Oct 13, 2020
Linda Behnken ’84, who has fished commercially for nearly four decades, has received the Heinz Award for the Environment for her advocacy work, including her role as executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.
One of seven recipients of this year’s $250,000 unrestricted cash awards, she joins another Dartmouth recipient, photojournalist and provostial fellow James Nachtwey ’70, who won a Heinz award in 2006.
The award recognizes Behnken’s advocacy work promoting sustainable fishing practices while bolstering rural Alaskan fishing communities, according to the Heinz Family Foundation website.
“Working at the intersection of industry, community, and the environment, she has led efforts to support small-scale fishermen” and promote their access to the state’s fishery resources, the Foundation said in a brochure commemorating the awards. She has demonstrated that by engaging fishermen in research, management, and stewardship, “both the viability of small-scale fisheries and the ecosystem upon which fishing communities depend can be strengthened and sustained for future generations.”
The awards, created in honor of the late U.S. Sen. John Heinz, recognize individuals’ “extraordinary achievements” in arts and humanities; the environment; the human condition; public policy; and technology, the economy, and employment, according to the Foundation’s website.
The owner of FV Woodstock—”FV” stands for fishing vessel—, Behnken was featured in the 2019 film Last Man Fishing, which explores the seafood system through the eyes of small-scale fishermen.
Behnken has led ALFA since 1991. The association’s initiatives include a community-supported fishery and a partnership with the Marine Fish Conservation Network to advocate for national policies promoting sustainable fishery management.
It also led a multiyear grassroots campaign to secure a ban on commercial trawl fishing—a practice that has been described as clearcutting the ocean floor—in federal waters off southeast Alaska, the foundation said. That ban now includes more than 100,000 square miles, “enabling the protection of deep-sea corals and sponges, as well as long-lived rockfish populations.”
With fewer young people entering the trade, Behnken helped create the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, which partners with ALFA and other organizations to encourage and support new fishermen, according to the Foundation brochure.
Behnken also helped establish the association’s Fishery Conservation Network, which facilitates collaboration between scientists and Alaska fishermen on research designed to address resource and conservation challenges.
Behnken is a founding board member of Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust and the Fishing Communities Coalition, a national association representing more than 1,000 independent fishermen and business owners. She was a member of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council from 1992 to 2001, and in 2016, President Barack Obama appointed her to the International Pacific Halibut Commission.
Behnken also has served as an industry adviser to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission and as a member of the National Academy of Science Individual Fishing Quota Review Panel. In 2017, she received an honorarium from the Alaska Legislature.
Behnken holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in English and environmental science, and a master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
To read more, see the Heinz Awards website.
Aimee Minbiole can be reached at aimee.minbiole@dartmouth.edu.
Jan 6, 2020
Please join the Studio Art Department on January 14, 2020 for the opening reception of Professor Christina Seely’s show Dissonance. She will give a public lecture at 5:00 p.m. in the Loew Auditorium.
Christina Seely’s show Dissonance will be installed in the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries from January 14 to March 8, 2020. She will give a public lecture on the work on January 14, 2020 in the Black Family Visual Arts Center’s Loew Auditorium at 5:00 p.m.
The exhibition Dissonance highlights works made since Professor Seely was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Studio Art Department at Dartmouth College. The exhibition will include works from the projects: Markers of Time, Next of Kin, Species Impact, Terra Systema, her current project in-progress, Perdita, In Finding(s) and will showcase a new video piece entitled, Dissonance, filmed this summer on a rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet while traveling with the Institute of Arctic Studies. Each project in its own way is designed to investigate and translate the complexities of both built and natural global systems in order to help a public register and face the realities of our tenuous relationship to the planet. Each also simultaneously point back to photography’s layered and complex cultural role in translating the realities of this relationship. Embedded in the works is often a dialectic between the surface documentation of representative media and the complex reality that lies beyond that surface – how beauty can suggest the simple and ideal while both subtly reflecting and obscuring an often darker more complicated truth. Created during a time of great cultural, political, photographic and environmental flux collectively the works form a conversation about sensing ourselves inside the realities of our contemporary relationship to the planet. Inherently in dialogue with the Anthropocene they each in their own right suggest incremental but tangible ways to acknowledge our disorientation and accept the facts of the climate crisis we are all facing. (www.christinaseely.com)
Feb 20, 2019
Ross A Virginia, Director of the Institute of Arctic Studies was elected a Fellow of The Explorers Club in October 2018
Founded in New York City in 1904, The Explorers Club promotes the scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space by supporting research and education in the physical, natural and biological sciences. The Club’s members have been responsible for an illustrious series of famous firsts: First to the North Pole, first to the South Pole, first to the summit of Mount Everest, first to the deepest point in the ocean, first to the surface of the moon.
The club’s mission is to advance field research, scientific exploration, resource conservation, and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore.
Explorers Club Fellowships are “reserved for those who have distinguished themselvesby directly contributing to scientific knowledge in the field of geographical exploration orallied sciences evidenced by scientific publications documenting fieldwork orexplorations.”
Virginia has more than 20 field expeditions to the polar deserts of Antarctica. Virginia Valley in the Olympus Range of Southern Victoria Land Antarctica is named in his honor for this work. In the Arctic his research and teaching in Greenland explores climate change impacts on tundra and permafrost soils.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson, famed Arctic explorer and founder of Dartmouth’s Northern Studies program was twice President of the Explorers Club, 1919-22 and 1937-39. “It is an honor to join the many distinguished explorers and researchers who are recognized by the Explorers Club and to support the spirit of exploration that I see in my students at Dartmouth” said Virginia.
