Our Background
Alaska’s Prince William Sound is one of the world’s richest marine and estuarine ecosystems. Encompassing 10,000 square miles, the Sound is an intricate web of ice fields, mountains, glaciers, forests, rivers, fjords, and sea. Its protected waters provide habitat for a spectacular array of wildlife, including humpback and killer whales, Steller sea lions, harbor seals, harbor and Dall’s porpoises, sharks, and sea otters. Five species of Pacific salmon share streams with Dolly Varden and cutthroat trout while over half of Alaska’s nearly 500 bird species, including migratory shorebirds, seabirds, and ducks, spend time in the Sound’s temperate rainforests, streams, marshes, and extensive coastal mudflats.
Despite some commercial activity and a location fewer than 60 miles from Anchorage, Prince William Sound has historically been remote and relatively difficult to reach. Its convoluted 3,500-mile shoreline was accessible by one road and one train, and could otherwise be reached only by boat or plane. In 2000 we lost the relative isolation that has always helped buffer the Sound when the State of Alaska opened a controversial tunnel that connects the Port of Whittier with the state highway system, bringing Prince William Sound within a two-hour drive of more than half the population of Alaska. Visitation jumped 250 percent immediately and state officials predict that it will balloon fifteen-fold in coming years. Not surprisingly, more visitors have led to greater development and use pressures. This has put Prince William Sound at a crossroads. In many ways, it is still John Muir’s “bright and spacious wonderland,” but it is also a struggling ecosystem facing unprecedented stress.
As a new organization, PWSK’s organizational culture can be described as “close-to-home” -- a general philosophy of being of and integrated into the working fabric of the PWS communiti
es, building trust in the region and building upon the strong grassroots base already established at the Board of Directors level. PWSK looks first for opportunities to both address environmental concerns and engage the people who live, work and recreate in the Sound. Accordingly, PWSK has chosen projects like clean boating, harbor pollution, and community beach clean-up events to publicize its existence, involve local people and forge new relationships. This “close-to-home” culture and approach has already fostered good relationships with harbormasters, local government officials, boaters and fishermen in the Sound.
Following the example of many Keeper programs across the country, PWSK has also begun a citizen-based water quality monitoring effort that will initially track water temperatures in anadromous streams, shellfish harvest areas, and other areas of interest near the five PWS communities.
Like these outreach and education efforts, PWSK seeks to engage in those public policy issues that both protect the environment and resonate with meaning to the local populace. Two examples that PWSK is working on are the Alaska Coastal Management Program and preventing the introduction of invasive species into the Sound, particularly from oil tankers’ ballast water. The latter issue is of particular concern to commercial fishermen working in the Sound, while the ACMP holds out the promise to coastal communities of improved management and control over their coastlines, along with coveted financial and technical support.
Additionally, PWSK will test and strengthen its capacity to serve as a galvanizer of local conservation voices by participating in the Forest Service’s Prince William Sound Framework process. The PWS Framework is a Forest Service effort to define the Sound’s “carrying capacity” in the context of the Nellie Juan-College Fjord Wilderness Study Area, and also to promote environmentally-conscious “geotourism” principles within the Sound.
