After examining insulation in buildings, they focused on every day types of insulation such as wool, aluminum foil, cotton, and plastic. Following their predictions on which material would be the most energy efficient, the scouts took turns taking the temperature of the water inside the experiment jars. As most scouts predicted, the wool worked best followed by the aluminum foil – it turns out these girls can’t be fooled by appearances anymore.

The skills the girls learned in this activity are just a fractional of the material in the overall journey that will teach them how to live more energy efficient lives. This Friday, troop 4140 will go on a tour of their school, Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary, led by a member of the maintenance staff to learn the ins and outs of the energy in the building. Proceeding the tour, the girls will make a list of recommendations to the school board regarding potential upgrades that could make the school more energy efficient based on the things they have learned during the journey.

Deer visiting the exclosure one week after installation!

At SCS, we know that getting people outside and participating in the stewardship of our environment is the single best way to realize our vision of a sustainable community living within the Tongass National Forest. Last summer, SCS, the Sitka Ranger District, and Sitka High School established a long-term monitoring study that will evaluate the efforts made to restore deer habitat in young growth forests in Peril Strait. Students built four “deer exclosures” to support this study. The exclosures will allow us to study the plant growth that occurs without being browsed upon by deer. Students will revisit these study sites each year. Through this project, students are being active participants in ecological restoration and gaining valuable insight in what it takes to be good stewards of our backyard!

The two-phase project will build momentum of the Sitka Collaborative Stewardship Group by partnering with local high schools and community members. With the $20,000 grant, the project will last throughout 2012 and will result in a collaboratively defined Strategic Restoration Priorities List, a Best Management Practices document on partnering with the U.S. Forest Service on restoration projects, and initial efforts to advocate for the highest priority projects.

“The project will combine ecological data with social and economic priorities to create a framework that prioritizes where we need to restore salmon and deer habitat,” Said Scott Harris, SCS Collaborative Restoration Projects Coordinator. “It will also find ways to maximize local benefits to create jobs for local contractors to perform the work needed on the Tongass National Forest, as best for the community as a whole.”

SCS will partner with Sitka High School (SHS) on the young growth component of the project.   Industrial arts students will build furniture and a visitor’s kiosk for Sitka Sound Science Center with young growth timber harvested and milled on Prince of Wales Island.  These projects will take place during the 2012-2013 school year and will be the first time local wood has been used in SHS industrial arts projects in nearly a decade.

“It is exciting to bring local wood back into the classroom. There will be some differences in using young growth than what we usually build with, so it should be a good experiment to see the best ways to use the wood,” said Sitka High School industrial arts teacher, Randy Hughey. “It will also be a great opportunity for the students to learn about the local resources available and how they can support the Sitka economy.”

Based on the experiences at Sitka High, SCS will develop a best practices guide for buying local wood.  The guide will compare the cost of local young growth to imported wood, will detail where and when local wood can be purchased, and will explain properties of local young growth that may be different from conventional lumber.  SCS and SHS will host two educational open houses during the 2012-13 school year for local builders and other community members on the best practices.

Bill Thomason, owner of Alaska Wood Cuts Mill, will sell SCS young growth spruce from a stockpile of timber he acquired under stewardship contract during a 2007 habitat restoration project on Prince of Wales Island.

“We have been cutting and milling second growth here on POW for a few seasons now. It is great wood for a number of purposes, particularly in the construction of log and timber cabins as we are now doing,” he said. “We are really encouraged by the start of its use here in Southeast Alaska.”

“There are a lot of opportunities for using young growth timber from the Tongass, and I hope this experience will not be a one-time thing at the high school,” said Sitka contractor Marcel LaPerriere, owner of Southeast Cedar Homes, which uses wood from local sources. “I believe this is an opportunity to raise awareness and increase the commercial use around the region.”

The second component of the grant will focus on strategic planning for collaborative watershed restoration projects on the Tongass.  In recent years, the U.S. Forest Service, Sitka Conservation Society, Trout Unlimited and other partners have worked together to restore salmon streams damaged by industrial logging practices decades ago.  Despite the work and successful partnerships, projects have proceeded without a community-derived strategic plan.

“There are important watersheds in the Sitka Ranger District that were heavily impacted by logging during the pulp mill days. We know that this has had a negative impact on the number of fish these watersheds produce,” Matt Lawrie, a 2nd generation Sitka salmon troller said. “I’m hopeful that this project will bring together agency staff, fishermen, and locals with knowledge about local watersheds and it will lead to more habitat restoration projects that will increase Coho numbers and create more stability and resiliency for salmon populations.”

Sitka Sentinel Front Page, February 13, 2012

The Sitka Conservation Society strives to blend sustainable community development with policy advocacy through projects and initiatives that demonstrate our ideals while building community and community assets.  Along the way, we organize stakeholders to work together with a commonly shared vision.  The  ideal projects are those that bring people together working face-to-face/shoulder-to-shoulder to jointly and collaboratively build our community under a vision of sustainability.  If we are not working with new and different partners, if we are not working toward institutionalizing our values within existing agencies, or if we are simply working within one closed group, we are not successful.

The Fish to Schools program is accomplishing all of the above as it organizes fishermen, integrates traditional Native cultural values around locally harvested fish in the school classrooms, teaches youth about fishing livelihoods and fisheries management by bringing community members into the classroom, and, above all, improves the school lunch program by finding creative and economically sustainable pathways to integrate locally produced food into the USDA school lunch program.  The program works with all the schools in the local school districts, all the major fish processors, multiple fishermen, parents, youths, USDA staff, State of Alaska agency staff, and many more. Recently we won a statewide award which received national attention in the USDA Farm-to-Schools program.

Our hope is that this program will create closer connections between our community and the natural resources from the environment around us.  Through its implementation, youth and stakeholders will gain an increased understanding of how we use and depend on the land and waters of the Tongass.  With the fish on our plates at home and at school, we will, as a community, make better decisions on the management and future of those resources that we intimately depend on.  Our hope is that in its actions the USDA, and the policy makers who direct it, will choose to focus on a more sustainable school lunch food system by using local sources for food.  And, importantly, our school districts will teach children about local natural resources and the jobs and livelihoods in our community by using hands-on, real-world learning experiences.

In this way, SCS is working to build a socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable community living within the splendor and beauty of the Tongass.

This simple graphic shows electric users that using an oil heater is over 2X as efficient as gaining electricity through the extremely inefficient diesel generators. Brewton hoped to encourage those with duel heating systems to switch since the diesel surcharge will add to every electric user’s monthly bill.

Check out this incredible video created by our good friend and local filmmaker, Hannah Guggenheim, documenting the “We Love our Fishermen Lunch” on 2/8/2012.

WE LOVE OUR FISHERMEN!  The Fish to Schools Program began as a vision at the 2010 Sitka Health Summit and with community support and leadership from the Sitka Conservation Society, we are now working with over half of students enrolled in the Sitka School District. This program is a component of our Community Sustainability efforts and we hope through this program we can begin to build a stronger, more resilient local food system. Fish to Schools ensures that students, whose families may not generally be able to afford local fish, have access to it directly through the school lunch program. These lunches provide a boost of nutrients and Omega 3 fatty-acids, supports the sustainable fisheries of Alaska, and validates the backbone of this community and culture.

On February 8, 2012, fishermen were invited to both Keet and Blatchley Middle Schools. They joined students for their bi-monthly local fish lunch, bringing with them stories from the sea, fishing gear, and photos to make the connection between this profession and the fish on their plates. Both schools plastered the cafeterias with student-made posters, cards, and valentines thanking fishermen for their contribution to the program. Fishermen led students around the cafeteria with lures, created a longline set in the middle of the lunch room, and generated a lot of hype around the lunches.

Sitka Conservation Society would like the individually thank the following groups and individuals for making this special lunch a success: Seafood Producers Coop, Sitka Sound Seafoods, Nana Management Services, Staff at Keet and Blatchley, Beth Short, Wendy Alderson, Lexi Fish, Hannah Guggenheim, Andrianna Natsoulas, Jason Gjertsen, Terry Perensovich, Doug Rendle, Sarah Jordan, Eric Jordan, Matt Lawrie, Spencer Severson, Jeff Farvour, Beth Short-Rhodes, Stephen Rhodes, Kat Rhodes, Scott Saline, Charlie Skultka, Kent Barkau, Lew  Schumejda, Bae Olney-Miller, and Jeff Christopher.

This lunch coincided with the beginning of the “Stream to Plate” lesson series with seventh graders in Ms. Papoi’s science class. The first of five lessons introduced students to how fish are caught in SE Alaska through subsistence, sport, and commercial fishing methods. The class began “back in time” as AK Native, Charlie Skultka, shared with students traditional methods of fish harvest. With models and relics from the SJ Museum, he demonstrated how fish traps and halibut hooks worked. Roby Littlefield, coordinator of Dog Point Fish Camp and Tlingit language instructor at Blatchley, showed students photos of students actually participating in current subsistence traditions. She told stories from camp and demonstrated how these practices continue today. Following their presentation, local fishermen Beth Short-Rhodes, Steven Rhodes, Jeff Farvour, and Steven Fish, shared with students how they commercially fish for salmon, halibut, rockfish, and blackcod. Students had the opportunity to interview and ask guests questions in small groups, developing a relationship with community members in town. This week students will learn about the importance of conservation and sustainability in fishing and more specifically how the Tongass is a Salmon Forest.

Dear Wisconsin Friends:

Greetings from Sitka, Alaska in the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska.  I hope that you can all get up here to visit sometime and see what an amazing place it is.  You should definitely come and visit too because most of the land around here you own.  That’s right, it is almost all public lands in the National Forest system so it is essentially yours!

The town that I have been living in for the last 6 years since I left Wisconsin is right on the coast of the Pacific Ocean.  We have the ocean in front of town and mountains rising up in back.  There are an infinite number of bays, fjords, island, and coves.  It is a lot like the boundary waters area but with bigger mountains, temperate rainforests, salt water, and whales, sea lions, seals, killer whales, Brown Bears, and some glaciers.   Most importantly, there are salmon!

The big issue I am working on right now is on protecting and restoring the Salmon on the Tongass.  They were really damaged by awful and devastating clear-cut logging over the last few decades.  This logging really impacted the ecosystems here and they are still healing.  We are working diligently to restore the salmon streams.  This is especially critical because my community and all the other communities in Southeast Alaska, depend on the salmon that come from the Forest.  Commercial fishing, charter fishing, and subsistence fishing are all really important and is a core part of our way-of-life here.

The problem we are trying to fix right now is that the Forest Service is still spending about $30Million a year on timber harvest even through there is only about 150 jobs in timber.  The fisheries and watershed budget on the Tongass, which is tasked with protecting and restoring salmon habitat, only gets $1.5 Million dollars, even though it employs over 4000 people.  We want that funding to switch.  We don’t want all timber harvest to go away… there is room for some logging.  But the Tongass National Forest is really best managed to produce salmon.

I know that everyone in Wisconsin loves fish and I hope that you eat our Wild Alaska salmon.  If you have, it probably comes from the Tongass.

I want to ask you to help us by writing to your Senator Kohl.  He is on the committee that oversees that Forest Service budget.  Next Thursday, he is going to be asking questions to the Forest Service chief.  You can help us here by writing to the Senator and asking him to ask the Forest Service chief when they are going to shift funding on the Tongass to management for Salmon.

This would be an immense help for us and I think this is entirely doable.  And I’ll also promise that if we are successful and your senator asks the Chief about the Tongass, I’ll come back to Wisconsin with a big cooler full of salmon and we’ll have a salmon Bar-be-Que at the church.

WRITE TO WISCONSIN SENATOR KOHL HERE:      http://kohl.senate.gov/contact.cfm

If you write a letter, please send me a copy (make sure to put your address on it) so we can keep track and deliver them to him when fishermen from Alaska go to Washington to ask for this same budget shift. andrew@sitkawild.org

Here are some of the main points to mention:

• Over 35% of Salmon caught in the United States are born and spawn on the Tongass National Forest in Alaska
• Salmon fishing provides about six times as many jobs in the in the Tongass as the timber industry
• The Forest Service spends about $25 million on timber  programs in the Tongass compared to $1.5 million on salmon stream  restoration projects;  those numbers need to be switched
• Senator Kohl is on the Budget Committee that oversees that National Forest Budget.  He will be asking questions to the Forest Service chief on Thursday Febuary 17^th.  Tell Senator Kohl to ask the Forest Service chief when they are going to start to manage the Tongass for Salmon

You can get more information here:  http://sitkawild.org/2012/01/action-alert-make-salmon-a-priority-updated/

Sincerely,

Andy Thoms

You can help us protect Tongass Salmon by taking action: here