<
https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/forest-restoration-alaska-youth-stewards/>
"As part of their summer jobs, three teenagers—members of the Prince of Wales
Alaska Youth Stewards work crew—are being asked by Quinn Aboudara to become
time travelers. Stay with him here.
They’re standing at the foot of a tumble of rocks and uprooted trees that was
the result of a 2020 landslide on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.
Aboudara, 41, grew up down the street and was raised by the land’s original
stewards—the Tlingit & Haida people who have lived in the area since the last
Ice Age. When he was the same age as his crew of local teens, this spot was a
salmon spawning stream. Since he knows what it was, he also sees how it can be
restored.
“I want you to start looking at the lands as they are now, and start
envisioning what they’ll look like in 10, 20, 40 years,” says Aboudara, the
natural resource coordinator for Shaan Seet Incorporated, the local Native
village corporation.
As part of their 10-week summer job, the Alaska Youth Stewards are working with
Aboudara and land managers like him on natural resource and cultural
stewardship projects to gain job experience and leadership skills. Each crew
member wears XtraTuf rain boots and high school sports sweatshirts with their
name printed on the back.
“Every landslide has the potential to become a stream, and every stream has the
potential to be a fish-bearing stream,” Aboudara says, redirecting the crew’s
attention to a pool of water with mayflies in it—fish food. “We want you to
start looking into the future and seeing a time when you have more fish, your
children have more fish, your children’s children’s children’s children have
more fish, than what we have today.”
As part of their job description, these young adults are building that future.
They are working to stabilize the banks and restore the stream in an area where
old-growth trees were decimated by logging in the past century. Losing those
trees helped precipitate major landslides like this one. The restoration starts
with surveying the site; work begins as the teens inch up the landslide on
foot. Aboudara distributes tools to the crew: Laci Lowery, an 18-year-old Haida
woman, peers through the scoping tool while her Tlingit & Haida relative,
Allison Mills, 17, holds one side of the measuring tape and Connor Bagby, 15,
brings the other side to the opposite embankment, shouting the measurements
back to Aboudara.
The program is much more than a typical youth internship experience. It is one
part of a 15-year-old Indigenous-led collaboration known as the Sustainable
Southeast Partnership (SSP), which was launched with support from The Nature
Conservancy, in part to help local communities develop stable, sustainable
alternatives to logging as that industry—and many of its high-paying jobs—has
faded from this landscape. A number of the region’s most influential
organizations—a consortium of the Tlingit & Haida communities and the regional
Native corporation, Sealaska—have also been major supporters of Alaska Youth
Stewards and SSP.
Now, zoom out to the treetops. Then even farther, to the big-picture view of
more than 30 communities spread throughout the forested archipelago that makes
up Southeast Alaska’s panhandle. From this vantage point, you’ll see another,
integral type of restoration in action: the restoration of a people, and of
Indigenous-led stewardship in Southeast Alaska—the first step toward undoing
centuries of social, cultural and environmental damage."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-healthcare-americas-smoking-in-indonesia-hunger-in-brazil/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
