Sarah Palin's dead lake (Salon)

[Up2Late]

Sarah Palin's dead lake

By promoting runaway development in her hometown, say locals, Palin has "fouled her own nest" -- and that goes for the lake where she lives.

By David Talbot

Sept. 19, 2008 | WASILLA, Alaska -- Every morning she's at home here, Sarah Palin wakes up to a postcard view from her lakeside home. Out the windows of her two-story wood-framed house stretch the serene, birch-lined waters of Lake Lucille. Ducks go gliding by the red-and-white Piper Cub floatplane docked outside. With the snow-frosted Chugach and Talkeetna mountains looming in the distance, the scene seems to define the Alaska that Palin celebrates: rugged, majestic, unspoiled.

And, yet, the lake Sarah Palin lives on is dead. "Lake Lucille is basically a dead lake -- it can't support a fish population," said Michelle Church, a Mat-Su Valley borough assembly member and environmentalist. "It's a runway for floatplanes."

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans "have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we've got up here and we want to protect that, so we're gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don't want development if there's going to be that threat to harming our environment."

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship. "Sarah's legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth," said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin's parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. "The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it's not a pleasant place to live. It's not thought out. And that's a shame. "Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can't understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition."

(more at link) <http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/19/palin/>

[Stop Cornyn]

1. k&mr

[Flabbergasted]

2. But exactly how did the lake become inhabitable. nt

[depakid]

3. Eutrophication

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication

[Up2Late]

4. The answer to your question is in the rest of the article at the link I gave...

...but more precisely, it's in the next paragraph:

<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/19/palin/>

...Among the environmental casualties of Wasilla's frenzied development was Palin's own front yard, Lake Lucille. The lake was listed as "impaired" in 1994 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and it still carries that grim label. State environmental officials say that leaching sewer lines and fertilizer runoff caused an explosion of plant growth in the lake, which sucked the oxygen out of the water and led to periodic fish kills.

"Sarah," a recent biography of Palin by Kaylene Johnson, features a photo of a beaming Palin, sitting in a rowboat on Lake Lucille clutching a fishing rod. But, according to local fishermen, the Republican vice-presidential candidate would have to be very lucky to reel in something edible....

Basically, she chose letting uncontrolled growth over doing needed fixes to the towns infrastructure, sound familiar?

[depakid]

5. It's interesting that they still stock the lake

even though the fish don't last very long....

[Up2Late]

6. kick

:kick:

[ellisonz]

7. Witch.

[Marrah_G]

8. Hey!

[trof]

9. Reminds me of a lake in NH.

Can't remember which one.
It was many years ago.
Spent a week end there.
I was talking to one of the locals about how clear the water was. I could see 10 feet straight down to the pebbly bottom from our cabin's dock.

"Yeah, it's clear alright. No moss, no algae, no nuthin'. No nutrients, no fish. The lake's dead. Beautiful, but dead. Acid rain."

[redqueen]

10. Disgusting.

Truly disgusting.

Thanks for posting this again... I'm sure it's probably been here before, but I missed it, so thanks again.

[Supersedeas]

11. but the Media frames her in environmental terms

[Up2Late]

12. kick

:kick: