This ethnographic study examines how as an agent of globalization, the Bering Sea's transnational commercial fishing industry has influenced local social and environmental change. It seeks to answer the question: How has industrial fishing effected social and environmental change in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Island area as experienced in the locality of Unalaska, Alaska? This study takes a local knowledge approach to this problem by historically examining changes in the life experience of local resource stakeholder groups since industrial fishing began in the area in 1960. This approach defines what it means to be local for these groups by exposing their varying relationships to marine resources in their socioeconomic practices, and in the values, beliefs and discourses concerning those practices. The study identifies the economic opportunities and constraints presented to the local population as a result of changes in mode of production and the resource base. Social change occurs in the cultural response to those opportunities and constraints.

These documents summarize some of the recent studies of the relationships among climate, the aquatic environment, and the dynamics of fish populations. The studies are mostly from the North Pacific ocean, but there are reports of investigations from the North Atlatic Ocean and from fresh water. Various papers include numerous examples of the relationships between fish abundance trends and the environment.