About this site

Herring Scraps is the place where I go to share the urgently wonky findings of my bureaucr-archival trawl through various (mostly) colonial efforts to understand, enumerate, and extract herring in Alaska. For some reason I find this angle of inquiry fascinating; I've written thirty-some of these things at this point, and I seem to have plans to write more.

Here's one explanation of what motivates this project, excerpted from Herring Scrap 32:

Sometime after noticing that herring seemed to be the straw that stirred the drink in Southeast Alaska (chased voraciously as they are, by birds and whales and people), I noticed something else:

A State regulatory agency (Alaska Dept of Fish and Game) is charting ecosystem enumerations across time, the resulting ecological narrative is falsely premised, the false construction resulting from that is acting powerfully in the world, and accountability is missing.

Half of what motivates me to stare so long at this curious enactment of statistical malfeasance is the problem itself: the more fish get counted, the more fish get killed; the more fish get killed, the more vulnerable ecosystems and communities become to various manifestations of environmental violence and resulting crises and collapses. I see the ways that herring are important for life around Sitka and I see State scientists and rulemakers handling knowledge and power in ways that threaten all that the herring have been so steadily maintaining for so many for so long.The other motivational half is the feeling that based on what I know of the world, the generalized contours of this problem are likely widely shared in all sorts of different settings, and this problem in aggregate is, I think, a worthy point of interest as we presumably try, together, to respect knowledge and experience in ways that might help us avoid the worst pitfalls of advancing mass extinction of life on earth and attendant human sorrow and hyper-injustice.