Oregon CSE Promotes Common-Sense Environmental Solutions

Since the fall of 1999, Oregon CSE (OR CSE) has been promoting common-sense environmental solutions to state salmon and water quality issues. OR CSE has been educating and mobilizing volunteer activists across the state to become engaged in these policy debates.

OR CSE staff and volunteer activists presented testimony at over a dozen hearing sponsored by the NMFS and the Oregon Department of Agriculture. At the Eugene NMFS hearing, OR CSE gathered nearly 200 trained volunteer activists to testify and demonstrate their support for sound science and local control of salmon recovery.

The Register Guard, a Eugene-based newspaper, wrote on January 25, 2000: “a large contingent from Douglas County, wearing green [CSE] T-shirts with anti-government messages and testifying that the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS’s) fish-protection rules were nothing more than an attempt to take over private property.”

The article continues, quoting our activists and describing the OR CSE message of sound science and common-sense environmental approaches to salmon restoration.

OR CSE has held more than 15 CSE Club meetings, conducted 18 volunteer activist training seminars, given a dozen speeches and co-sponsored a coalition rally on this issue – reaching a combined audience of more than 2,000 Oregonians.

OR CSE gathered over 100 activists at the Oregon State Capital for a hearing held in January on S.B. 1010, a bill on state water quality issues.

OR CSE staff and volunteer activists know how to get earned media. OR CSE staff and volunteer activists have received earned media throughout the state on television, radio, print, and the Internet. OR CSE staff and activists have generated a “letter to the editor” campaign, sending in letters to nearly every major paper in Oregon. OR CSE has been interviewed on local and national radio shows, hitting as many as 320 radio markets on one interview.