Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP)
North Pacific Fishery Management Council
Agenda Item D2: Programmatic EIS – Consider purpose and need, alternatives
June 8-11, 2023
My name is Vivian Korthuis, and I am the Chief Executive Officer for the Association of Village Council Presidents, a tribal consortium of 56 federally recognized tribes (AVCP). I am Yup’ik and a member of the Emmonak Tribe. I will be speaking to agenda item D2: PSEIS, Purpose and Need.
Western Alaska is entering the third summer of the salmon crisis for villages on the Kuskokwim, and the fourth summer for communities on the Yukon. Across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, families are facing another year of empty smokehouses and freezers. Our Way of Life continues to be under attack. Without immediate action, informed by the best available science and Indigenous Knowledge, our ecosystem is in danger of being unable to recover. That’s why it is absolutely necessary that the process for a new Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement begin immediately. The existing Programmatic Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the groundfish fisheries management plan is almost 20 years old and has not been reviewed since 2015, nearly a decade ago. This means the Council and NMFS are making fisheries management decisions on sorely outdated information.
Without an up-to-date analysis of what’s happening in the ocean today, the Council and NMFS cannot make informed decisions about how their fisheries management decisions cumulatively affect the ecosystem and the human environment. The law requires programmatic environmental impact statements that are more than five years old to be reviewed and updated if there have been significant changes since the statements were adopted.
Years of melting sea ice, warming ocean temperatures, sea bird and mammal die offs, and the multi-year salmon crisis we find ourselves in certainly qualify as significant. The federal government can no longer go on with business as usual – managing fisheries under a management plan designed for a different world. You must meet your obligations to manage these resources that belong to all of us – not just to the industry – appropriately.
Please also direct your attention to our written comments on the purpose and need for a Programmatic EIS.
Thank you.
Vivian Korthuis
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For additional information, please contact AVCP Communications Director, Gage Hoffman at 907-543-7308 or email at ghoffman@avcp.org
AVCP is a regional nonprofit tribal consortium comprised of the 56 federally recognized tribes of the YK Delta. The geographic boundaries of AVCP extend from the Yukon River Village of Russian Mission downstream to the Bering Sea coast, north up through Kotlik and south along the coastline to Platinum and then extending up the Kuskokwim River to Stony River, including Lime Village on the Stony River tributary. The area encompasses approximately 6.5 million acres, or 55,000 square miles, in Western Alaska.
