Meet our Guests: Kristen Kirkby

Kristen Kirkby

Fisheries Biologist, Cascade Fisheries

Twisp, WA

8/31/2021

There are nine dams on the Columbia River between the ocean and the spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead in the Methow River Basin. During migration their chances of survival exponentially decrease with each obstacle. For Kristen Kirkby, Fisheries Biologist with Cascade Fisheries and 2004 Westie, protecting this migration route is key. Spring Chinook salmon, steelhead, bull trout, and Pacific lamprey (Kristen’s favorite water dwellers) are all listed under the Endangered Species Act as either threatened or endangered. The populations of these species have been plummeting over the past century due to a variety of factors Kristen says can be summarized as the four “H’s”: habitat, hatcheries, harvest, and hydroelectric dams. Overconsumption, habitat degradation, disease from hatcheries, and dams create a nearly impossible path to sea for these fish.

In an effort to ameliorate the dire situation, Kirkby utilizes mitigation funds from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the organization that manages Columbia River hydroelectricity, to restore and rehabilitate rivers and tributaries that can help safely house and transport fish on their journey through the Columbia River. These funds stem BPA, which promised to pay out $900 million from their revenue for fish habitat restoration projects over a period of ten years.

Kristen has been working on projects with Cascade Fisheries for more than a decade, one of which located at Wolf Creek in the Methow Valley. Westies were fortunate enough to suit up and snorkel with some of the many fish that inhabit and thrive within the restored riparian area. The work that Kirkby is doing is limited in its ability to drastically alter the survival chances of salmonids trapped in a dammed river system once they leave protected habitats upriver. And yet, her confidence remains reassuring despite the unpredictable flow of fish politics in the Pacific Northwest.

By Elio Van Gorden

Meet our Guests: Neil Kornze

Neil Kornze

CEO of the Campion Foundation and Campion Advocacy Fund, former Director of the Bureau of Land Management

Methow Valley, WA

8/29/21

A Nevada Native, Neil Kornze grew up with over 60% of his home state’s land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). By age 35, Neil was the director of that agency and oversaw that land in his home state and millions of other acres, altogether comprising 10% of the nation’s land area. Neil graduated from Whitman in 2000 and went on to study at the London School of Economics. In 2014, he was confirmed under the Obama administration as the director of the BLM. Neil was an innovative force within the BLM. During his three-year tenure, Neil worked to expand renewable energy generation on BLM lands and protect culturally and ecologically significant areas, all while making them more accessible to the public.

Today, Neil still works with the nation’s public lands in a different capacity as the CEO of the Campion Advocacy Fund (CAF). CAF was started by Tom Campion, co-founder of Zumiez, and his partner Sonya, with the main goals of protecting intact wilderness ecosystems in the U.S. and working to find solutions to homelessness across the nation. At the forefront of CAF’s priorities is permanently protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Neil recently led a host of White House officials to this remote region to experience its raw landscape and captivating wildlife.

Neil hopes for a future where government agencies can collaborate more and reduce conflict in land management. A possible starting strategy that he proposes is “being able to walk down the hall and have a conversation with the people making decisions…colocation [of agencies] is a simple but powerful thing.” What could result from such a collaborative structure are what Neil calls the National Trust Lands, “a combination of the forest service, the refuges, the BLM…and some set of the parks…I would like to see us erase those lines.”

By Ani Pham

Meet our Guests: Matt Ellis

Matt Ellis

Fire Management Officer, Methow Valley Ranger District, U.S. Forest Service

Methow Valley, WA

08/30/2021

Standing amongst an old-growth forest stand in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, Matt Ellis, Fire Management Officer for the Forest Service’s Methow Valley Ranger District, speaks to the dilemmas in managing National Forest land from a wildfire management perspective. When looking at this dense, multi-layered old-growth forest, Matt sees a continuous availability of fuel and the potential for high-severity fire. However, Matt’s Forest Service colleague, wildlife biologist John Rohrer sees an ideal habitat for the northern spotted owl, an animal that was listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) due to loss of habitat. The spotted owl’s status under the ESA means that the Forest Service has to prioritize preserving its habitat. Nevertheless, Matt knows that without thinning the vegetation in old growth stands, fire will blacken the landscape on a large scale.

Dilemmas such as this often don’t have easily defined answers. Matt emphasizes that there’s not one person or agency that fully gets their way in the management of forest lands. In the old growth stand Semester in the West visited only small diameter trees were thinned to reduce fire risk, while the large ponderosa pines that provide habitat for the spotted owl still stand tall.

Despite the demanding nature of reconciling fire safety with the variety of uses on forest lands, Matt continues to believe “one of the coolest things about the Forest Service is we offer opportunities for all these different users.”

By Claire Warncke

Meet our Guests: Lincoln Post

Lincoln Post

Carpenter, former President of the Methow Valley Citizens Council, co-founder of Cinnamon Twisp Bakery 

Twisp, WA

8/27/2021

Lincoln Post is a born storyteller and a stalwart protector of his home: north-central Washington’s Methow Valley. He believes in commitment to place. To Lincoln, “being a local means being a contributor.”

In the 1990s, a Colorado-based corporation proposed development of a ski resort complete with condo units, a couple of golf courses, and a “boutique town.” Some Methow residents were weary of the site’s impact on their small farming and ranching community, a population of around 2,000. Lincoln attended a meeting to review the corporation’s environmental impact statement. He left as the president of the Methow Valley Citizens Council, the only person willing to sign an appeal. Lincoln entered the political scene as the valley emerged into two distinct groups: those in favor and those opposed to the resort project. To many, the remote location was a tourism gold mine waiting to happen; to others it was home, and already felt too much like a vacation destination. Lincoln and other residents fought against the proposed resort. As he puts it “there’s a strong community here even if it was small.” The development operation was slowed by the resistance put forth by MVCC and was eventually halted by water rights: the corporation couldn’t purchase enough water to realize their plans. 

Lincoln’s efforts speak to the power of small, determined groups of citizens to influence the future of their home, even when faced with economic pressure to alter their way of life.

By Neave Fleming

Meet our Guests: David Schmidt and Spenser Shadle

David Schmidt and Spenser Shadle

CEO, CFO Heartwood Biomass

Wallowa, OR

8/24/21

David Schmidt and Spenser Shadle are two affable entrepreneurs whose timber mill, Heartwood Biomass, is redefining the timber industry by building a web of symbiotic relationships between environmental, community, and economic interests.

In Wallowa County, fire suppression over the past century has led to unnaturally dense forests susceptible to catastrophic wildfires. Thinning of small diameter trees is widely accepted as a necessary fire mitigation practice. Unfortunately, standard timber mills are designed to process old-growth trees and thus are mechanically and financially unable to take on forest restoration projects.

By processing small diameter trees from fire suppression projects into poles, firewood, and woodchips, Heartwood Biomass creates a niche market for sustainable forest management. While showing Semester in the West around the mill, David charismatically proclaimed, “I see humans as part of the landscape.” This sentiment guides David and Spenser’s philosophy of creating economic opportunity to incentivize healthy landscapes. They hope the mill will help move the community away from an extraction-based economy and toward one that promotes the stewardship of both natural resources and local jobs.

By Josh Matz

Meet our Guests: Dana Visalli

Dana Visalli

Organic Farmer and Editor of The Methow Naturalist

Winthrop, Washington

August 28, 2021 

A self-proclaimed “refugee from American culture,” Dana Visalli moved to the Methow Valley in 1970, built an off-the-grid house, and began preparing the sandy soil surrounding it for farming. He wanted to know how to grow food, and how to make something by hand—two things his city upbringing had not taught him.

“It’s a tough way to start: living in the country, growing up in the city,” Dana states. “I just constantly put everything together backwards. You have to learn how to do everything, but that makes life challenging and exciting.”

Disenchanted by conventional American agricultural practices—which he notes were “built on energy addiction”—Dana embraced the ethos of challenge and excitement, and set about farming with ecological processes in mind.

Dana explained how the alchemy of ingested food becoming manure, and manure returning to enrich the soil is one cycle that has been wholly undervalued. It’s a cycle of reciprocity that demonstrates humans’ embeddedness in ecological processes. But that cycle has been broken, Dana claimed. Rather than treasuring our “humanure,” as Dana calls it, we label it “waste” to be disposed of. Rather than enriched soil, we end up with fertilizer dependencies and mass scale waste problems that, Dana claims, are wholly unsustainable.

An example of his penchant to take the road less traveled, Dana’s garden tells a different story: the once sandy soil is rich and dark with organic matter and humanure, the air hums with pollinators, and the garden rows swell with bounty. As a result, the compost pile is well-fed, and so are Dana’s neighbors who come by on weekends to buy his produce.

Standing amidst it all, Dana declares with reverential glee: “I’m entranced by the miracle of life!” Then, more quietly: “I don’t know what the question is, but the answer is ecology.”

By Nicki Caddell

Meet our Guests: Angela Bombaci

Angela Bombaci

Executive Director, Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland

Wallowa County, Oregon

08/26/21

Passion lights up Angela Bombaci’s faces as she talks about her role as Executive Director of the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland, a nonprofit that manages a 320-acre property in Wallowa, Oregon, that aims to reconnect Nez Perce people with their ancestral homeland. With miles of walking trails, a longhouse and beautiful dance arbor for gatherings and ceremonies, and a major salmon restoration project, the Homeland has become a hub for native culture in Wallowa County.

In 1877, the Nez Perce people were violently displaced by white settlers and the US government from what is now Wallowa County. Angela believes that the mission of the Homeland is even more important because of this. She is dedicated to helping provide the Nez Perce people the platform to tell their own story and a physical place to gather on the land that was once occupied by their ancestors since time immemorial. 

Angela says that “The highest priority [of the Homeland] is to create space for people to celebrate their culture.” This has included large, joyful gatherings like the Tamklik powwow, smaller events like naming ceremonies and celebrations of life and death, and groups like Semester in the West visiting to learn about Nez Perce story.

Angela has worked hard to facilitate positive relationships between current Wallowa residents and Nez Perce tribal members and has been thrilled by the joy and excitement she has received in response.

By Livvie Bright

Photo courtesy Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland

Meet our Guests: Montana Pagano

Montana Pagano

Watershed Restoration Specialist, Nez Perce Tribe Department of Fisheries

Wallowa, OR

8/25/21

Montana Pagano covers a lot of ground with her work for the Nez Perce Tribe as a Watershed Restoration Specialist. Her project area encompasses 3 million acres in Northeast Oregon and Southeast Washington where she focuses on salmonid (salmon and trout) habitat restoration. Semester in the West was able to visit one of her recent projects on a site owned by the Nez Perce Tribe where her team is in the final stages of creating a side channel on the Wallowa River to enhance native fish habitat. More than 100 years ago the river was straightened by non-native residents, destroying much of the river’s fish habitat. The Nez Perce’s side channel project reintroduces refuges for juvenile salmonids that are quickly vanishing from streams due to the prevalence of dams and warming stream temperatures caused by climate change.

It took several years before the project received approval and the Tribe was able to break ground. Montana reflects, “habitat restoration work takes a long time. It takes a long time to get this habitat to the level of degradation that it’s in, so you can imagine it takes a while to rehabilitate it.” Currently, the river is showing signs of improvement. The side channel has already created mellow stretches of stream for fish to rest with ample shade from transplanted willows, and the river will continue to evolve as natural processes take over the restoration work. A long time in the making, the persistent efforts of Montana and her team are beginning to pay off.

By Ruthie Colburn

Photo credit: Phil Brick

Meet our Guests: Joe McCormack

Joe McCormack

Tribal Fisheries Biologist, Nez Perce Department of Fisheries

Wallowa, OR

8/26/21

The Nimiipuu people, known by most as the Nez Perce, were forced from their homeland in what is now Wallowa County, Oregon in late 1877 by white settlers and the US Army. Since the infamous Flight of the Nez Perce, most tribal members live on a reservation in Idaho, hundreds of miles from their traditional territory. Joe McCormack is a biologist for the Nez Perce Department of Fisheries and one of the few tribal members still living in Wallowa County, working to revive populations of the salmon his ancestors subsisted off of since time immemorial.

Salmon historically spawned in the Wallowa River basin, but more than a century of stream channelization and habitat degradation has pushed their numbers close to extinction. After earning a degree in fish biology from Washington State University, Joe moved to a ranch in Wallowa County and today spends his time working to restore salmon to the Wallowa River. Most days, that means monitoring fish populations or adding structure and native vegetation to river banks. Joe considers himself lucky to have studied fisheries biology, as it gave him the privilege of living in his ancestral homeland, and he thinks education is an important step for other Nimiipuu to return to their ancestral land: “Young people now are getting undergrad degrees, graduate degrees, doctorate degrees... and that I think is key to people moving to Wallowa County, with those tools.” Joe is using his education and Western science as a lever to return culturally significant animals and tradition to his people’s home.

By Kevin Faeustle

Photo credit: Phil Brick

Meet our Guests: Rich Wandschneider

Rich Wandschneider

Library Director, Josephy Center for Arts and Culture

Joseph, OR

8/25/2

     In the small town of Joseph Oregon, so named for the famous Nimiipuu (also known as the Nez Perce) leader Chief Joseph, there lives a storyteller. Rich Wandschneider is an animated local historian and Library Director at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture. Rich tells the stories of the Nez Perce tribes who inhabited and still inhabit the West: stories of cultural annihilation, land expropriated from the tribe by white settlers, and promises unkept. These stories aren’t his own, but he explains that when white settlers came to the West, they kept written notes detailing of all their journeys and conquests. With these stories, outreach and extensive research, Rich put together the Nez Perce Treaties and Reservations Exhibit at the Josephy Center. The exhibit includes detailed maps, historic drawings and paintings all to illustrate the impact treaties have had and still have on the Nez Perce tribe. Rich is a steward of Native American history in the West working to share the stories of the Nimiipuu with his community of Joseph, Oregon and all of its visitors.

By Jade Strapart

Meet our Guests: Gail Hammack

Gail Hammack

Rancher

Wallowa County, OR

8/25/21

Gail Hammack was not born a rancher. She is not a fourth generation Wallowa County resident like her late husband Doug McDaniel. Gail Hammack is a trained educator who traded her corporate job as McDonald’s regional Vice President for a life of cattle ranching. Today, she is a steward of land, of legacy and of love.

In 1998, Gail married Doug and, simultaneously, his cattle-grazing operation in rural Eastern Oregon. Doug—Gail recounts—loved the land immensely. His passionate care for river systems is what ultimately inspired the couple to re-meander the section of Wallowa River flowing through their private property. In the 1950s, the Wallowa was mechanically straightened to build railroads and grazing lots. This environmental surgery had unintended consequences: lacking in natural curvature, the channelized river became too fast-moving and too warm to support ecologically critical fish species such as salmon. In 2003, Gail and Doug—with the help of local resource agencies—began the process of putting the meanders back into their section of the river. The first two phases of the project focused on improving natural resources and restoring the historic fish habitat. They re-routed half-a-mile of Wallowa canal into a mile of winding riverbed. Doug, Gail, and their team geo-engineered the new channel with felled logs and vegetative cover to reintroduce diversity and complexity into the riparian area.

Since Doug’s passing in 2019, Gail has devoted herself to carrying on her husband’s legacy. She owns and operates the cattle operation while simultaneously spearheading Phase Three of the Wallowa River Restoration Project to further improve wildlife habitat, restore healthy riparian processes and inspire other landowners to do the same.

By Kate Joss

Meet our Guests: Angel Sobotta

Angel Sobotta

Nez Perce Language Program Coordinator and Storyteller

Wallowa, OR

8/26/21

Wearing traditional beaded moccasins, a ribbon skirt, and an intricate necklace, Angel Sobotta welcomes us with a Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) greeting. She greets Semester in the West in the dance arbor at the Nez Perce Wallowa Homelands, a site reclaimed for the celebration and recognition of the first people of the region after they were forced out by the US Federal Government 100 years ago.

Angel is dedicated to reclaiming Nimiipuu tradition through language. “You must rename it to claim it” she says. In her culture, names are a source of guidance—something to live up to. Angel’s Nimiipuu name means “the red glowing part of the sunset.” Both of her names remind her of beauty and grace and have helped to guide her through troubling times. She believes that bringing Nimiipuu language back into the lives of her people can do the same. She refers to the revival of language as a medicine to heal her peoples’ spirits, provide understanding of their culture, and connect to their ancestors.       

Angel shares the story of the sáplis- a symbol sacred to the Nimiipuu derived from the rotation of Hiyumtaxto around Luk’upsmey (the Big Dipper and the North Star, respectively) that creates a map of the sky. Based on the location of Hiyumtaxto, the Nimiipuu know when to harvest and hunt and when to migrate each season. This sacred symbol has been appropriated by other entities—the Nazi Swastika has the same basic shape—and through the telling of the origin of Hiyumtaxto and the sáplis, Angel works to reclaim the symbol and its meaning.

To conclude the morning, Angel led the group in a traditional friendship dance, stepping clockwise to the beat of a drum. Circling around the center of the dance arbor, Angel smiled and shook hands with each student she passed.

By Katie Wallace

Photo credit: Phil Brick

Meet our Guests: Matt Howard

Matt Howard

Fire Manager, Oregon Department of Forestry

Wallowa County, OR

8/24/2021

Standing in the hot sun on a bed of dry pine needles, Matt Howard, Fire Manager with the Oregon Department of Forestry, emphasizes that this place, the Lostine Canyon in northeastern Oregon, is only accessible by a one-lane road. The nature of the road and its users means that a wildfire evacuation would be difficult and slow. Traffic could create a bottleneck at the bridge and block emergency vehicles. Matt describes that thinning the forest around the road by cutting small diameter trees would give firefighters a chance to hold back a blaze during an evacuation.

Working with homeowners in the area, Matt educates on fire preparedness. About half of the residents in Lostine Canyon participate in the Firewise Community program which involves creating a “defensible space” without burnable debris around their homes so that wildfire or flying embers do not ignite the building as easily. Why don’t more people take action to protect their (and their neighbors’) homes? Matt explains in a resigned tone that people just do not think fire will come to them. He also mentions that it is hard to get second homeowners to care for a property they only visit one or two weeks in a year. Matt speaks from experience when he says “I can educate, I can regulate, but people aren’t going to do things unless they believe in them.”

Matt loves these woods, and understands why people would risk living here. Even considering the persistence of fire in the area, Matt believes that “people can live here and be safe…knowing there’s inherent risk.”

By Reya Fore

Meet Our Guests: Gwen Trice

Gwen Trice

Founder and Executive Director, Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center

Joseph, Oregon

8/23/21

     Gwen Trice’s father never told her about being one of the first Black people to live or work in the state of Oregon. During a time when the state’s constitution barred Black people from the entire state, he worked as a logger in Maxville, a small company town in Wallowa County, Oregon. After spending time away from Wallowa County, a hostile environment for Gwen growing up, she learned of her family history and decided to return to save space for people of color, both culturally and literally.

     Gwen is the founder and Executive Director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, a local nonprofit located in Joseph, Oregon, that is dedicated to telling the story of her family and the other families that made up the town of Maxville. The museum showcases artifacts and stories from the residents, but Gwen did not stop there. She channels her seemingly boundless creativity into multiple storytelling ventures including a musical about Maxville performed around Oregon, and multiple documentaries interviewing residents of the town and their decedents.

    Gwen is currently working to rebuild the original administrative building from Maxville to use as an interpretive space to celebrate and share her family’s history while educating visitors about the history of this often-overlooked Black community. Gwen believes in telling these forgotten and erased stories because she wants to give everyone a story, including the people who didn’t know about their histories and those whose voices were lost when Maxville became a ghost town.

By Haley Post

Meet our Guests: Brian Kelly

Brian Kelly

Restoration Director, Greater Hells Canyon Council

Lostine, OR

8/22/21

The Lostine River Corridor is a place of great tension for many residents of Wallowa County. For Brian Kelly, Restoration Director for the Greater Hells Canyon Council, a regional environmental advocacy group, this is an area of devastation and disappointment. Brian is a transplant to northeastern Oregon, the native New Yorker discovered his love for the West on a hitchhiking trip straight out of high school and came back to his home state eager to return. He soon got his chance in the form of a full-time position with the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon; however, after a year with the federal agency he became disillusioned with its forestry practices.

Brian believes in a holistic and forward-thinking approach to forest management that emphasizes minimal intervention and natural aesthetics. Much of Brian’s work revolves around advocating for land managers to follow those principles, but it can be a struggle to convince them. Recently he has advocated against the Lostine Corridor Project, a tree-thinning project conducted by the Forest Service meant to reduce fire danger along a heavily-trafficked forest road. The Forest Service exempted this project from a full environmental analysis for public safety reasons, but Brian argued that it deserved a thorough assessment. Looking over stumps and debris between the remaining trees, he said “this would be a great treatment for a dry, pine forest. Unfortunately, it’s not a dry pine forest.” The transition from the thinning site to the wet undisturbed canopy further from the road provides confirms Brian’s assessment of the forest. In most of the clear-cuts that Brian has worked on, he believes it was unnecessary to clear the area in the first place. “If you’re doing that kind of forestry, let’s just say that I don’t agree with you”.

By Elio Van Gorden

Meet our Guests: Nils Christoffersen

Nils Christoffersen

Executive Director, Wallowa Resources

Wallowa County, Oregon

8/24/2021

     After Wallowa County lost 20% of its jobs due to its sawmills shutting down in 1996, Nils Christoffersen stepped up alongside other citizens to regrow the community. Now the Executive Director of Wallowa Resources, a local environmental stewardship and economic development nonprofit, Nils believes that if people didn’t step up to steer the community in a positive direction, some other boom-and-bust investor would have capitalized on the in-need populace by staking ownership over a new economy in tech, heavy tourism, or energy development.

     What Nils and others had in mind for Wallowa County’s rural wellbeing was a new economic model that balanced the vitality of the community’s economy with its environment. They established a vision for a “stewardship economy” that creates jobs while respecting ecosystems or even actively restoring them. As Nils spoke to Westies on the Goebel-Jackson Tree Farm, the students looked around at an embodiment of that vision: a vibrantly diverse landscape on which the Goebel and Jackson families thinned and sold small diameter, dead, or downed trees to both protect against high-intensity fires and secure their retirements. Wallowa Resources is a collaborative conservation group, meaning that it works with partners like the Forest Service, the Nez Perce Tribe, Wallowa Land Trust, and private landowners to meet intersectional goals while building trust and resiliency at a local level. It’s easier said than done, Nils will tell you. There is no project that wholly meets each goal, and yet the community is empowered to make many important decisions themselves.

     Nils encouraged Westies to look beyond the strict division between preservation and extraction. In his work lies “the third way,” a different strategy that roots itself in the particularities of his region’s peoples and non-peoples alike.

By Fielding Schaefer

Meet our Guests: Todd Nash

Todd Nash

Wallowa County Commissioner

Wallowa County, OR

8/22/2021 

­­ Todd Nash, rancher and County Commissioner of Wallowa County, met with Semester in the West for a backyard barbecue with his mom and family. As locally-raised steaks sizzled on the grill, he discussed what it means to be a rancher in rural Oregon as well as the responsibilities and challenges of his position in local government. Pointing from his chair to the landscape surrounding him, Todd spoke about the ecological trends he has witnessed during his four years as Commissioner and a lifetime in the county: more frequent and destructive wildfires in the county’s vast forests, stream flows getting smaller and warmer, and intensifying conflict regarding wolf management in a ranching community. The most effective response to these environmental concerns is far from agreed upon.

Todd discussed political divisiveness, and he spoke to the difficulty of pleasing all parties involved in these issues: ranchers, hunters, environmentalists, and citizens at large. While it’s difficult to balance all opinions, Todd believes there is ultimately a way to satisfy everyone: it just takes empathy and creative solutions. He recognizes a barrier between political parties in the U.S. and wishes for folks to put in the time to get to know one another. Todd demonstrated a strong sense of pride, both in the people and land he represents. Before digging into a steak topped with fresh tomatoes from his mother’s garden, Todd concluded: “I get to represent the best people in the world, the best county in the world.”

By: Erika Goodman

Meet our Guests: Jeff Fields and Randi Movich

Jeff Fields and Randi Movich

Zumwalt Prairie Preserve Project Director, The Nature Conservancy

Nurse Care Manager, Winding Waters Clinic

Enterprise, OR

8/22/2021

Twelve years ago, Jeff Fields and Randi Movich moved to the small town of Enterprise in Wallowa County, Oregon, and began to connect with disparate groups within the rural community.

Jeff is The Nature Conservancy’s Project Director for the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, a 33,000-acre section of land in northeastern Oregon that represents the largest intact bunchgrass habitat in the Pacific Northwest. Jeff is in charge of the management of the prairie, which includes grassland monitoring and working with local landowners to manage livestock grazing on the prairie. He has also recently worked with several tribes whose traditional homelands include the prairie, including the Nez Perce (Niimíipuu), to open access to First Foods.

  When The Nature Conservancy first bought the land in 2000, anxiety soared as local community members questioned whether the environmental group would continue to allow cattle to graze on the land. To assuage those fears, The Nature Conservancy partnered with local ranchers to make the preserve available for grazing while attempting to retain healthy native grasses. According to Jeff, this grazing is critical to working in Wallowa County, saying that saving land purely for biodiversity reasons is “[a luxury the] majority of the planet, at this point in time, doesn’t have.”

Randi, a nurse at the community health clinic and Jeff’s wife, says that many local voices are often not present in these ecological management conversations. As a part of her job, Randi gets an intimate glance at a different set of Wallowa County residents’ lives. Many Wallowa County residents remain below the poverty line. Randi says while The Nature Conservancy works with local stakeholders with land or family ties on the prairie, those without — including those that she works with on a daily basis — aren’t represented in groups like those currently working with the Zumwalt Prairie .

“What voices do we bring to the table, and how do we get them to the table?” she asked.

Jeff and The Nature Conservancy are currently hoping to incorporate more ideas and viewpoints within the management of the Zumwalt.

“The human capital we have in this community… is really amazing,” Jeff said. “If you can get all that energy harnessed in a common vision, that supports both the economy and culture — then that’s amazing, that’s where we’re trying to go.”

By Emma Fletcher-Frazer

Meet our Guests: Liza Jane McAlister

Liza Jane McAlister

Rancher, The 6 Ranch

Wallowa County

8/21/2021 

Liza Jane McAlister defies most stereotypes of cattle ranchers. She is the fourth generation to raise cattle on her family ranch, The 6 Ranch, a legacy she secured after buying the land from her family. Wearing denim and a radiant smile, Liza Jane shared with Semester in the West her passion for the land and her aim to preserve Western traditions while ranching. It’s clear as she speaks that she has a deep connection to the animals she cares for, “I make their life super good; my cows are happy cows.”

In addition to the full-time job of maintaining the ranch, Liza Jane has worked to add stream meanders and complexity back to the section of the Wallowa River that runs through her property in partnership with the Grande Ronde Model Watershed and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). Inspired by her neighbor Doug McDaniel’s re-meandering work upstream of her property, Liza Jane completed two separate projects on the river to recreate side channels and deep pools for fish habitat. She chose to graze her cattle along the riparian area of the second project, a controversial decision due to cows’ tendency to degrade stream habitat. According to Liza Jane, without using grazing as a management technique invasive reed canary grass crowds the stream bank and becomes “a nasty-ass monoculture that’s ten feet tall”. ODFW did not initially allow her to graze here due to the grass’s ability to stabilize stream banks, but Liza Jane insisted grazing rights be included for the re-meandering project to continue. ODFW agreed to Liza Jane’s terms and her hard work came to fruition. These days, she keeps her eyes peeled for salmon returning to her stretch of the Wallowa.

By: Claire Warncke

 Photo credit: Elio Van Gorden

Meet our Guests: Kathleen Ackley

Kathleen Ackley

Executive Director, Wallowa Land Trust

Wallowa County, Oregon

8/20/21

Kathleen Ackley is the Executive Director of Wallowa Land Trust (WLT), a nonprofit focused on conserving land and maintaining its ecological health. In Wallowa County, where private land is tightly woven into the fabric of the valley, the land trust works to conserve parcels of land for myriad purposes, from grazing to recreating, for both people and wildlife. They rely on the voluntary participation of landowners to carry out their work in protecting lands identified as significant in terms of biological diversity, cultural connections, and educational value. Preserving the prominent glacial moraine on the east side of Wallowa Lake is a major project championed by WLT and for good reason: it is a window into our geologic past and keeps the skyline free of imposing mansions.

Through Kathleen’s eight years with WLT she has seen a shift in their responsibilities and practices. Maintaining workable land has become more of a central tenet in the land trust sphere, along with movements to return land stolen from indigenous peoples and take action against systemic racism. Kathleen knows that land trusts are not exempt from addressing these societal reckonings. In a statement released on their website, WLT lays bare the inequities they continue to hold central to their work. Kathleen engages with such issues through her efforts with the Oregon Land Justice Project, a group which works to amplify indigenous stewardship knowledge and provide a space to hear from Native American leaders and allies about making land management more equitable. Kathleen made it clear that this work is vital, saying “it is not just about taking their knowledge for our benefit, it is about facilitating reconnections…for people with their land and for people with people. This is the right way to move forward, but it is far from easy.”

By Ani Pham