[laughs]

And so that little red and blue number, that was mine.

And as you can see, it really is, um, a vast and very open space, but we made it cozy.

And it was the third week of August, and so you have this golden maple syrup light, and it's lasting until 11:30 or so.

And the reason for the really big smile on my face is the surprise that the guide that I was traveling with put in our, in our plane despite the weight limit, the camp chair.

Oh, I was so grateful for the camp chair.

There was no log to lean on.

[laughs]

But she seems to see a way forward.

You can't abuse a waterway for more than a hundred years and dump anything you want into it and just walk away from that and think it's all going to be fine as soon as you stop.

I mean, what is so sad about this is we're living with our past mistakes, and this is true in so many ways and at so many levels.

No one should be surprised that it's also true in the environment.

The way to think about this is it's a circle, and it's all connected both in time and in space.

And the only way to interrupt this cycle of pollutants is, number one, to, to stop putting them in the water with source control.

Number two, uh, clean up our mess and stop making more.

Lynda Mapes ended her reporting for her recent article on the banks of the Duwamish River, a major source of the pollution for Elliott Bay.

What does keeping people whole look like in this case?

What it meant was spending about a billion, that's a B, billion dollars to, number one, bring tribal governments into the energy development space to create alternative sources of hydropower to take some pressure off this river, to be able to turn off the Lower Snake River dams and replace the power with alternative sources.

Solar, wind, et cetera.

That was one of the things that this agreement was going to do.

Another thing it was going to do was look at alternative infrastructure for moving products to market down to Portland.

The alternative always has been and still is, uh, trucks and rail.

So, there was gonna be a lot of money put into figuring out how to rebuild abandoned rail lines and, uh, beef up alternatives to shipping on the lower snake portion of the river.

What does it mean that this is canceled? What happens right now?

What does logging in the national forest currently look like here?

Not much.

We actually really don't do that much logging in the national forest here, and that's part of why this is so interesting.

So here in the Evergreen State back in the 1990s, 1994 to be specific, the people of this region took it to court because there was so much logging in the national forest of old growth and big trees.

And so that resulted in the Northwest Forest Plan, which is the most far-reaching multi-species conservation plan of its type when it was enacted in the world, affecting millions of acres of national forest land in three states.

So it's important to understand that plan is still on the books.

That's not gone away.

What can you say about the reasoning behind this executive order?