Word: lankard
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...saved for hunting, fishing and tourism. But the natives would have to forgo income from logging. Advocates of the plan needed a native Alaskan to help sell it, so Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska biologist, and David Grimes, a fisherman from the village of Cordova, recruited Dune Lankard...
...time, Lankard was a commercial fisherman who sat on the board of the Eyak Corp., which administered the tribe's land rights. He had grown up fishing for salmon and herring in Cordova and never identified with environmentalists. "I used to call them 'granolas,'" he says with a laugh. But he had become concerned about how runoff from logging operations was polluting the streams fish use to spawn...
When he first proposed the idea of forest protection to the Eyak Corp., his fellow board members voted him down, 8 to 1. "They called me a greenie and a tree hugger," he recalls. Undeterred, Lankard gave up his fishing business, set up the Eyak Rainforest Preservation Fund and began lobbying politicians and native Alaskans throughout the state. "Indigenous people have thousands of years of being preservationists," he would argue. "We need to become stewards of the land again." In Lankard's view, not only the trees and streams were endangered; so were the native cultures that depended on them...
...Lankard took his fight all the way to Washington, where lawmakers would oversee the land deals. He became a familiar sight in the Capitol with his battered leather backpack, laptop computer and a small, smooth stone from his beloved Copper River that he always carried. The chief of the Eyak tribe renamed him Jamachakih. Translation: "little bird that screams really loud and won't shut...
...Lankard wants to stop the building of a road across the Copper River Delta Basin, a rugged wetland where bald eagles still soar. "This is the last refuge," says Lankard. "Our way of life is gone if they build that road." His opponents had better prepare for a long battle...