kasatochi volcano erupted in 2008 and dusted the Gulf with mineral ash, salmon surged. As fisheries scientist Timothy Parsons observed: “the two biggest salmon runs in history are both associated with volcanic mineral dust events”, then our native peoples volcano of OPR of 2012 beat Nature’s volcanos. Here is a link to read more about volcanos and the ocean, and fish. https://russgeorge.net/2026/02/16/volcanic-salmon-no-its-not-a-spicy-sushi-roll/

Here’s what most people still don’t understand:

Ocean Pasture Restoration doesn’t just bring back fish. It captures and sequesters massive amounts of CO₂ — repurposing deadly atmospheric and oceanic carbon into thriving marine life. The blue carbon potential is enormous: tens of millions of tonnes sequestered into the deep ocean for centuries with each restored pasture. This is a nature-based climate solution that could move Alaska’s oil production toward a net-zero carbon footprint for a fraction of the cost of any other methods— not by attacking the industry, but by pairing it with the ocean’s own carbon engine. By repurposing fossil fuel carbon into healthy restored ocean life, into salmon, the most delicious Climate Change solution for this Blue Planet!

Fish. Jobs. Climate. Clean Energy. Not a trade-off. A synergy.

OPR Alaska is not asking for public money. It is working to deploy a three-year, privately financed, for-profit Gulf of Alaska Pilot Project based in Kodiak — with rigorous scientific monitoring, full transparency, and deep collaboration with commercial fishermen, Alaska Native communities, and state and federal scientists. The fishermen of Kodiak are among its most passionate advocates. They see the collapse with their own eyes, and they are asking for the chance to bring back the fish.

In the Yup’ik villages of western Alaska, grandmothers who have dried salmon every summer for seventy years have none to dry. In Tanana, a village that once kept 500 sled dogs fed on chum salmon, there are 19 dogs left — not because people stopped loving them, but because the river stopped providing. Children are growing up without fish camp, without the ancient knowledge that passes only one way: from the hands of the old to the hands of the young, beside the river, in the presence of the fish. When the fish are gone, that transmission stops. And what is lost in a single generation can never be recovered.

The salmon cannot lobby. The puffins cannot vote. The ocean cannot write a campaign check. But they are Alaska — its soul, its identity, its oldest covenant with the wild.

To every candidate: the fish are asking you a question. Not with words, but with their absence.

Who will speak for the fish?

Read the full open letter — it may be the most important thing written about Alaska’s future this year: An Open Letter to Everyone Running for Governor of Alaska

OPR Alaska is a division of OPR World Inc., dedicated to restoring Alaska’s ocean pastures to historic health and abundance. Learn more at opralaska.com 

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