177 Bringing the Sea's Bounty to You - In a Can - But at what Cost?

This week for our exploration of the National Park Service, especially as we are deep into the portion of American history where we are in a fever of exploration powered by steam engines and visions of wide open spaces to be conquered, let's take a look at the Katmai National Park in Alaska.

It's basically at the point where the long chain of islands, the Aleutians, jump off from the state out into the Bering Sea.

Now, since the park is larger in size than three American states, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Connecticut, feel it's worthwhile to specify which part of the park I'm talking about.

In this case, it is the Brooks River, site of some of the most prodigiously fat bears that star on social media.

The Brooks River is part of the system that feeds into the Neneq River and out into the sea.

It is also part of the same system that hosted a truly startling number of salteries, which then became canneries that allowed the fish wealth of Alaska to be mined and shipped around the world.

Much like the Atlantic cod, the bison of the forest and plains, the giant timber, and the passenger pigeon, and many of the other riches of North America that seemed so boundless that a bottom could never be found, the canneries of Alaska in the late 19th century started that work of finding the bottom.

The Brooks River area of the park and the west end of the Neneq River where The Diamond NN Cannery perches are interesting reminders of how the lust to capture the portable wealth of an area and port it right out of there can alter the look, spirit, and general health of an area as well as its ability to support the population that was already there in addition to all of those that start coming there because of its wealth.

During the period we're in, the latter part of the 19th century, more wealth was extracted from Alaska in the form of salmon than the copper and gold strikes combined, and this includes, though it's Canada now, the gold coming from the Klondike.

There's a cool NPS site in Seattle about that.

But a more interesting part about the Brooks River area is that it is also one of the areas where America really started to develop and follow conservation science.

They had a chance to see overfishing in action at a timescale they could see and reverse.

All of this happened around World War I.

Advances in conservation science were made there, and so now we have amazing sustainable Alaskan salmon runs and fat, fat bears in the fall.

So if you're interested in this chunk of food history that lies hidden in Alaska, go check out the Brooks River portion of the Katmai National Park and Preserve.

And if a trip to Alaska isn't in your near future, I've included some fun links about the park to go look at, including a map of all of the canneries that were built there.

And much more fun, if you wanna watch bears get fat on fish, go check out explore.org. That's where the fat bear watch will be this fall.