The Observer, July 2006
Board member honored for work on oceans
Walter Parker this summer received the 2006 Ocean Champion Award at the Alaska Oceans Festival in Anchorage.
Parker represents the Oil Spill Region Environmental Coalition on the citizens’ council board.
The Ocean Champion Award is presented annually to a key individual in the Alaska community who has worked for ocean conservation in Alaska’s waters. It is sponsored by the Alaska Conservation Foundation’s Alaska Oceans Program.
“Walter Parker was selected for many reasons, but largely because of the inspiration he fosters and his dedication to conservation issues in Alaska and the Arctic,” the sponsors said in announcing the award.
Besides serving on the citizens’ council, Parker is a member of the North Pacific Research Board; the Oil Spill Recovery Institute; the Environmental Preparation, Prevention, and Response Working Group of the Arctic Council; and the Alaska advisory board of the Ocean Foundation. In addition, he chairs the Circumpolar Infrastructure Task Force for the Arctic Council. He has held many state, federal, and local positions in government, including the chairmanship of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission after the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.
He also co-founded the Alaska Forum for Environmental Responsibility and, since the Selendang Ayu grounding off Unalaska, has helped lead efforts to put safer shipping measures into place along the Great Circle Shipping Route.
“Several things have come together in the past three decades that will have profound effects on North Pacific ecosystems,” Parker told the Observer in an email. “First and primary is rapid climate change that is already having a strong effect on ocean currents and temperatures. Next is increasing industrial development in East Asia which will contribute more and more contaminants, seaborne and airborne. Contaminants from the greatly increased shipping between East Asia and North America will add to this.”
Parker said he hoped the large marine ecosystem program of the United Nations would provide information that will enable regulators to deal with these changes.
“It will take a lot of money to do this, from the U.S., Japan, Russia, China, Canada and Korea,” Parker wrote. “Regional treaties and agreements are more important than ever.”