Balance between traditional activities, tourism key to sustaining coastal Alaska communities

When Lee Cerveny arrived in coastal southeast Alaska in 1999, she intended to interview local women about their relationship with the natural environment. She soon found, however, that women she met were more interested in talking about tourism and making sense of the changes that were taking place within their communities. Cerveny adapted her research focus on the fly, ultimately conducting more than 200 hour-long interviews as part of a two-year-long ethnographic study on coastal Alaskans' perceptions of tourism. The findings of her work were recently published as a book titled "Nature and Tourists in the Last Frontier: Local Encounters with Global Tourism in Coastal Alaska."

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