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Groups are urging Northwest leaders to act on U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson s infrastructure and Snake River dam proposal.
The plan would breach the four lower Snake River dams to help salmon, whose numbers have dwindled for years. It aims to restore what American Rivers calls in a report out this week, the most endangered river in the country.
Julian Matthews, a Nez Perce tribal member and co-founder of the group Nimiipuu Protecting the Environment, said the dams are harming tribal treaty rights to fish for salmon in the region. We didn t give them up and say, Well yeah, but if there s no fish, then we won t have that right , he said. We said that we have that right, and want to make sure that right is enforced by the federal government and our elected officials.
Billy Frank Jr. could replace Washington’s statue of Marcus Whitman
Efforts to take down the missionary’s statue have resurfaced this year with a proposal to replace it with the renowned Nisqually activist.
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Billy Frank Jr., a Nisqually activist who was arrested dozens of times while trying to assert treaty-protected fishing rights during the Fish Wars of the 1960s and ’70s, died May 5, 2014. He was 83. (Ted S. Warren/AP)
Outside of the Native community, Billy Frank Jr. isn’t a household name yet.
His son, Willie Frank III, says it’s about time. His activist father dedicated his life to furthering treaty rights and environmental protections. This work spanned decades and led to the Boldt decision the landmark federal court ruling that dictates the relationship between tribes and state governments as it exists today.
SEATTLE â From reintroduction of the grizzly bear to its wild North Cascades redoubt to attacking climate change, a wide range of environmental policies could see a new direction in the Pacific Northwest under a Biden administration.
For starters, government and nonprofit policy leaders say they are looking forward to a return to science as a basis for environmental policymaking. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than on climate warming.
Gov. Jay Inslee has championed Washington climate and energy policies sharply at odds with a president who dismissed the threats posed by greenhouse gas emissions in a warming world.
Inslee now has a powerful ally in President-elect Joe Biden. Biden s campaign platform calls for dramatically stepping up a U.S. transition away from fossil fuels to set the nation on a path to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury, which means that whatever carbon pollution is emitted into the atmosphere is offset by other measures. And, sinc