Sunday, March 13, 2005
Alaska Ocean Film Festival
The Alaska Oceans Film Festival was held Thursday, March 10 at the Bear Tooth Theater a second-run theater and art house combined with a microbrewery and pizzeria. The place was packed as the festival had sold out its single show. The festival featured international films and Alaskana short subjects on the deep soft coral area of the Bering Sea, surfing in the Yukutat area of Southeast Alaska, and an uniquely Alaskan event known as the Montague Cup. The Cup bears the name of the island where the surfing, silver salmon fishing, and deer hunting events that make up the competition take place. Whoever surfs the best set, catches the biggest fish, and shoots the biggest buck wins the Cup. The film featured great surf scenes but much less fishing with hunting footage pretty much absent from the film, save for a couple of guys with rifles slung over their shoulders. I guess the fishing and hunting were creatively edited because this film festival was somehow tied into the San Francisco Oceans Film Festival. I can only imagine what the reaction would have been to those in attendance in "the City" had the fishing and hunting sequences received the same play time as the surfing. I surmise the reaction would have been the same to suggesting that the 1002 area of the ANWR coastal plain be opened to oil and gas exploration, but that is a different blog.
I was watching the surf film "Riding Giants" last week with a surfer friend. In the course of the evening, the conversation turned to our respective childhoods. He grew up in semi-rural Portland while I spent my latter teen year in California. I remarked the Santa Barbara of the 1970's I knew growing up was quite different than the city today. I recalled going up into the Los Padres National Forest behind Santa Barbara to go target shooting with my high school buddies, which has now largely been prohibited by the Forest Service. The manager of the firearms department of the local rod and gun store would open the Junior ROTC firing range at Santa Barbara High School one weekend a month and teach marksmanship to the area's teens. I can only imagine the reaction of the school district if one were to make that proposal today. Yet, in Alaska, riflery is a high school interscholastic sport. In California, the number of hunters has precipitously tailspun in the last 30 years. In Alaska, the State authorizes wolf hunts to increase the number of moose as a game management technique.
This weekend I was reflecting on the state of ocean affairs in Alaska. I have come to the conclusion that Alaskans have a very utilitarian approach to the ocean. People depend on the ocean for subsistence or for an economic livelihood in the form of commercial fishing, sportfishing charters, or cruise ship and other tourism related activities. A small, largely-aging, offshore oil and gas industry does exist, almost exclusively in Cook Inlet. While it pops up from time-to-time, the abstraction of "mother ocean" or the concept of "the ocean for the ocean's sake" is largely absent from discourse in Alaska, save for the efforts of "Outside" connected environmental organizations to inject these ideas. A kernel of these ideas was present at the film festival. It will be interesting to see if the concept grows.
I was watching the surf film "Riding Giants" last week with a surfer friend. In the course of the evening, the conversation turned to our respective childhoods. He grew up in semi-rural Portland while I spent my latter teen year in California. I remarked the Santa Barbara of the 1970's I knew growing up was quite different than the city today. I recalled going up into the Los Padres National Forest behind Santa Barbara to go target shooting with my high school buddies, which has now largely been prohibited by the Forest Service. The manager of the firearms department of the local rod and gun store would open the Junior ROTC firing range at Santa Barbara High School one weekend a month and teach marksmanship to the area's teens. I can only imagine the reaction of the school district if one were to make that proposal today. Yet, in Alaska, riflery is a high school interscholastic sport. In California, the number of hunters has precipitously tailspun in the last 30 years. In Alaska, the State authorizes wolf hunts to increase the number of moose as a game management technique.
This weekend I was reflecting on the state of ocean affairs in Alaska. I have come to the conclusion that Alaskans have a very utilitarian approach to the ocean. People depend on the ocean for subsistence or for an economic livelihood in the form of commercial fishing, sportfishing charters, or cruise ship and other tourism related activities. A small, largely-aging, offshore oil and gas industry does exist, almost exclusively in Cook Inlet. While it pops up from time-to-time, the abstraction of "mother ocean" or the concept of "the ocean for the ocean's sake" is largely absent from discourse in Alaska, save for the efforts of "Outside" connected environmental organizations to inject these ideas. A kernel of these ideas was present at the film festival. It will be interesting to see if the concept grows.
# posted by covediver @ 1:00 AM 
