Biography:
Acacia Johnson is an artist and photographer from Alaska. Drawn to remote places and otherworldly landscapes, her work has focused on the environment, conservation, and the connections between people and place. After receiving a Fulbright grant to...
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Skills:Translator, Digital Printing, Photo Assisting, Film Scanning, Adobe InDesign, Book Layout/Design, Photo Editing, Black & White Printing, Web Design, Video Editing
Tremendous numbers of sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) school under a bridge at Brooks Camp, Alaska, where brown bears (Ursus arctos) gather to catch them. Due to a record-breaking period of hot weather, these salmon had been waiting for cooler temperatures to resume their journey upstream, resulting in larger than usual densities once temperatures cooled.
This image was taken from a public viewing platform at Brooks Camp in Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve. Here, summer visitors can easily view wild brown bears fishing for salmon at Brooks Falls, using the area's established system of boardwalks, trails and viewing platforms. Made increasingly famous by a live webcam on Explore.org, Brooks now sees around 400 visitors a day who come to view the bears during the high season. The bears come for the fish.
A work camp in the area of the proposed Pebble Mine, near Lake Iliamna on the Alaska Peninsula - the headwaters of the world's largest sockeye salmon run. If built, this open-pit mine would be the largest in North America, a pit the size of a city and a mile deep. The mine proposes to use earthen dams to hold hundreds of millions of tons of toxic mine tailings - in a region renowned for seismic and volcanic activity - in perpetuity.
Rick Delkittie Sr. at his fish camp on Six Mile Lake near Nondalton, the closest village to Pebble Mine's proposed mine site. A member of the Dena'ina tribe, who have relied on the region's abundant salmon for thousands of years, Rick is a passionate opponent of the mine. He has been to Washington DC four times to present to legislators on behalf of his people. He says that the mine, the controversy over which has already divided the people of the region, would risk everything his people value.
"How can one man, with the stroke of a pen, determine that an area the size of Kentucky is a mining district, when we the people have used it for hunting, trapping and fishing for 10,000 years?" he wrote in the Anchorage Daily News.
https://www.adn.com/opinions/2019/05/04/the-elders-are-right-risks-from-pebble-mine-are-too-great/
Contact: Rick Delkittie Sr.
Email: rickdelkittiesr@gmail.com
Phone: 907-717-8108
Diamond Point, (point of land on the left), the proposed site of Pebble Mine's indusrial port complex. This port would be the end of a 86-mile transport corridor using an existing road over the mountains from Lake Iliamna to Williamsport. Although the owners of large sections of this corridor, and the port site itself, have denied the mine access to their land, it has nevertheless included it in its final proposal.
Subsistence fishermen pull in sockeye salmon from set nets near Ekuk, a small community near Dillingham, Alsaka. At the peak of the salmon run, even shore nets like these can harvest thousands of pounds of salmon at a time.
Robin Samuelsen on the beach in Dillingham, Alaska. Samuelsen is a tribal chief, board member of Bristol Bay Native Corporation, and commercial fisherman whose family has fished for salmon in Bristol Bay for five generations. His father, Harvey Samuelsen, organized a strike for native rights in the 1950s. He and his grandsons, who have now taken over his fishing boat, have traveled to Washington DC numerous times to testify at congressional hearings about the risks that the proposed Pebble Mine poses to the environment, the $1.5 billion Bristol Bay fishing economy, and their ways of life.
Samuelsen is a Curyung Tribal Chief, Executive Board Member of Nunamta Aulukestai, Bristol Bay Native Corporation Board Member, & Chairman of the Board of Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation.
Contact: (907) 843-1642, sockeye1@nushtel.net
Sharlee Sifsof untangles a salmon from her family's set net in Ekuk, a community of seasonal fish camps near Dillingham, Alaska. During the high season in Bristol Bay, subsistence nets such as these can yield thousands of pounds of salmon at a time. So far in 2020, the Bristol Bay commercial salmon fishery has harvested over 52 million fish – sustaining both a booming fishing economy and local communities who rely on salmon for subsistence.
Sifsof, from Dillingham, said that she was spending the week fishing with her aunt Sandy.
Contact: (aunt) Sandy Kemp: 907-843-0742
Commercial fishermen fish for sockeye salmon near Dillingham, Alaska. This small community forms a major hub for the Bristol Bay commercial salmon fishing industry, a $1.5 billion industry which supplies more than half the world's wild salmon and supports 14,000 sustainable jobs. At the time this image was taken, the season's fish count had amounted to over 52 million salmon.
Keith Jensen, president of the Village Council of Pedro Bay, Alaska, outside his home. This small settlement on the coast of Lake Iliamna has stood together against the proposed Pebble Mine, using the Village Council's land holdings to block a northern transportation route the mine had proposed. Today, with a southern route proposed instead, the community remains concerned about the mine's impacts to the natural ecosystem and their way of life.
Contact: Keith Jensen
Email: darthlike@yahoo.com
Phone: 1-907-850-4041
A brown bear paw print (Ursus arctos) on the trail to McNeil Falls in Alaska's McNeil River State Game Sanctuary - home to the largest seasonal congregations of brown bears on earth. As many as 80 bears have been viewed simultaneously from a singular vantage point at McNeil Falls.
Over the past fifty years, bear biologists at McNeil have learned to read brown bear behavior and developed techniques to view them safely from the ground. This has formed the principles for the bear viewing industry that now thrives on the Alaska Peninsula, and challenged widespread beliefs that brown bears were always dangerous to humans. Today, summer permits to visit McNeil River are distributed via a lottery system, allowing only ten people per day. The bears at McNeil are now uniquely habituated to existing in harmony with the small groups of bear viewers who share their habitat every summer.
Brown bear conservation advocates are concerned that the proposed Pebble Mine could not only damage the world-class salmon habitat that feeds McNeil's bears, but also irrevocably alter these bears' peaceful relationships with humans. The plan for a road to Pebble's proposed industrial port at Amakdedori Creek would border the McNeil State Game Refuge, making it likely that many of McNeil's bears would interact with the mining infrastructure and personnel, and possibly learn to associate humans with food.
A glacial river runs through wetlands into Iniskin Bay on the shores of Alaska's Cook Inlet, a few miles north of where Pebble Mine's proposed port site at Diamond Point would be located.
Percy Urban shows off a salmon at his fish camp near Ekuk, Alaska. Urban, a nurse from Miami, Florida, bought his family's setnet operation near Dillingham last year. He explained his hopes that spending summers fishing, rather than in Miami, will allow his children to grow up with a deeper relationship to the natural world.
Contact: 305-588-1799
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Private Story
Salmon vs. Gold - new
Copyright
Acacia Johnson
2024
Updated Dec 2020
Topics
Documentary, Editorial, Environment, Human Rights, Photography, Photojournalism