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Erica Thompson

July 26, 2011

Orca Books

Cordova, Alaska

My name is Erica Thompson.  I’m grew up on Kodiak Island, and now I live in Cordova across the Gulf of Alaska. 

I’ve spent summers drift gillnetting in Bristol Bay for about eight years, two months every summer from the time I was about fifteen until I was twenty-four.  I did my first year of my undergraduate work at the University of Alaska Anchorage on scholarship, then finished a bachelors of science at Southern Oregon University. I’ve seined salmon, dove for sea cucumbers, jigged cod during spring break, worked as a deckhand on a salmon tender and a charter boat, and did exactly one halibut longlining trip. Right now I’m working on a Masters of Education in Community Counseling.

I was six [at the time of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill].  At six years old, I don’t think you really understand what is happening around you so much as see the activities, but the feeling is different.  I definitely remember that there was a feeling of sadness and anxiety during that time.  Kodiak wasn’t nearly as badly impacted as Prince William Sound, and the areas that were touched by oil were not very close to where the main population on Kodiak Island lived, so you didn’t actually see it rolling up on the beach.  But everyone was gone and they weren’t out herring fishing, they were contracted in to do clean up activities. 

My family was actively commercial fishing both out West and in the Gulf of Alaska.  My dad was out West at the time.  My mom had commercial fished up until the time I was born, and then my parents continued to commercial fish and take me with them as an infant and toddler.  In the winters my mom stayed at home with me, except for working at a small garden shop in town where I could go with her. 

But when the spill happened, my mom got a job working as an expediter to get clean up gear out to the recovery sites all across the Island.  [Instead of] being outside and playing in the woods while she worked at the garden shop, I had to go with her to her friend’s house who was also working as an expediter and hang out there all day while she ran the radio channels.  I remember sitting underneath the stairwell while she worked at a desk on a landing that had all the sidebands and everything, the VHF all set up and that looked out over Chiniak Bay, and I would just sit underneath those stairs, bored, because her friend’s son wasn’t very nice to me and I wanted to be outside.  I didn’t really understand why we had to be indoors all day long and doing this new job, because it wasn’t very much fun for me as a kid.

At that time in my life, I can’t remember reacting any way besides being bored and saddened by the change in our lifestyle.

Because my parents fished primarily crab and ground fish, we weren’t dependent upon the main fisheries affected by the spill.  We weren’t solely dependent upon the herring fishery in Prince William Sound, or the Kodiak salmon seining fishery, so for us things were pretty normalized as soon as they stopped doing extensive clean-up as far as I remember. My dad and my mom had always fished out West for halibut and cod and would use the boat as a tender during the summertime.  So I think that that was the most normalizing factor that we weren’t intrinsically dependent on the fisheries that were primarily impacted.

I do recollect when I was in high school, a few friends mentioning that their parents were waiting on their Exxon settlements and I always just kind of thought that was interesting, because you know you don’t have that -- if something happens when you are six you don’t really think about it too much and then to figure out when you’re you know, 18 or 19 that that this event is still having repercussions on people’s lives, I think that’s kind of something that struck my interest a little bit.

And every once in a while you still hear someone referred to as a Spillionaire which, you know, kind of sets the tone.

It definitely changed my path as an older young adult. I went commercial fishing for most of my life.  I grew up on our family’s longliner as a tot. During high school and college, I fished every summer, paid for college with cash – that was great!  Commercial fisheries have definitely been an incredible asset in my life and I feel very blessed to have partaken in them.  I feel that it is an amazing renewable resource that we have the ability to sustain.  I always knew I wanted to go to graduate school but I didn’t quite know for what. Up until the point after I graduated college, I had worked as an educator during my undergraduate internship and after college I worked in the Kodiak community as an educator. I knew that I wanted to do something with education, but I wasn’t quite feeling all the way fulfilled, because I wanted to do something that had an impact on the environment in a positive way.  My friends have always jokingly called me a hippie, because I was recycling and boycotting Wal-Mart before it was cool. The incredible landscape and the sustainable fisheries of Alaska have really shaped my life and made A LOT of things happen for me, so I decided to go towards a masters of education with a focus of community counseling.  I’ve had the intention of studying youth and adults who had been traumatized by a human-caused or technological disaster like an oil spill or a mine collapse or a chemical spill – that sort of thing.  Just to see what could be done to help these people after their lives had been touched by something that was out of their control that had really affected the environment that they lived in. 

Also, being a Bristol Bay fisherman, I am avidly against the Pebble Mine.  And so I thought perhaps if I could look at some of these long-term research articles that had a lot of documented data over decades of negative impacts not only on the environment but on the people of communities that are affected by human-caused or technological disasters, perhaps that could also go toward the fight against developing the Pebble Mine in such a remote location of Alaska where everyone is not only depending on the fisheries as a sustainable income but also for their subsistence lifestyle.

I think the part of the reason I became avidly against the Pebble Mine was because I saw, I remembered, what happened because of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.  Because, by the time I was a teenager, there was no Prince William Sound [herring] fishery, and my mom used to come to Prince William Sound and tender herring back in the 70’s. Cordova is the first place my dad came to in Alaska.  Though he passed away when I was really young and I didn’t get the chance to hear his stories about it, my grandfather grew up in Cordova and fished Prince William Sound.  So, seeing how something could completely devastate a fishery that had touched so many definitely piqued my interest.  I realized the place where I fished (Bristol Bay) there was this idea that someone had that they would do mineral extraction that could possibly poison the waters the salmon live in and thereby do the same thing essentially to the Bristol Bay area as happened in Prince William Sound.  An income and a sustainable resource were just gone for so many people.  And growing up dependent on these kinds of resources, it really hits home when you’re older and those resources that you then depend on are also challenged by what may be a similar threat.  So I think that in a round about way, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill probably affected me by helping me figure out that I wanted to be more of an activist than perhaps I would have known had I not grown up post-spill.

I moved to Cordova when I was 25.  Working at the Prince William Sound Science Center in Cordova as an educator -- as an environmental educator that does localized ecological education within the school district and then also in the summer time, I’ve seen some fantastic things happening with young adults who come up from the Gulf states that were affected by the Deepwater Horizon Spill.  The Science Center runs a program called the Ocean Science and Leadership Expedition, and there are phenomenal students between the ages of you know 16, 17, 18 that come up from Gulf States. All they want to know is everything they can possibly learn about how oil spills affect marine environments and how Cordova recovered from the spill because Cordova itself was so heavily impacted in such a traumatic way. Because they want to help their communities recover. They want to understand what’s happening, biologically, to the waters around their homes. To see that kind of empowerment among these youth and to see how much they benefit from these kinds of experiences -- traveling to communities that have lived through this kind of spill and then continue to exist -- that has been phenomenal.  Several have also participated in the Wetlands Ecology Media Expedition, and the effort these youth make to become educated about the ecology of the natural systems around them and how to preserve these systems is inspiring. And just to see where those individual youth are going with their lives and the amount of interest they have in helping their community survive this kind of trauma, it’s, it’s pretty incredible.  

I have a lot of hope for what this next generation of youth activists will do. And that some of the work I do through my graduate research may help someone else down the road.  And I have hope that Alaskans will put sustainable fisheries first over resource development that might have short-term economic benefits.  I hope that someday when I have children of my own, they’ll have the chance to fish too.