Northern Journal

Anchorage's new mayor, Suzanne LaFrance, has pledged to fix what she describes as a broken city hall. 

The team that she's hired so far is a group of technocratic policy nerd all-stars, and their three year term will function as a kind of test: Can an administration rooted in professional competence and policy expertise make meaningful progress in solving some of the deep-rooted, intractable problems facing the city? Namely, its homelessness crisis, but also the housing crunch, a looming spike in energy costs and the always annoying inability of snowplows to clear out streets within 15 minutes of a snowfall.

LaFrance joined the Northern Journal podcast for an hourlong interview on her background and the priorities and vision for her administration.

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

There may not be any subject as serious as the one the last episode of this podcast covered — the emotional issue of salmon bycatch. So, now it's time to balance out that seriousness with frivolousness. And we mean serious frivolousness.

To be precise: This episode is about mammoth resurrection. And the possible transplantation and reintroduction of other charismatic megafauna to Alaska on a massive scale.

For this story to make sense, you have to read the original Northern Journal story. We've got a special guest host, Ephraim Froehlich. Apologies in advance for the puns.

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

If you listen to this podcast, you probably know about "bycatch," the accidental harvest of fish that aren't boats' target species. The issue — specifically, of salmon bycatch by Bering Sea whitefish trawlers — has become an all-consuming debate for some Alaska commercial and subsistence fishermen, along with leaders of Washington-based seafood companies and Southwest Alaska tribes.

This episode features a rare interview with two officials from Bering Sea trawling-related businesses, Hunter Berns of Bering North and John Henderschedt of Phoenix Processor Limited Partnership. In it, we talk through the industry's history and operations — and the potential impacts of tighter regulations being considered by federal policymakers.

If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

For the past two years, we've been hearing about the impending shortage of the locally produced natural gas that we use to heat our homes and generate our electricity in Southcentral Alaska. But there's been little concrete information about how utilities plan to solve the problem. Now, we're hearing that supply gaps are developing sooner than originally expected — as soon as two winters from now. This recent piece from Erin McKittrick is a good overview.

In this episode of the Northern Journal podcast, we hear from one of the biggest players in the debate about what comes next. John Sims is the president of Enstar, which sells natural gas to households and commercial customers in Anchorage, the Kenai Peninsula and the Mat-Su. Enstar is privately owned, which means that some folks have been skeptical about its motives. Sims addresses those questions, plus many more, in this episode about the future of urban Alaska's energy economy.

If you like what you're hearing, the best thing you can do is to buy a paid subscription to Northern Journal. I'm also looking for underwriters and advertisers for this show — you can reach me at nat[at]northernjournal[dot]com. Thanks for listening.

Last month, we heard outrage from conservation advocate Brad Meiklejohn and tribal leader Aaron Leggett; those two guests thought utilities' new proposed plans to fix the Anchorage-area Eklutna hydroelectric project's harms to salmon were inadequate.

Now, it's time to hear directly from those utilities, which own the project at scenic Eklutna Lake. Guests on this episode include two utility spokespersons, Julie Hasquet from Chugach Electric Association and Julie Estey from Matanuska Electric Association, along with their consultant on the Eklutna project, Samantha Owen. They offer a robust defense of the utilities' study and planning process, and they share more details about why certain ideas for habitat improvements were chosen and others dismissed.

You'll get far more from this episode if you listen to the interview with Meiklejohn and Leggett first. Send your feedback and suggestions to nat [at] northernjournal [dot] com.

Alaska regulators first said it was time for the Spurr platform, offshore from Anchorage in Cook Inlet, to be removed in 1992. Then, they backed down, and 30 years later, it remains in the water, where it hasn't produced a single drop of oil since. 

The history of Spurr and five other shuttered Cook Inlet platforms are featured in a new story from Nat. It's not a Northern Journal piece — it was produced with Alaska Public Media and APM Reports — but the powers that be signed off on a podcast episode that delves into the details. Curtis Gilbert, Nat's editor at APM Reports, guest hosts.

This episode features Pete Chelkowski, one of the two directors of One with the Whale — a new documentary that features the story of Chris Apassingok, a Yup'ik whale hunter from St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. Apassingok was 16 when he caught a bowhead and was subsequently subjected to a campaign of attacks and death threats initiated by an animal rights activist.

One with the Whale is a rousing story, a celebration of Indigenous subsistence culture and a rural Alaska coming of age tale. It also raises some interesting questions about storytelling and narrative and ownership. Chelkowski speaks to that and a lot more in this interview.

You can watch One with the Whale for free on PBS, and this High Country News piece by Julia O'Malley also tells Apassingok's backstory.

Send your feedback, criticism and guest suggestions to nat[at]northernjournal.com. If you want to support this podcast, you can purchase a paid subscription to Northern Journal at this site.

Eklutna Lake is a jewel of Anchorage recreation. It's also the source of some of the electricity used by city residents. A major policymaking process has been underway for the past several years to address the Eklutna hydroelectric project's effects on salmon, and it's now coming to its conclusion with intense controversy.

This is a complicated story with many different stakeholders. But two people who have been among the most involved are Aaron Leggett, head of Eklutna's tribal government, and Brad Meiklejohn, a longtime environmental advocate whose conservation group led a project to remove a derelict dam near the Eklutna River's mouth. They are featured on this episode; we hope to hear from the utilities that own the hydroelectric project in the coming days.

Feedback? Criticism? Ideas for a future episode? Email nat at northernjournal dot com.

Brooke Woods is a longtime Yukon River salmon advocate. She is Koyukon Athabascan and a tribal member of the community of Rampart, which is on the Yukon in Interior Alaska, about 80 miles northwest of Fairbanks.

She joins the Northern Journal podcast to share a personal perspective on Yukon River salmon declines, and on management measures to address them. Bathsheba Demuth, the Brown University environmental historian who discussed the same issues on a previous episode, also joins us — if you haven't listened to her interview, it provides context that would be useful before listening to this one.

We've invited representatives of the pollock trawl industry to appear on their own episode of the podcast, and hope that interview materializes soon. Questions, comments or feedback? Email nat [at] northernjournal dot com.

Researchers Paul Denholm and Marty Schwarz just published a new study that says urban Alaska could save a lot of money by using much more wind and solar power to generate its electricity. The interesting part: They don't ignore the fact that it would take a lot of effort to make sure the system still works when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, as we all know can happen periodically. They join the Northern Journal podcast for a discussion about their findings.

If you like this new show, please share it with others. You can subscribe to the Northern Journal newsletter here.