Have you ever stepped into an old-growth forest alive with ancient trees or traveled a shoreline with migrating salmon, and thought: what treasures! Many who call Southeast Alaska home cherish such experiences. Yet just as often we find it difficult to grasp the magnitude of environmental riches surrounding us. The value of these lands and waters seems immeasurable.
We might be tempted to let the worth of wild places remain unspoken, allowing forests and marine waterways to communicate in their own perfectly wordless way. Yet history has proven time after time that if human beings don’t speak up and speak out in our language when the natural world is threatened, ecosystems pay a price. And so do people. According to the United Nations, 1.3 billion people worldwide were impacted by ecosystem degradation between 2015 and 2019 alone.
What if someone handed you a report that did much of the heavy linguistic lifting? One that uses the latest scientific research and vernacular of economics to demonstrate why Southeast Alaskans must prioritize our flourishing ecosystems for the sake of the social, physical, spiritual, and fiscal well-being of local communities and the wider world beyond.
Since 2018, the SeaBank Annual Report, published by the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, has been doing just that. This report was cited last year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in its Fifth National Climate Assessment and in 2024 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in an environmental impact statement on salmon fisheries.
As Southeast Alaskans await a new legislative session and presidential administration, the threat of old-growth logging in the Tongass National Forest, seafloor trawling and transboundary mines looms large. The SeaBank Annual Report can—and should—inform resource decisions. Consider these facts from the latest edition:
Commercial fisheries and tourism in Southeast Alaska together provide more than 16,500 jobs and roughly $1 billion to local economies each year. The Tongass National Forest stores 2.7 billion metric tons of carbon, making it one of the world’s largest rainforest carbon sinks. Southeast Alaska contains North America’s largest system of icefields and glaciers, forming a critical portion of the Earth’s dwindling frozen realm, the cryosphere. The region is home to 284,727 acres of coastal wetlands and 2,304 acres of protected coral reef areas, with a combined annual value of over $24 billion as habitat for commercially-important fish stocks, marine and terrestrial mammals, avian species, and carbon-sequestering seagrasses.
But there’s something besides convincing numbers built into the SeaBank Annual Report: a unique set of principles called ecological economics—a transdisciplinary field analyzing the relationship between natural environments and human economies. If you believe the goal of a healthy economy is human well-being, then even if some of what you read in the SeaBank Annual Report is new, some will also feel familiar.
In the SeaBank Annual Report, you’ll come across terms like natural capital (resources and environmental features that possess inherent economic value) and ecosystem services (direct and indirect benefits that human communities derive from healthy ecosystems). These are established concepts—you can read the works of pioneers Robert Costanza and Rudolf DeGroot referenced in the SeaBank Annual Report bibliography—but they often operate outside the public consciousness.
How then does the language of ecological economics translate into words we use every day? Here is an incomplete list. Most plainly, the ecosystems of Southeast Alaska provide jobs in fisheries, tourism and all the related employment they buoy up, writing the paychecks that buy groceries and family homes. Our ecosystems supply clean drinking water and transportation corridors. They offer space for exercise, recreation, and the solitude and adventure that feed our spirits. They provide a staggering abundance of nourishing foods, including fish and wild game. They are the heartbeat of Indigenous cultures and the planetary pulse that touches everyone everywhere, regardless of heritage. Our ecosystems even recycle the atmospheric gases we breathe and the essential nutrients that fuel our bodies.
One last thing: Southeast Alaskans receive all these ecosystem services free of charge.
As you await the hands poised to shape our lands and waters, perform this simple exercise: Consider what you value most about life in Southeast Alaska, then follow the trail back to its beginnings. Whether it’s a livelihood in fisheries or tourism, educating young people, providing health care, putting a salmon fillet or venison steak or blueberry pie on the dinner table, climbing mountains, or slipping quietly into an old-growth forest, turn around and look behind you. When you come face to face with a healthy ecosystem, listen to it speak. Then pick up the SeaBank Annual Report and see what more this treasured place we call home has to say.
• Beth Short-Rhoads is writer, seafood chef and producer of the “Savory Moment” food podcast and the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust’s “SeaBank Chronicles” science and mystery podcast. She lives in Sitka. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government.
