At the last Harvest Moon Festival in Soldotna, our Local Foods Program hosted a booth, with an interactive component aimed at helping event participants understand the carbon footprint of their food choices. The carbon footprint of a food, or “foodprint,” is the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced throughout its journey from seed to farm,...
Cook Inletkeeper works to ensure our state government protects our wild salmon. We fought the state when it authorized the industry to destroy 11 miles of Alaskan salmon streams for the proposed Chuitna Coal Mine. Our Government and industry repeatedly claim that they would never trade one of Alaska’s resources (salmon) for another (coal). Yet...
As we transition from long summer nights to fall, the autumnal equinox reminds us that Solarize the Kenai is nearing the end of its 2021 season. Inletkeeper proudly supports this volunteer-led effort to help make clean energy more affordable to Kenai Peninsula residents. In 2020, 84 people added photovoltaic (PV) rooftop panels to their homes and...
Most people don’t know about the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, or how, more recently, it helped shape resource development in Alaska. But this forgotten history is vital, because as the poet Maya Angelou famously put it: “You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you have been.” The Battle of Blair...
The Kachemak Bay Conservation Center (KBCC), located on Ben Walters Ln in Homer, houses several conservation organizations like Inletkeeper and Kachemak Bay Conservation Society who work to protect and preserve this place we call home. When the KBCC was built in 2001 with the vision of creating a space “dedicated to preserving the...
Decades-Old Regulations Currently Allow Use of Toxic Chemicals after Oil Spills A federal district court judge ruled on August 9 in favor of Inletkeeper and a coalition of individuals and environmental groups and ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to update its decades-old regulations on the use of toxic chemical...
The fact that fish need water and that Alaskans love their fish should not be controversial. But the House Fisheries Committee held a meeting to learn about the Department of Natural Resources' (DNR) proposed changes to the regulations that allow Alaskans to keep water in streams for fish. Although DNR refused to show up, Cook Inletkeeper raised...
If you were alive in the 1970s, you probably remember the “Crying Native American” ad. It came in the wake of the first Earth Day, when millions of Americans flocked to the streets, driven by fresh visions of burning pollution in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River and the outrage of blackened California beaches after the Unocal oil well blow-out. The ad...
Alaskans are blessed with an abundance unlike anywhere else. And that abundance translates to a richness of life we all savor. It’s hard to find anyone who voted for Trump or Biden who disagrees: we all love Alaska. So, why are we squandering this rich legacy for short term profit? And why are we allowing the vast majority of our resource...
By Claire Babbott-Bryan, Climate Change and Wild Salmon Intern I’ve been a water nerd my whole life. It began, as it so often does, with the third-grade interdisciplinary river unit. In English class, we wrote poetry personifying the local biota. In art, we crafted ceramic salmon plaques. My favorite was science class, where we learned the salmon...
