Country: United States

Organization: Eyak Preservation Council

Year the initiative began: 1997

Project Website: Website

Positioning in the Mosaic of solutions:

• Main barrier addressed: Lack of local input
• Main insight addressed: Incorporate sustainable practices

What is the goal of your innovation?
Permanent protection of wild salmon runs and habitat in the 17-million acre Copper River Watershed.

How does your approach support or embody geotourism?
As a program of our non-profit organization – Eyak Preservation Council (EPC) – the CRWR originated as an activist and fundraising tool to alert environmental and political associates to threats to the region, and to promote protection from non-sustainable development. We found that the Copper River tells the story better than anyone and emphasizes the true power of place. Desired outcomes include cultivating environmental advocates through our internship program, activation of our visitors as knowledgeable participants in resource use and preservation, and bringing together diverse interests from within the Copper River watershed and the community of Cordova. We seek out a variety of opinions from groups including commercial and subsistence fishermen, tribal and community leaders, and environmental and political leaders. The most powerful element of CRWR is the actual raft trip down the Copper. Most people have never experienced a true wilderness. Seven days without visible or audible indication that any other human beings exist on earth – without a trail or road – is an exceptional opportunity. Over and over again, we hear that the Copper River changed their lives.

Describe your approach in detial. How is it innovative?
CRWR utilizes an exceptional and unique wilderness experience in a threatened region to help us build a constituency of support for wild salmon habitat preservation policy. CRWR’s intentional combination of advocacy, fun and education for multiple groups via experiential learning has already assisted with direct support that stopped several unsustainable and irreversible development projects in the region. The CRWR business model is also innovative. It is a non-profit program, therefore CRWR invites “participants”, and spreads the word about these trips by invitation, word of mouth, internet, and association. By virtue of realizing what certain groups, policy-makers, students, locals, fishermen and Natives can do to help us in our preservation mission, we strive to transform and give them the tools to become effective advocates. Rather than pay a fee for a service, participants are asked to consider a donation. By bringing them into our mission, they change from passive consumers of an experience to active donors making a statement with their money. CRWR teaches people how to trust, rely on each other and truly respect the environment. In the seven-day adventure, watching them working together and become a community is inspiring. We witness people literally transform physically, emotionally and spiritually.

What types of partnerships or professional developement would be most beneficial in spearding your innovation?
Recognition and referrals from environmental, scientific, educational, and indeed, all individuals and groups that want to help preserve wild salmon habitat. Ensuing support and attendance of our CRWR experience would help build our constituency of preservation. This in turn would help us spread our CRWR concept to other regions. This includes, very importantly, building bridges with all 23 tribes of the Copper River watershed. Participation will help lead to a visionary Tribal Copper River Keeper program and a watershed management plan to forever protect the integrity of the Copper River, salmon habitat and its wild salmon.

In one sentence describe what kind of impact, change, or reform your approach is intended to achieve.
Permanent protection of Copper River wild salmon runs and habitat; benefiting wildlife, subsistence, commercial and sports fishers and the economy.

Describe the degree of success of your approach to date. Clearly define how you measure quantitative and qualitative impact in terms of how your approach contributes to the sustainability or enhancement of local culture, environment, heritage, or aesthetics? How does your approach minimize negative impacts?
CRWR has had measurable success with tangible results. By virtue of the experience building support, key participants have helped in key campaigns: we stopped the state from building a road and trail down the Copper River, protected 65,000 acres in Katalla on the eastern Delta from oil & gas drilling, and stopped the Alaska Delegation’s Chugach Road Rider that would have allowed a 55-mile access road across the Copper River Delta and open the area to oil & gas drilling, clearcutting, coal mining and tourism. The monitoring aspect of CRWR has delivered a spectacular preservation success. Through CRWR, we became aware of a land grab in a special bear and wildlife feeding area called Abercrombie Rapids. The intentions were for development and hunting. We were able to garnish awareness and support in order to retain this parcel in the name of conservation. Locally, CRWR has reduced the traditional divide between pro-development and pro-ecosystem people. Significantly, a number of commercial fishermen took a conservation position when they realized that ecosystem protection preserves their livelihood. Numerous participants make additional donations to our non-profit. Years later, participants report maintaining the reflective environmental practices that they were exposed to during their trip.

How does your program promote traveler enthusiasm, satisfaction, and engagement with the locale?
CRWR provides a high-quality and holistic experience for our guests, engaging them intellectually, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. We care for their physical needs with exacting attention to their safety and comfort, locally relevant meals, and personable and knowledgeable staff. By structuring the experience as one to connect to them on a mission level – rather than on a consumerist one – we capture their attention from the very outset with our invitations; from the moment they arrive, they are primed to engage with the Copper, its wildlife and its people.

In what ways are local residents actively involved in your innovation, including participation and community input? How has the community responded to or benefited from your approach?
Community members are actively recruited to numerous platforms for dialogue with participants on the value of the local resources and maintaining a traditional way of life. Commercial fishermen and local residents are invited on many of our trips to share their views and concerns. CRWR participants generally visit Cordova for several days on either end of the raft trips, and their spending, shopping and eating in town is noticed and appreciated. We also use a variety of Cordova vendors, such as pilots and auto rentals, which is a tangible incentive for support of our “eco-tourism” and habitat preservation mission.

Describe how your innovation helps travelers and local residents better understand the value of the area's cultural and natural heritage, and educates them on local environmental issues. How do you motivate them to act responsibly in their future travel decisions?
CRWR engages participants on a mission level in environmental and Indigenous cultural defense. Every aspect of their experience introduces and reinforces our goals. Meals are locally-caught or gathered foods, participants are introduced to traditional processing methods, and guides and interns enforce leave no trace camping. Lively evening discussions focus on the importance of identifying and supporting Indigenous and local communities with individual economic choices. We demonstrate how to live more sustainably, and that by honoring and respecting the land, water, Native culture and animals we will be given the gifts of wild salmon, clear air and clean water for generations to come.

Is your initiative financially and organizationally sustainable? If not, what is required to make it so? What is the potential demand for your innovation?
Yes; CRWR has contributed to the sustainability and mission goals of EPC for 10 years. The innovation can be replicated in threatened areas anywhere with access to true wilderness, a community, and an infrastructure for getting people to a wilderness experience. Our structure is based on the non-profit model, so it is integrated in our preservation mission. The demand for such an experience, with life-long ramifications for all participants and perhaps centuries-long ramifications for the environment, is limited only by the size of the market for experience-based tourism. Currently CRWR brings 50-75 people annually down the Copper River.

How is your initiative currently financed? If available, provide information on your finances and organization that could help others. Please list: Annual budget, annual revenue generated, size of part-time, full-time and volunteer staff.
We request donations and ask that they give at least a certain amount. Generally, the donations that guests choose to make cover the cost of each trip. EPC also requests general support grants from foundations and donors, and lists the CRWR program as a specific program that their grant will support. Specific rafting excursions, like the Indigenous Youth Leadership Adventure, are sponsored by individual donors and foundations. We also depend on volunteer and “discounted” help for the trips. Often our guides donate much of their time and charge us much less than commercially paid guides. Annual Budget - Eyak Preservation Council: $298,000 Revenue generated - CRWR: $25,000 - $35,000 3 FT, 2-3PT, 3 volunteer

What is your plan to expand your approach? Please indicate where/how you would like to grow or enhance your innovation, or have others do so.
Although satisfied with CRWR, EPC would consider a larger roster of yearly trips for those who want to contribute to our mission of preservation of the Copper River Watershed. We are expanding to include kayaking in Prince William Sound, and have an associate that is building ecologically sustainable lodges at Knight Island and Orca Inlet where participants will experience wilderness AND restoration efforts in areas that were hit by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. We would like to help others do similar projects around the world, bringing together community advocacy, education and outreach, and an authentic, life-changing wilderness experience.

What are the main barriers you encounter in managing, implementing, or replicating your innovation? What barriers keep your program from having greater impact?
CRWR battles Cross-Cultural Myopia and the Corporate Monolithic Approach to Tourism. Our trips are cultural, physical, educational and spiritual and are not a “home away from home” trip. CRWR has a goal– we want to build an advocacy, so we are not focused on a vacation experience. Additionally, corporate tourism enterprises directly impede our dialog building agenda. Each time we oppose an incursion into wild salmon habitat by an unsustainable tourist enterprise (e.g.: Shepard Point port, Copper River Trail, Carbon Mountain Rd.), we have another point of contention among locals. EPC employs several strategies to overcome these barriers. We establish Community Incentives by linking local commercial interests to the eco-tourist desire to purchase and support sustainable eco-friendly products and practices. We Incorporate Sustainable Practices through policies like leave-no-trace camping and providing locally-relevant meals. But our most powerful tool for combating both the Corporate approach to tourism and lack of local input from the process, is our ability to educate through hands-on experience. Through this final practice, CRWR adventures create an exceptional and unique experience benefiting the local economy, rewarding and uplifting visitors and interns, and generating awareness and preservation of the spectacular Copper River Watershed.

What is the origin of your innovation? Tell your story.
In 20 years of conservation work in Prince William Sound, we have been an integral player in efforts that have united fishermen, Natives and environmentalists to preserve over 700,000 acres of wild salmon habitat in the Exxon spillzone. In 1997, as the State of Alaska was considering authorization of a recreational trail that would follow the Copper River from Chitina to Cordova, EPC found itself in opposition to environmental allies and political forces. We realized that they simply did not understand that a world-class recreational trail already existed, and that was the Copper River itself. The addition of anything else would be toxic to the ancient sense of place of the Copper River and would provide greater and more destructive access to an intact and thriving wild salmon habitat ecosystem; and it would indeed be a precursor to a road. They could not understand that some places should not be readily accessible and retain their character. The Alaska Delegation, State of Alaska and the federal government along with Native corporations decided that they wanted to provide access to the Copper River Watershed via the proposed Copper River trail and a road across the Copper River Delta. We had no choice but to defend the region from unsustainable development that called for hundreds of miles of trails, roads, oil and gas drilling, clearcutting, mountain top removal coal mining and industrial tourism. We decided that the best way to educate people was to get them out in the wild and onto the Copper to see for themselves that the place was already highly developed in its intact state, where wild salmon and wildlife thrived. Our first CRWR trip was with several key conservation attorneys who saw for themselves what was possible and attainable and that this was one of the last productive wild places on earth where we humans had a chance to get something right, by leaving it the same. We brought them to Cordova and we flew them in bush planes to Chitina where we put into the Copper with our rafts. After about the third day of the trip, they started to change their pro-trail minds. By the time we passed Abercrombie Rapids, Bremner Sands and landed near Miles Glacier, they were in agreement with us and against the proposed Copper River trail. We still had work and lobbying to do, but one of the biggest environmental organizations on the planet backed us in our work. And, together, we stopped the trail. We then began organizing rafting adventures that included community activists, organizers, lawyers, scientists, fishermen, Native stakeholders, artists and donors. Because of our efforts we were able to hold the line of development and unify Native people, commercial fishermen and conservationists on several critical campaigns to keep the Copper River watershed trail free and roadless, for now. Now, we want permanent protection that forever preserves our Native and fishing cultures while preserving our wild salmon markets and renewable and sustainable fishing economy.

Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers' marketing material.
Dune Lankard is a Native Eyak from Cordova, Alaska. A commercial fisherman, he became an ecosystem advocate after the Exxon Valdez oil spill devastated his homelands. Since then, Dune has lived up to his Eyak name, Jamachakih: Little Bird Who Screams Really Loud and Won’t Shut Up. The institutions he has founded– including Eyak Preservation Council (EPC), the Fund for Indigenous Rights and the Environment (FIRE Fund) and the NATIVE Conservancy Land Trust– protect wilderness and secure rights for Native people to continue their way of life. He is now developing social profit firms combining the positive characteristics of for-profits and non-profits

Please write an overview of your project. This text will appear when people scroll over the icon for your entry on the Google map located on teh competition homepage.
Copper River Wilderness Rafting (CRWR) is a 7-day float trip that starts in Chitina and travels the Copper River down to Cordova, Alaska. In the 110-mile adventure, participants will witness bears, wolves, seals, eagles, land otters and eat wild Copper River salmon. There are four climate changes that cleanse everyone’s mind and souls. Upriver is hot where sunburns happen, the next leg of the trip there are tremendous sand dunes caused by glacial silt, then we travel into the land of glaciers where the temperature dips, then on the lower Copper we raft among huge turquoise icebergs and oftentimes encounter rain from the Gulf of Alaska. CRWR raises awareness of environmental, wild salmon and Indigenous cultural issues in the Copper River Delta, Prince William Sound and the Chugach National Forest and shows how these issues are connected to the global community. Pre-trip conferences with local residents and camp discussions cover all sides of issues such as subsistence living, cultural and environmental preservation, leave no trace camping, and grassroots activism. While floating the Copper River participants experience the magic of this pristine wilderness and come to an intimate appreciation of the importance of protecting our planet’s last remaining wild places.

Contact Information
Title (e.g. Mr. Ms. Dune Lankard
Your Job Title
Eyak Preservation Council
PO Box 460 Cordova, Alaska
dune@redzone.org