Jefferson Land Trust Executive Director Sarah Spaeth Accepts the 2010 Eleanor Stopps Environmental Leadership Award
Jefferson Land Trust is happy to announce that Executive Director Sarah Spaeth is the recipient of the prestigious 2010 Eleanor Stopps Environmental Leadership Award.
At the Port Townsend Marine Science Center breakfast on Sept. 30 when the award was presented, Sarah paid tribute to Eleanor Stopps, who was in the audience. Eleanor Stopps was primarily responsible for the designation of Protection Island as a National Wildlife Refuge in 1982. Sarah celebrated Stopps’s passion for preserving habitat as a model for her own work with the Land Trust.
Eric Harrington, president of the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, which administers the award, cited Sarah for her “ability to form productive partnerships with other organizations, to engage community members honestly and clearly, and to manage sometimes difficult and complex transactions efficiently and transparently” as well as for her role in writing over $5 million worth of successful land acquisition proposals and the preservation of over 8,400 acres in Jefferson County during her fifteen years at the Land Trust.
Attendees at the breakfast also heard from former Washington secretary of state Ralph Munro, who told the electrifying story of how he came to challenge the herding and capturing of Puget Sound orcas after seeing a then-legal roundup of a group of orcas just outside Olympia. His challenge led to a 1972 ban on the practice in Washington State. Munro likened the current health of the Hood Canal to the area’s canary in the mineshaft and urged the audience to continue to support scientific inquiry that can inform public policy decisions that will benefit all inhabitants of the Salish Sea, human and animal.
