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Clean air and water is essential to support Alaska’s huge and diverse ecosystem. Trustees for Alaska has a long history of protecting the clean water and wildlife resources. From our earliest days challenging Susitna Hydroelectric Project to today’s fights for Seward Alaska’s harbor and against Pebble Mine, Trustees for Alaska hold our clean air and water as key program in our mission.

The light always returns: Alaska News Brief June 2023

Earlier this month, I joined my mom on her last—for now—“bucket list” adventure. We took the train to the Canadian Rocky Mountains for two days from Vancouver to Banff, going from an urban landscape and rainforest into high desert into boreal forest. Then we rented a car to spend some time in Lake Louise and Calgary. Stunning! And, because life works this way, I caught a virus at the end of this short-but-sweet trip.… Read More

How building a house in Idaho changed national wetlands policy and now threatens waterways in Alaska

In late May, the U.S. Supreme Court again stepped out of its role as interpreter of the Constitution and law and did what only Congress is allowed to do: Rewrite the definition of “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act.  If you care about clean water and understand the tremendous progress made in the last 50 years in cleaning up rivers choked with so much pollution they burned, seeing huge fish kills because of toxic pollutants, and seeing beaches closed to swimming because people were getting sick, then you should worry about how the Sackett v. EPA case reverses that progress. … Read More

A trip to the South Brooks Range makes the Ambler road threat palpable

One of the things that most struck me in flying across the proposed Ambler road route was just how complex the waterways are across the Southern Brooks Range. Waters flow down off the mountains of the Brooks Range and crisscross the vast valleys down below. In just the distance between Coldfoot and Iniakuk Lake, we flew over countless winding rivers, streams, and lakes.… Read More

Stories can teach, stories can lie: Alaska News Brief April 2022

It doesn’t take long spending time with dogs, bears, birds and bees to know they communicate. Some animals even manipulate. Only human animals uniquely share knowledge, wisdom, tall tales and lies through stories. The writer Margaret Atwood describes the origin of storytelling as the coupling of language with concepts of the past, present, and future to help people learn about what happened before—to teach people things to avoid having to learn by trial and error every time.… Read More

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