Elsa Sebastian
Photo by Colin Arisman
"I am so grateful for the way I was raised— we were completely off grid. We didn’t have TV, didn’t have internet, and the bears would chew through the phone cables, so sometimes we didn’t even have a phone.
I think it’s really special to grow up in a wild place and have the sense of being surrounded by forest and lands that feel intact. As a child, I had the sense that the whole world was like this— just full of beauty and wildness and thousands of years of undisturbed evolution. It was a very privileged and fortunate way to grow up.
When I started running my own power troller in my twenties, I realized how impressive it was that my parents were able to commercial fish three months a year with a couple kids onboard. The fishing side of things is enough to pull off, and yet they somehow had enough bandwidth to also be amazing parents.
Those long summers on the fishing boat were really challenging as a child, but I always was grateful for a sense of connection to the ocean and all the animals that live in the ocean —the whales, the seabirds, the salmon. Through a childhood of living between the forest and ocean, and realizing how salmon tie the coastal ecosystem together, I learned to appreciate at an early age how the natural world is held in balance."
—Elsa Sebastian
Photo by Colin Arisman
"Commercial fishing is so cool here in Alaska because it’s something that keeps families connected to each other. When I was in my early twenties, and running my fishing boat, the summer fishing season was the most reliable time for my family to get together. We’d all find ourselves back at the same beaches where we’d had salmon cookouts and roasted marshmallows when I was a kid, and it was so cool to be able to revisit those places and memories as a family.
The salmon season is a time to work hard, make money and be on the ocean, but also a time to return to a community. That’s a big part of what fishing is to me. When you have intergenerational fishing families, everybody really respects each other, because the challenges of catching fish from small boats on the big ocean are so relatable. I haven’t captained a fishing boat for a few years now, but my brother and my parents are still running trollers and I’m grateful to be able to relate to what they’re going through."
—Elsa Sebastian
"Ground truthing is a general term that people use in a lot of different ways, but what it means for me is going to lands that are part of political decision-making and trying to see for yourself the value of those places and assess whether or not they are being represented in a way that seems fair or appropriate.
For me personally, I grew up in the conservation movement in Tongass, and I already knew the facts and figures around the economics and ecological impacts of the timber industry. And at a certain point, it feels like we are repeating ourselves. My parents were making the same arguments about deer and salmon habitat and the value of ancient trees decades ago. It’s not that these things aren’t true, but I felt that I needed to develop a relationship with the land, to see if and how those concerns actually played out in the forest. I also had some doubts and wondered if maybe some of those ecological concerns were dramatized for the sake of the conservation movement; it turns out that the impacts of logging felt way worse than I’d imagined.
For a scientist you might go out and measure things. For an artist, you might go out and paint or try to write a creative piece. What’s most exciting about ground truthing for me is exploring threatened lands with people who have really different skills and ways of seeing the world than I do. I enjoy being in conversation with those different perspectives while moving through a landscape that has a complicated human history."
—Elsa Sebastian
Photo by Colin Arisman
"I originally learned about the transboundary mining issue because I was really fired up about the Pebble Mine issue. The Pebble fight made clear to me that if commercial fishermen are going to see our fisheries as multigenerational businesses and opportunities, then we have to take some responsibility for taking care of the habitat that salmon depend on. The Pebble issue was just so big and clear; and I remember how surprised I was when I saw a map of all of the mines that were being developed in British Columbia and realized that we have the same problems here in Southeast Alaska, and I felt kind of powerless because there are mines being developed on the other side of the border.
There is something really engaging about the issue of transboundary mining because it's such an obvious example to see why natural systems shouldn’t be divided. Commercial fishermen shouldn’t be severed politically from the origin of the salmon they are catching. That is the issue that we have with transboundary mines; we have commercial fishermen and indigenous people who have been depending on salmon for thousands of years and generations, who have to work so hard to be heard on an issue that is so critical to their future. It’s an issue of appealing to common humanity and it's challenging. We’re trying to find a way to connect political leaders whose priorities are different from the people who are on the other side of a border.
We are in a time of managing our lands not just for our own economic benefit but for the future of our earth... we are in a time where international cooperation is needed in order to make sure that our earth remains alive and vital, and that our lands and waters can continue to be abundant.”
—Elsa Sebastian
Photo by Colin Arisman
"It’s interesting living on Prince of Wales in Sumner Strait and seeing these big cottonwood logs drift by, and knowing that those cottonwood trees are on their way to the ocean, and that they are coming out of the Stikine. It’s really cool to think of the Stikine River and how a lot of the animals on Prince of Wales descended from animals who migrated out of the mainland through that corridor.”
—Elsa Sebastian
Photo by Colin Arisman
"When I was trolling I had my favorite spot on north Kuiu where I would finish out the season, and it’s the easiest fishing drag ever because at that point in the season I’d be totally burned out. I remember there's a late run of Taku cohos that would show up, just these gorgeous bright fat cohos. They’d show up and all the old-timers that I was fishing with would say, “oh, those cohos are headed for the Taku,” and there’s something really exciting about being a fishermen and over a lifetime of fishing realizing that you can recognize the destination of a salmon just based on the shape of its body."
—Elsa Sebastian
Photos by Colin Arisman
“We need to start thinking about the long term consequences of development in this state. Our salmon runs have been as abundant as they have been because we’ve been fortunate enough to live in a place that has so many intact watersheds and so many abundant rivers, but we are coming to a time where the pace of development and history of extraction is going to start catching up to us.
It’s also a time where because of climate change, we need more than ever for wild salmon to have intact and vast habitats because adapting to the changing climate is going to mean that these populations of fish will need places to go and space to adapt to changing ecosystems."
—Elsa Sebastian