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Fishery Cooperative. ~hey wrote a statement of purpose, developed a long-range plan, and identified major problems. For each of these concerns (including habitat, public awareness and education, and the economics of the fishery), the group identified specific solutions and assigned people to get the job done. ~he Cooperative has not, in two years, been able to accomplish any sweeping changes in the lake's fish population. But it has made some modest gains, including a habitat survey on private and pUblic lands surrounding the lake. Various groups within the Cooperative have funded spawning habitat improyement projects on streams that flow into the lake. The cooperative has proposed developing a Lake Pend Oreille Center to heighten public awareness of fishery issues. Whether the Cooperative will succeed in improving the fisheryremalns to be seen. Everyone familiar with the Cooperative's goals can point out major obstacles between here and there. But these same people also see real potential in the group's work. When Ned Homer talks about the lake's capacity to produce very large trout, he implies that the lake will only see such trout if a variety of groups at least as diverse as those in the Cooperative could agree to support such an outcome, and the regulations to accomplish it. This would not be an easy consensus to reach, since some of the groups would have to give up some of what they now like to do in order to let some fish grow that big. But Homer's point is that if a number of grdups with a cumulative membership in the thousands could agree on such a goal, it would give agencies like his the baCking they would need to adopt and enforce the necessary regulations. Tom Mehler makes and sells fishing tackle in his shop on the lake, and serves within the Cooperative as a spokesman for charterboat fishermen. "Sportsmen's groups have never been good at communicating let alone working together," he says. "The Cooperative is improving communication, although working together still comes hard." At the very least, Mehler believes that the Cooperative has helped various lake users identify commonly perceived problems and agree about some facts. "It isn't always easy to get the a9'encies to unvedl the facts,lI he says, "but in this working relationship, the facts do come out-and agreements about what you don't know." When he talks about this, Mehler sounds almost exactly like Tom nUffanno.explaining how the meetings between Bitterroot irrigators and anglers changed over time. Instead of mistrusting every shred of one another's evidence as just more propaganda, they got to the place where they could agree on what they needed to know, and how to go about finding it. This is a deceptively simple step toward better communication. Facts are supposed to be objective--they should look the same to all sides. But in highly polarized natural resource debates, where experts for each side put the most favorable spin on the facts, opponents instinctively mistrust each other's data. And an agency, which might be thought to be the coldly neutral party, turns out simply to be mistrusted by everyone. But in any process like the one followed by the cooperative or by the fishermen and farmers in