Nov. 19, 2000 — A big, glossy book just out from Duke University goes coast to coast to find "grass-roots American democracy."

With honest documentary photography and contemplative interview snippets, it visits a range of civic-minded communities, from a ghetto arts movement in Philadelphia to a "hippie" credit union in upstate New York to traditional sheep farmers in Navajo country.

And it includes an Anchorage-based organization, the Alaska Marine Conservation Council.

All represent "Local Heroes Changing America," according to the title of the book.

"A lot of people say that community is dead, that nobody cares anymore. This project is a challenge to that," says Tom Rankin, the book's editor and director of Duke's Center for Documentary Studies.

He is well aware that his Alaska chapter is likely to provoke disgust from some in the state's commercial fishing community.

These are contentious times for the fishing industry, beleaguered recently in a high-profile tilt with the Steller sea lion and the Endangered Species Act. Some fishermen, worried about livelihoods, don't see any heroes among conservationists.

Founded in 1994, the AMCC—most people say "AMC-squared"—is a coalition of small-scale commercial fishermen, Native and subsistence catchers, coastal residents and conservationists. Most notably, the group has campaigned against the use of bottom- dragging, habitat-busting trawl nets and the waste of fish caught and then dumped because they are the wrong species or size.

People can and should harvest fish commercially, though some practices should change, the council says. Members like Homer cod fisherman Paul Seaton are wary of the large, predominantly Seattle-based trawl fleet that "travels in, harvests fish and leaves."

Yet many commercial fishermen, including some Alaskans, lump AMCC with harder-edged environmental groups like Greenpeace, which has sworn to rid the oceans of the biggest trawlers.

The real agenda of the groups—all of them, these fishermen say—is to drive many operators out of business and put a lid on the ocean.

Sounding Out a Community

"Go ahead, join AMCC or Greenpeace," said Scot Gilliland, a Kodiak trawler, in an ad he took out last month in the island's Daily Mirror newspaper. "Cut your own economic throat."

Little of that venom can be found in "Local Heroes," a gentle work that aims merely to hear out AMCC members and other residents from Sitka to Kodiak to Unalaska.

New York photographer Lynn Davis shoots evocative duotones of boats, fishermen and seascapes, printed on oversized pages. Folklorist Jens Lund of Olympia, Wash., contributes introspective quotes from interview subjects.

There's Walter Tellman, born in Knik, who tells how his Native mother used to set salmon nets off Fire Island.

And Mark Thomas, a Sitka commercial fisherman who says he likes his fishing "small, simple, and close."

And fisherman Bob Storrs, clad in a wool sweater, sitting in his weathered Unalaska cabin.

And the Rev. Tod Putney, saying a prayer last year at a Kodiak memorial service for hands lost at sea.

The attempt is to capture a community yearning for a middle ground, something good for families, a way to neither fish big nor quit—the extremes—but to fish forever.

"I don't like to see any fishery eliminated," says Stosh Anderson, a Kodiak fisherman and founding AMCC board member. "What I would like to see is fisheries that may have to make some changes and transitions so that they can provide for a sustainable ecology, an environment, an ecosystem that will support the ability of the communities to have a sustainable economy."

Adds Carolyn Servid, a Sitka conservationist and AMCC member: "It's not necessarily about saving the wilderness. It's about how people live well in places."

Feeding the World, Funding Activism

Those skeptical of the Alaska Marine Conservation Council's mission say they've heard too mush of the group's bucolic bilge; they equate it with family farmers saying there's no good in agribusiness.

Most annoyed are the operators of large trawlers that catch millions of pounds of Alaska pollock, cod and other groundfish in what is essentially the world's largest fishstick harvest, a haul worth nearly $1 billion annually.

They note that the fishermen members of AMCC are typically small-boat guys fishing with gillnets, hooks and pots. They catch a few fish, the trawlers a lot. Thus, trawlers are bad.

"While the membership of AMCC sees itself as sympathetic and cooperative, the group knows almost nothing about commercial fishing for groundfish," says Dave Fraser, a Washington trawler owner who has long sat on a federal fishery management panel that includes an AMCC representative.

"The small-boat fishermen that are supporting them are involved in very low-tech fisheries that do not provide the volumes of food necessary to feed the world."

Trawlers can truthfully boast that they've made big, eco-friendly changes in recent years. Pollock boats can no longer drag their nets hard against the bottom in the Bering Sea. And new regulations have dramatically cut fish waste. Alaska's pollock and cod stocks are large, healthy and tightly regulated.

Yet many trawlers are convinced that conservationists will keep nibbling.

Al Geiser, an Oregon resident who fishes his boat, the Hazel Lorraine, out of Kodiak, wrote recently in the Kodiak Daily Mirror that AMCC, along with national environmental groups like Greenpeace and the American Oceans Campaign, are being financed by big charities to "wage war on commercial fishing in Alaska."

AMCC executive director Dorothy Childers, who can look out over Knik Arm from her corner office in a rambling downtown Anchorage building, says her group has some 600 members, mostly small fishermen, who pay at least $25 a year.

But the majority of AMCC's total revenue of $415,189 in 1999 indeed came from big Outside philanthropies—the Rockefellers of New York, Ted Turner in Atlanta, the Packard Foundation near San Francisco, the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts and others.

Pew, a multi-billion-dollar philanthropy known for its involvement with journalistic, environmental and educational projects, also funded "Local Heroes."

Who Wants to be a Hero?

Childers is not a fisherman. The daughter of a country doctor in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, she became AMCC's second executive director in 1995. Her previous employer: Greenpeace, where she campaigned against offshore drilling.

She and a handful of staffers spend much of their time not on fishing boats and docks but in marathon meetings, following the arcane and often cutthroat development of fishery regulations.

AMCC is often misunderstood, Childers says. Most recently, Alaska's commercial fishing industry, particularly trawlers and the packing houses they feed, were hammered by a Seattle Judge's ruling that kicked big boats out of vast ocean zones inhabited by endangered Steller sea lions. The theory is that the nets are depriving the sea lions of food fish, contributing to their sharp decline in recent years.

The ruling came in a federal lawsuit brought by Greenpeace, the American Oceans Campaign and the Sierra Club. Though AMCC caught some of the heat, and though it agrees with curtailing the harvest in sea lion waters, the organization declined to join the suit, preferring to keep making its case to fishery managers and not a judge.

"We're a unique organization," Childers says. "Some people see us as a conservation group, and some people see us as a fishing organization. We're both. We want fishermen to go fishing generation after generation. But we don't think the status quo does that."

AMCC is honored to be featured in the book, she says, though she worries that it contains errors that might reflect poorly on the group. The introduction to the AMCC chapter asserts that the fish waste, known as bycatch, has "decimated fish populations." Not so in Alaska, she says.

The book also "credits AMCC too much" for certain fishery management changes, including a limit on bottom trawling in waters around Kodiak. AMCC's main role is to support community initiatives for change, and that's what happened on the Kodiak trawl issue, she says.

Are AMCC people heroes? The organization's 15 board members certainly are, Childers says. They're people who have taken the time to raise some tough issues in their own communities.

That's all local heroes are, says Rankin, the book's editor. People taking the time.

"The work of democratic change is all about conflict," he says. "It's messy. It doesn't have a clear beginning and end. But the process of staying with that messiness is profoundly important in a democratic society. It's what community is all about."