Mark Solomon: Executive Director, 1995-1999
In celebration of our 40th Anniversary, The Lands Council highlights the contributions of those who have served as its executive directors.
By Kate Vanskike, TLC Board President
If John Osborn was the visionary for The Lands Council, Mark Solomon was the architect.
Mark Solomon’s experience for the job with The Lands Council was vast and varied. He’d been County Commissioner for Latah County, a grizzly bear lobbyist in the Bitteroots of Montana, held a Ph.D. in water resources, and led the University of Idaho’s Water Institute.
It was while he was working as a blacksmith and volunteering as a water quality activist focused on the Clearwater River basin that John Osborne (TLC founder) asked Mark to join this young board in Spokane. He was serving as the board’s VP when in 1995 he was asked to be the executive director.
The Lands Council under Mark expanded beyond its forest-related activism and litigation work — which had been wildly successful in scaling back logging in the National Forests of the upper Columbia River Basin — to include water quality efforts, particularly in the Coeur d’Alene / Spokane watershed. Despite the fact that TLC had a small staff and budget, Mark guided the production of a “Get the Lead Out” campaign that, among other things, distributed 10,000 VHS tapes to educate residents and leaders on the toxins flowing into the waters of the basin from mining in the Silver Valley. 165 billion pounds of lead-contaminated sediments were washing down the Coeur d’Alene River into Coeur d’Alene Lake and into the Spokane River.
The video campaign brought massive attention to this issue — along with controversy. “The mining companies had the money and were heavily invested in Spokane,” Mark explains. “Plus, people just didn’t want to believe what was happening.”
That’s one of the reasons Mark insisted that The Lands Council join the Spokane Chamber of Commerce, where, hopefully, TLC representatives could influence matters.
During Solomon’s era, founder John Osborn continued to publish the newsletter “Transitions” to provide education to the public.
Alongside this massive undertaking, Mark says his first priority in becoming executive director was to hire staff (there were only two full-time employees) and to find ways to engage the membership. He started annual conferences and meetings, and offered role-playing workshops with activists, demonstrating how to find solutions with those who advocated against environmental causes.
“I wanted people to be well aware of how the process works and identify whether they were capable of compromise,” Mark says. “It was particularly illuminating for the staff, some of whom believed that compromise was ‘selling out’ before the exercise. That changed.”
Amid these big-picture advances, it was Mark who led the organization to shorten its original name — the Inland Empire Public Lands Council — to The Lands Council, while maintaining the original mission: protecting the forests and waters of the Inland Northwest.