Writing by Assistant Professor Rosanne Pagano is featured in the summer issue of Forum, the magazine of the Alaska Humanities Forum.
“Speaking of Salmon” focuses on understanding the ways that tolerance for ideas we don’t agree with can help resolve divisions among Alaskans who depend on the sustained health of wild Alaska salmon. The effort is sponsored by the Anchorage-based Humanities Forum and involves leaders from around the state with expertise ranging from land management to guiding, Alaska Native tribal advocacy to philosophy, sport fishing and commercial fishing to social science. Known as the Alaska Salmon Fellows, the 16-member group meets regularly to form working groups and develop new, collective projects.
“We’ve almost come to think that it’s normal to just talk past people we disagree with,” Pagano said. “This new project by the Humanities Forum reminds us that tolerance – the real goal of a liberal arts education – is key to solving problems.”
The first cohort of Salmon Fellows was named in April and includes Ben Mohr, land manager with Cook Inlet Region and an APU graduate who completed a bachelor’s degree in Outdoor Studies in 2005. “Fish were never really my thing,” Mohr said. That changed when he came to Alaska for college and hooked his first red salmon on the Russian River, about 110 miles south of Anchorage. “I haven’t stopped fishing since,” he told the magazine.
Pagano is a longtime Anchorage writer and editor whose work has appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Alaska magazine, National Parks Magazine and other news outlets and websites. She serves as APU writing coordinator and teaches in the writing program. Read the summer issue of Forum: https://www.akhf.org/magazine
