By Tom Conner
Oil, mining, and fisheries have long been the bedrock of our state’s economy, bringing not only thousands of in-state jobs and billions in tax revenue, but also billions of Outside investment in critical Alaska infrastructure throughout the state. This Outside money has fueled growth and spawned a rich diversity of support sector businesses and jobs that benefit many.
Concurrent with this growth has come another source of Outside funding: the proliferation of nonprofit organizations that are funded by wealthy Washington, D.C.-based foundations with poorly informed ideas of resource development and Alaska. These funders do not have any stake in the outcomes or impacts of the programs they fund; rather, they only seek assurances from their grantees that their money will result in measurable deliverables and neatly written grant reports. The impact of a job lost, or a community starved of its economy does not typically show up in these reports.
For the Alaska-based organizations that receive this money, the goal is to perpetuate their own existence. While a group may form to combat a specific project, once that project is stopped or approved, the group simply goes searching for another issue that will fund their staff’s salaries.
SalmonState is a great example of this. The group is funded through the New Venture Fund, a D.C.-based foundation with more than a billion dollars in the bank, which it directs at anti-resource projects around the country. The New Venture Fund leadership also run the Hopewell Fund, which aims to influence policy outcomes through media ownership and is a funder of the Alaska Beacon.
SalmonState ostensibly began to consolidate funding and staff in the fight against two mining projects: Pebble Mine and the transboundary mines in Southeast Alaska. However, with the halting of those projects under the Biden Administration, SalmonState has instead gone searching for new issues to coopt. It has found its stride in using targeting misinformation and mischaracterization of several resource projects and industries, going against fishermen in largely Alaska Native communities like Sand Point, Unalaska and Akutan, and AIDEA-supported projects like the Ambler road.
But, like many groups before it, SalmonState does not care about the impacts of the messages or misinformation it pushes; it only cares about funding their largely non-Alaskan-rasied staff and meeting grant deliverables set by a D.C. foundation that does not feel the pain caused by their anti-resource agenda. They do not have a stake in the outcome; they are only driven by the need to feed the industrial nonprofit complex that has become rooted in Alaska.
The irony of these efforts to shut down responsible and sustainable resource development in Alaska is that they simply shift increased development and harvest into countries like Russian and China — countries that do not adhere to environmental, labor, or ethical standards — which in turn put their products on U.S. markets further hurting Alaskan businesses and communities. Alaska is the global standard in safe and sustainable resource development. We all lose when that development is pushed abroad.
Our state is suffering from a well-documented trend of outmigration and we need to work together to build opportunities and protect sustainable businesses and resource development. We shouldn’t let dark money from wealthy D.C.-based funders and groups like SalmonState exercise undue influence on our state.
• Tom Conner was born and raised in Alaska, and is a second-generation crab fishermen and resource advocate. He lives in Haines.
