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romanticizing this possibility, or in pretending that it suddenly makes friends out of old enemies, or eliminates future conflicts. But something fairly remarkable does seem to happen if these kinds of adversaries ever succeed in treating the river as a common good. After that the conversations often take on a different tone. As Tom Ruffanno says, "Now the meetings go better. Everyone just comes in, sits down, and says, "Well, what's the problem and how are we going to solve it? They trust the data more. They know you have to get along if you're going to get anything done in the valley." Fish are at least as much an issue in Idaho's Lake Pend Oreille as they are in the Bitterroot. "Pend oreille is the only lake in the Northwest capable of producing world class rainbow fish in the thirty to forty pound class," according to Ned Homer,. the Regional Fisheries Manager for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. "But the lake can only produce those fish if there is consensus that we want it to do that." without that consensus, and the rules to enforce it, no fish will grow to that size. Whether the aim is to produce some of these big fish or many smaller ones the question of what kind of fishery Pend Oreille provides comes down to what the people around the lake want. But what do they want? The Lake Pend Oreille Idaho Club and the Bonner County Sportsman have long been interested in the fishery, but the interest has run more to catchi~g the fish than to worrying about the habitat in which they spawned and lived. Trout Unlimited worked for habitat improvement, but the Forest Service was responsible for most of the decisions that actually affected habitat. Meanwhile, the Idaho Fish and game Department regulated how many, what size and what type of fish could be caught. Each of these groups or agencies had a particular interest in some part of the fishery, but no one seemed to be responsible for the big picture. With all the division of responsibilities and agendas, the quality of the fishery gradually declined. Lakeshore communities that once saw economic benefits in high-quality fishery began to lose interest. The lake seemed to have entered a self-perpetuating downward spi,ral. It was this deterioration in the fishery which led to the formation of the Lake Pend Oreille Fishery cooperative. The organization, now beginning it's third year, grew out of the activities and urging of Dave Thorson, a Forest service biologist at the Sandpoint Ranger District. Thorson (and soon his boss, the District Ranger), decided that part of the solution was to improve communication among the groups and agencies with a stake in the fishery. In January, 1987, at the invitation of the Forest Service and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, about fifty people attended a meeting to talk about Lake Pend Oreille. These people drew up a wish list of what they would like to see the fishery become; then they wrestled the list into a rough priority order, and recruited a core working group to turn all this into a strategic plan for the fishery. Meeting every two weeks for about four months, this group of about fifteen representatives of various lake centered interests created the Lake Pend Oreille