Name
Louise Wagenknecht

WWP Affiliation
Board member

Residence
Leadore, Idaho

Family
Husband Bob, mother Barbara, assorted imaginary friends

Occupation
Writer and recovering sheep farmer

Other Conservation Affiliations
None. WWP is the only one you'll ever need!

Memorable Conservation Experience
Watching the incredible recovery of the riparian corridor on the East Fork of the Salmon River at WWP's Greenfire Preserve; seeing the wildlife living there in peace; the great sense of accomplishment helping to rebuild the roadside fence at Greenfire last fall. Looking forward to going at it again in April.

Other Interests
Hand-spinning and knitting; bird-watching; movies; reading; wannabe policy wonk and unreconstructed political junkie.

Favorite Place(s) in the West
The Klamath Mountains of far northern California, where I was raised: ancient, mysterious, full of relict plant species, now home to a returned population of Roosevelt elk (largest deer in the world), and once and future habitat for gray wolves. A steep forested country, unfriendly to ATVs, where logging roads disappear beneath brush in a few years and where range cattle are few.

Western Oklahoma, where the souls of bison linger in ancient wallows. Fences, cattle, wheat, oil and gas wells, but also a world of botany and birds: buffalo grass, blue grama, little bluestem, sand bluestem, shinnery oak, sumac, poison ivy climbing up ancient cottonwoods, bobwhite quail, wild turkey, roadrunners, scissor-tailed flycatchers, cuckoos, cardinals. White-tailed deer in milo fields, rabbits, opossums, raccoons, bobcats, coyotes, foxes. Cottonmouth snakes in the roads and box turtles in my garden. Tracks of a cougar in a coulee on an abandoned homestead. Pipestone outcrops where descendants of Cheyenne warriors still come to find material for ceremonial pipes. Whole counties emptying out, losing people since 1930.

Yellowstone, that plateau of geologic wonders where elk cows calve beside parking lots while 20 tourists stand around taking pictures, where the meadows show the difference between the way domestic cattle graze and the way bison and elk graze. And now the wolves, feeding the grizzlies, keeping the elk on the move so that willows are returning to the riverbanks.

Finally, the mountains and rivers and sagebrush seas of central Idaho, where the aridity cured my bronchitis. Mountains so massive they create their own weather; sage grouse and antelope and horned larks, the surprise of a moose in the willows. A job as a range specialist and the knowledge, finally, that when it comes to cattle on public lands, agencies won't enforce the rules and ranchers won't follow them. Learning that we have traded an energy surplus (free rivers carrying wild salmon) for an energy sink (pouring out the rivers for alfalfa to be fed to cows). This will not last; the only question is how long the salmon can wait.

Books Recently Read
The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien (reading the trilogy for about the 20th time; it never gets old); Finding Caruso by Kim Barnes (a terrific first novel from a northern Idaho native); The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (one of the great works of political economy of the 20th century, analyzing the origin and deficiencies of the market system; highly relevant in an era of globalization.)

Quote to Live By
From a bumper sticker I saw in Portland, Oregon: "Live Long and Die Out."

Three Wishes for the Planet
A human population stabilized at a much lower level, this to be achieved without mass starvation or disease. Second: 60 million bison roaming from Yellowstone to North Dakota to Oklahoma, with their complement of wolves, antelope, sage grouse and prairie hens. Third: all dams blocking fish migration removed, and the rivers of the Northern Hemisphere dark with migrating salmonids.