Working together, Alaskans are a powerful force for positive change in our communities. Let’s roll up our sleeves and put local solutions into action!
We’ve all seen what happens when outsiders come in and do things without meaningful input from locals: We get cookie cutter houses built for Florida winters where all the roofs shed snow right onto the doorstep.
Our Alaskan communities feel the sharp impacts of rising temperatures, increasing wildfires, and polluting emissions. Because we intimately experience the accelerated warming happening in the arctic and sub-arctic, we also know what will work best to solve the problems here. Our Central Peninsula Local Solution Series and Homer Drawdown Series are concrete examples of how the world can be a better place with meaningful community action. The local solutions in our series are being chosen and implemented BY the community, FOR the community.
While it’s important to assess and discuss climate change, we also need to get to work implementing solutions right here, right now. Over the past two years, we’ve rolled up our sleeves alongside hundreds of volunteers and participants and tackled real projects that not only make our communities healthier but also meaningfully reduce the rampant emissions that are warming our salmon streams, depleting our snowpack and threatening our Alaskan way of life. Many of you participated in these projects and you are the heroes behind the success of Solarize the Kenai, Community Compost and Peatland Preservation. THANK YOU!
In both the Central and Lower Peninsula, we just finished concurrent deep dives into our next local solutions. In the Central Peninsula, we explored the next top three solutions that came from our initial community brainstorm in 2019: Energize the Kenai – a community energy audit and retrofit program, Re-Treeing Our Neighborhoods, and Landfill Methane Capture (reach out to david@inletkeeper.org for more info). Re-Treeing was voted the first solution to start with in our rank-choice community solution selection process. Check out this Peninsula Clarion article from our initial Re-Treeing community dialogue. In Homer, we explored a host of top solutions that arose during the 2020 planning process from a Local Food Preservation Co-op, a Home Energy Efficiency initiative, and Affordable Heat Pumps (reach out to satchel@inletkeeper.org for more info). The winner was Non-Motorized Paths! Both communities are diving in and getting to work. Join the team today and be part of the solution!
If you live outside of the Central or Lower Kenai Peninsula and want to start a solution in your area, we would love to support you with planning and a micro-grant to kickstart your local solution. Check out the guide we developed to help implement local climate actions at inletkeeper.org/actionkit and get in touch with kaitlin@inletkeeper.org!
Check out KDLL’s reporting on the Methane Capture Solution: Inletkeeper is holding a vote May 5 to gauge which community solution volunteers would like to focus on next. In the past, it’s solarized local homes and businesses and created a community composting system (Photo by Sabine Poux, KDLL).