Featured Work

Protecting Alaska’s Harvest - Scientific American

On a cool morning in August, Stephen Payton stood at the edge of a dock in Seldovia, Alaska, dragging a fine, conical net at the end of a pole through the rippling ocean water. Screaming crows and gull wheeled above us in the damp air, as the long-limbed 30-year-old watched his ghostly net wend its way underneath the surface. A small plastic bottle at the net’s narrow end captured and concentrated particles from the water. When Payton pulled the contraption up, he detached the bottle, added drops of iodine preservative to the wet muddle inside, labeled the sample and handed it to me. We climbed inside his big white truck and drove a mile to Seldovia’s gravel airstrip, where I scrambled aboard a cramped, six-seater propeller plane. Organisms within the sample could deteriorate within hours, so time was of the essence.

How Indigenous memories can help save species from extinction - Vox

From his home in remote coastal British Columbia, Ernest Mason, a 77-year-old elder and hereditary chief of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais Nation, remembers. He remembers a childhood fishing trip with his ather, when they packed sleeping bags but caught so many halibut they were home before dark. He remembers setting traps for pink Dungeness crab and floating hemlock branches to collect edible herring eggs.

He also remembers watching the first two times the herring stocks collapsed, and then, fearing a third collapse, telling the Canadian government that he and the other chiefs were banning commercial fishermen from their traditional territorial waters. “I said, ‘We’ll do what it takes to protect what we have,’” Mason told Vox. “This is one of the ways our grandfathers taught us, how to look after things. That’s one of the chores now.”

Freeing Oysters from a Parasite’s Hold - Hakai Magazine and Reader’s Digest

The dead oyster falls from the plastic mesh bag with the hollow clop of a horse hoof on pavement. Its shell gapes, innards rotted. About 100 or more oysters—some living, some dead—quickly follow, clattering like maracas onto the flattened bow of Joe Googoo’s dark-green jon boat. Clad in a jacket with blaze-orange sleeves and a ball cap with a moose on it, Googoo pulls a knife from his belt holster in one smooth motion and taps oyster shells with its curved tip as he sorts through the mottled pile. Counting them one by one, he tosses lifeless shells aside and puts the living oysters back in the bag.

Beside Googoo, Robin Stuart, a large, curly-haired man in a tattered black-and-blue drysuit, perches on the boat’s edge. Stuart, one of Nova Scotia’s most experienced aquaculture experts, cracks jokes as he, too, picks around for “morts”—mortalities. “If you could grow an oyster big enough, Joe would be buried in it,” he says with a chuckle. As the longtime friends tally the dead, Stuart soon grows somber. “There’s almost as many morts as there are live,” he says in his gravelly Scottish-Welsh brogue. “MSX is definitely doing its thing here.”