SEWARD FARMER'S MARKET (opens in new window)
Our goals are to cultivate connections to the natural world, empower community resilience, and inspire collective climate action. With the Seward Farmer’s Market, we uphold this mission, and successfully turn tourism dollars into benefits for our local community.
We believe it’s important to feel connected to where our food comes from, improve security around food resources, and provide a platform for local growers and craftspeople. This is one way we have found to leverage our collective power for community-level resilience and strength in the face of a changing Alaska.
Talking about climate change is challenging. That’s where our friends at the National Network for Ocean & Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI) come in. NNOCCI offers resources and training to help others strengthen their voices and to increase our collective impact in promoting climate action. You’ll notice that the first step on most climate action plans is to talk about climate change, and we’re excited to start that conversation.
In pursuit of our goal to inspire collective action, we are proud members of 1% For The Planet, a pledge to commit at least 1% of our annual sales to nonprofit environmental organizations. By joining this group of over 5,000 businesses that have donated over 530 million dollars, we hope to motivate others to direct tourism dollars towards a cleaner planet. We specifically choose to partner with Alaskan nonprofits that benefit the local community, ecosystems, and wildlife, through their work to address pressing environmental issues in Alaska.
We invite our guests to be active stewards by choosing which nonprofit in our program most connects to their personal core values. On your tour you will learn a bit about what each of these organizations does to protect our planet. Then at the end of your tour, you will have the choice of which nonprofit resonates most with you. We use small wooden tokens to keep track of your choice and when we donate 1% of our annual sales to these nonprofits, we will divvy them up accordingly.
Working with our amazing nonprofit partners, we have the opportunity to lead, to be fearless, and to fully embody our belief that when dollars and doers come together, we are unstoppable.
On our boat + hike combo tours, we offer the option to offset the carbon emissions of the boat tour. We hope that we inspire questions, curiosity, and action by beginning a dialogue on carbon offsets. Above and beyond anything else we do, encouraging you to have an inquisitive outlook on the world, whether in regards to wildlife or our changing climate, is one of our biggest goals.
Many companies are now marketing “carbon neutral” trips. However, we feel that this is misleading, as carbon offsets do not zero out the carbon emissions, they simply mitigate them in a strategic way. While we believe in carbon offsets as a positive thing, we recognize that we still have a significant impact on the world around us.
Furthermore, offering “carbon neutral” tours would have robbed us of an educational opportunity. We think that allowing you to make the decision about your carbon footprint is more meaningful. We hope it helps you to see your actions in a new light, and opens up possibilities for how to address your carbon footprint, whether it is your commute to and from work each day, the flight you took to get to Alaska, or the electricity you use from fossil fuel power sources. We are all active participants on this planet and have the opportunity to engage in a sustainable way forward.
And if we’ve piqued your interest in learning about carbon offsets, here are some resources we found interesting and are happy to share with you:
A Complete Guide to Carbon Offsetting by The Guardian
How Carbon Trading Became a Way of Life for California’s Yurok Tribe by The New Yorker
Carbon Offset FAQs by NativeEnergy
Chugach Alaska Corporation Enters Agreement to Sell Carbon Credits to California by Indian Country Today Climate Education
