{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Exploring Washington State","title":"Not a Bog, a Fen: Inside the $1.5 Million Save of Bonaparte Meadows","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4442,"description":"Kate Miller is the executive director of the Okanogan Land Trust, a nonprofit with two staff and an intern that protects working farms and ranches, wildlife habitat and water resources across Okanogan and western Ferry counties. Scott recorded this in their office in the town of Okanogan, in the county of Okanogan, a naming situation he admits gets him every time.\nKate did not plan this career. She was born in Chapel Hill, grew up overseas while her father worked in global public health, went to Reed College, and finished a PhD in cultural anthropology in California. There was a postdoc in Vienna and teaching at Western Oregon University. Then COVID rearranged everything, a friend pointed her toward local environmental nonprofits, and she has now run this one for over five years. Her husband teaches at Tonasket Elementary.\nMost of this conversation is about one property.\nBonaparte Meadows is 745 acres in the Okanogan Highlands, below Bonaparte Mountain near Bonaparte Lake, and at its centre sits roughly 265 acres of calcareous fen. Kate explains the distinction most of us never learn. A bog catches and holds rainwater, which is what makes bogs acidic. A fen is fed by groundwater welling up through the site. At Bonaparte that water filters through limestone, which makes it a calcareous fen, one of the rarest wetland types in the United States and the largest peat wetland in Okanogan County. Its deep peat soils hold water, store carbon, and feed cold clean flows into the Okanogan River watershed.\nParts of it had been mined for peat. The family that owned it wanted to sell rather than place an easement, which meant the only way to protect it was to buy it outright.\nSo a two person organisation in one of Washington's least populated and lowest income counties set out to raise 1.5 million dollars. Kate walks through how that actually works: state Recreation and Conservation Office grants that require a local match, the Ponderosa Dinner they hold every summer, the end...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/0eY6-pOxiu7Y0bYJVEHtvpyTc1r-qxWqjB1LDd4c1GM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9hOTI5/ZjliODdhODFlODgy/YzlmYTY5YjlhMTBl/NTVmYy5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}