Sarah Palin's dead fish

Nah, only dead fish go with the flow.

- Sarah Palin

UPDATED

Palin has been involved in a number of environmental controversies. These have included species such as Alaskan polar bears, beluga whales, and wolves. But fish?

Palin's decision -- back when she was mayor of Wasilla -- to open her small town to strip-mall development may have led to the death of fish in her town's lake. It's not just a rumor. Apparently the lake has long been considered "dead" by environmentalists.

An article in Salon described the situation.

. . . . the lake Sarah Palin lives on is dead.

"Lake Lucille is basically a dead lake -- it can't support a fish population," said Michelle Church, a Mat-Su Valley borough assembly member and environmentalist. "It's a runway for floatplanes."

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans "have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we've got up here and we want to protect that, so we're gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don't want development if there's going to be that threat to harming our environment."

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.

"Sarah's legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth," said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin's parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. "The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it's not a pleasant place to live. It's not thought out. And that's a shame.

"Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can't understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition."

Among the environmental casualties of Wasilla's frenzied development was Palin's own front yard, Lake Lucille. The lake was listed as "impaired" in 1994 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and it still carries that grim label. State environmental officials say that leaching sewer lines and fertilizer runoff caused an explosion of plant growth in the lake, which sucked the oxygen out of the water and led to periodic fish kills.

Sadly, we must add Lake Lucille fish to our list of animal species that Sarah Palin has failed to save. Once again, I will have to update the Palin Timeline.

UPDATE: As if it couldn't get any worse, Jot Green has just learned that as governor, Sarah Palin approved the execution of another lake.