The impact of industrial fishing on localized social environmental change in Alaska's Aleutian Islands

This ethnographic study examines how as an agent of globalization, the Bering Sea's transnational commercial fishing industry has influenced local social and environmental change. It seeks to answer the question: How has industrial fishing effected social and environmental change in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island area as experienced in the locality of Unalaska, Alaska? This study takes a local knowledge approach to this problem by historically examining changes in the life experience of local resource stakeholder groups since industrial fishing began in the area in 1960. This approach defines what it means to be local for these groups by exposing their varying relationships to marine resources in their socioeconomic practices, and in the values, beliefs and discourses concerning those practices. The study identifies the economic opportunities and constraints presented to the local population as a result of changes in mode of production and the resource base. Social change occurs in the cultural response to those opportunities and constraints.; In Unalaska, when mode of production evolves into a global capitalist form as experienced today, it provides short-term economic advantages in the form of high-paying jobs and a substantial tax base for the community as well as quality of life improvements for all stakeholder groups. These local social improvements are enjoyed, however, at a cost of diminishing resource levels and new, possibly detrimental interspecies relationships as influenced by industrial trawling and processing. Sustainable development in the region is dependent upon holding transnational corporations accountable for their development in the locality by reinvesting in both the community's local population and the natural habitats it relies upon.