Board of Directors

Martha Burke

I received my masters from the University of Washington in Public Administration focusing on environmental management. My master’s thesis was published under the Washington Sea Grant Program and was on port expansion in the Puget Sound region. My first job was with King County in developing the County’s first Growth Management Plan, responsible for coordinating with municipalities to complete their corresponding plans.

Worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and was responsible for implementing the Puget Sound Estuary Program’s Urban Bay Approach to toxic cleanup. Worked for the City of Seattle in the Office of Long Range Planning and the Office of Management and Planning. Developed Seattle’s Environmental Action Agenda. Was responsible for developing the first King County Local Hazardous Waste Plan that was approved by all 37 local governments including the City of Seattle. Developed the City’s procedures for managing hazardous waste and materials. Developed the City’s long range Wastewater Systems Plan. Served as Chair of the Executive Council for the Washington State Ferry Advisory Council. Served as Chair and member of the Suquamish Citizen’s Advisory Committee for the last few years and was active in developing the Subarea Plan for Suquamish as part of the County’s update to their Comprehensive Plan.

Paul Larson

Paul Larson and his wife Jayne have lived in Indianola, Kitsap County, for the past 13 years. Paul was raised in a small town in Vermont where he came to appreciate the natural world. Paul joined the Navy in 1970 after which he graduated from San Diego State University then worked in the aerospace industry in Southern California for 31 years. After retirement Paul and Jayne moved to Indianola and within a year began taking University of Washington Extension classes including Native Plants and Beach Naturalist. For the past 12 years Paul has been volunteering as a Steward at North Kitsap Heritage Park (NKHP) and as a Trustee/treasurer for the Indianola Beach Improvement Club a 501(c)(3) community club. Paul participated in creating the NKHP Forest Stewardship Plan and the NKHP Master Plan/Stewardship Plan which would preserve the NKHP as a natural open space for the future generations of human and animal residents of Kitsap County. Paul is excited to have the opportunity to join the KEC’s board of directors to help guide its efforts in protecting Kitsap County’s environments.

David Onstad

David Onstad and his wife Dawn Dockter have lived in Kitsap County for two years in both Poulsbo and now Port Orchard. He was a professor of insect ecology and pest management for 26 years and then worked in the agrichemical and seed industry for 11 years until retirement in April 2023. He has been a treasurer of 4 non-profit organizations, including Treasurer of KEC since May. David is passionate about protecting KC Heritage Parks. This year he helped evaluate the County's COMP Plan, PROS Plan, and Critical Areas Ordinances.

Beverly Parsons

Beverly is a 19-year resident of Kitsap County. She recently retired from her 30-year role as executive director of InSites (a research, planning and evaluation nonprofit with a national and international focus on large scale systemic change). While at InSites, she worked at multiple levels of social systems from community groups to governors and legislators across education, environment, social services, and health. She is also on the board of the International Evaluation Academy. She has a passion for working with others to rebalance the relationship of humans with the rest of life on this planet. She has a PhD in social science research.

Dave Shorett

Dave Shorett has been a lawyer in Washington State since 1970, primarily as a trial lawyer handling a variety of cases in local courts, US District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He presently serves as a Judge in the Suquamish Court of Appeals. Born in Seattle, he graduated from Whitman College and law school in Boston, he has lived in Kitsap County for 43 years. He has written 5 fishing books and wrote a fishing column in the Kitsap Sun for 5 years. He has long been active in land acquisition for public use, served as Parks Commissioner for Bainbridge Island for 15 years; is a founding member of the reorganized Bainbridge Island Parks and Trails foundation; member of the Island’s Open Space Commission; long time member of the Land Trust’s Projects Committee; Board member of the Friends of the Farms; member of the Wyckoff Committee; and served on other committees.

Dave believes that what makes Kitsap County a great place to live is its natural areas, shorelines, lakes, relatively undisturbed flora and fauna. Kitsap County has the opportunity to control its growth, provide attractive urban areas with all amenities, including parks and recreation, while at the same time protecting as much of its great natural lands, streams, lakes and shorelines in perpetuity.

Steering Committee

Marion Allen

Marion Allen is a wife, mother, and a biologist. She grew up in Oregon and lived in Leavenworth and Quilcene as well as Hagerman and Boise, Idaho. For the last 35 years, Poulsbo has been her home. A true Northwesterner, she worked as a clinical microbiologist and retired from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Her favorite travels include Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and most of all southeastern Utah. Since retirement she has been involved in our local parks as a forest steward and volunteer, Great Peninsula Conservancy (GPC) volunteer with a special love of Port Gamble Forest Heritage Park (PGFHP). She has logged hundreds of miles hiking PGFHP. In the last year, she spearheaded the launch of Kitsap County Native Plants Facebook group that now has over a thousand members. She enjoys leading hikes for them around the county. Her involvement with Kitsap Environmental Coalition (KEC) began in the spring of 2023 with inspiration from Beth Nichols.

Martha Burke

Martha has worked for the city of Seattle in planning and management, has developed environmental action agendas and has been a member and/or leader of several community groups including the Suquamish Citizen’s Advisory Committee and the League of Women Voters of Kitsap. She has a long-standing interest in the environment and its protection with a holistic perspective.

Tom Doty

Tom and his wife Aimee, a Ph.D. oceanographer at NOAA, moved to Kitsap County in 2000. With a B.S. degree in biology (cum laude) from Kent State University (1968) followed by a Ph.D. in biological sciences from the University of Rhode Island (1978), supported by the Atomic Energy Commission, he studied larval amphibian population dynamics. In a post-doc sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management, the Cetacean and Turtle Assessment Program (CeTAP), Tom flew with the U.S. Coast Guard on their Offshore Law-Enforcement Patrols looking for marine mammals and sea turtles in a 98k square mile study area in the western North Atlantic. Tom joined the faculty at Roger Williams College in 1982 and resumed his amphibian community monitoring program in Rhode Island. Following retirement Tom studied juvenile salmon habitat preference in streams tributary to Hood canal for the S’Klallam and Skokomish tribes.

Joe Forsthoffer

My interest in the environment began in my childhood in the late 1960s, when I used my allowance to buy a water- and air-monitoring kit and convinced my conservative parents to let me put an Ecology Flag sticker on the family car. With a background in communications, I spent most of my adult life and professional career on the Delmarva Peninsula on the East Coast. As a journalist, I covered the impact of development on the rural and environmentally sensitive Peninsula. I then moved to public relations and corporate communications, with experience ranging from local nonprofits to national consumer brands and international agricultural products. My family made Indianola our home in 2019, and I moved to Washington fulltime in January 2023 after working in Orlando, FL, for 3-1/2 years. I now work as a communications consultant and writer. My hobbies include kayaking, hiking, camping, and photography. I’ve completed Stream Stewards and Beach Naturalist training, was active in environmental groups while in Florida, and led kayak nature tours at Assateague Island and was involved with environmental groups while in Maryland. I currently serve on KEC’s communications committee and look forward to expanding my involvement.

Doug Hayman

Doug Hayman has been with the Kitsap Environmental Coalition since the beginning days. He has taken part in Kitsap County's Critical Areas Ordinance Update process acting as the KEC working group representative during the Fish and Wildlife session. He is active in work to hold the county in compliance with Critical Area protections. Doug likes to remove invasive English Ivy from nearby trees having done that on over 400 trees in Indianola in public lands and on the largest Great Peninsula Conservancy parcel in the area where he is a GPC steward. He has also actively worked to protect the North Kitsap Heritage Park from being degraded with a proposed paved path that would damage the environment and cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Doug has worked in the field of assistive technology which has served the needs of people with disabilities since 1996.

Joe Lubischer

Joe Lubischer is a twenty-year Indianola resident, fifth decade in Kitsap County, and a steward at the Indianola Waterfront & Woodland Preserve and also North Kitsap Heritage Park. For the latter park, he served several years as stewardship chair and actively promotes environmental restoration and soft trails. He is a retired engineer with experience in water resources, but mountains and woodworking are constant draws.

Bruce McCain

Bruce has a PhD in microbiology, and retired in 2005 after working for NOAA Fisheries, a Federal agency, as a program manager for 30 years. Most of his research concerned the effects of pollution on marine fish. Much of his team’s research was conducted in Puget Sound. For the last 10 years of his career, he was a facility manager at a large NOAA facility in Newport, OR. He has been involved with various environmental groups in Kitsap County for the last 10 years. Bruce currently is a member of the KEC Board and the Steering Committee seeking his second term on the Steering Committee.

Elizabeth Nichols

Beth has lived in Kitsap County, in the same house in Indianola since 1986. Beth worked as a nurse over a long career, including as a community health nurse for the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe. She has recently switched careers – now working as a library assistant for Kitsap Regional Library. Beth likes to use her writing skills to educate, and to challenge elected officials and agencies to do better in the realm of environmental protection. She is currently learning about the land use policies and critical areas ordinances of Kitsap County and how to work more effectively to protect this special place along the Salish Sea.

April Ryan

April Ryan has lived in Kingston since 2014 after retiring from a 25-year career as a Senior Computer Specialist in Graphic Design at the University of Washington. There, she specialized in data visualization for scientific research across various disciplines, including environmental studies, using multiple media such as print publications, animation, and television. Since moving "out to the country," April has been learning about the local history and geography, beginning with a Stream Stewardship class given by WSU-extension, exploring the area's countryside, waters, and trails, and volunteering for Stillwaters and NKHP. April values the natural environment and aims to improve public awareness of and access to it through active participation in community planning. She is familiarizing herself with the area's various plans and ordinances and is currently involved in legal efforts to prevent/minimize damage to the Appletree Cove watershed.

Robin Salthouse

Robin Salthouse, a retired public librarian supervisor, moved from Phoenix, Arizona to Kingston, Washington in January 2020 with her husband, Rob. While in Phoenix, she volunteered with a group that advocated for the protection of the surrounding Phoenix Mountain Preserves through educational events, collaborating with other community organizations, elected officials and city staff. Robin has also been consulting as a library specialist with Arizona State University and SciStarter.org to increase community participation in scientific research through participating as citizen scientists.

Russell Sciandra

Russell Sciandra has lived in Indianola since 2013, when he and his wife, Eva, moved there from New York’s Hudson Valley. Russ is retired from a career in public health focused on cancer control and population-wide behavior change. He managed two large, multi-year research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health before joining the American Cancer Society in 1997 to lobby the New York State government on behalf of cancer prevention policies.

Dave Shorett

Dave Shorett has been a lawyer in Washington State since 1970, primarily as a trial lawyer handling a variety of cases in local courts, US District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He presently serves as a Judge in the Suquamish Court of Appeals. Born in Seattle, he graduated from Whitman College and law school in Boston, he has lived in Kitsap County for 43 years. He has written 5 fishing books and wrote a fishing column in the Kitsap Sun for 5 years. He has long been active in land acquisition for public use, served as Parks Commissioner for Bainbridge Island for 15 years; is a founding member of the reorganized Bainbridge Island Parks and Trails foundation; member of the Island’s Open Space Commission; long time member of the Land Trust’s Projects Committee; Board member of the Friends of the Farms; member of the Wyckoff Committee; and served on other committees.

Dave believes that what makes Kitsap County a great place to live is its natural areas, shorelines, lakes, relatively undisturbed flora and fauna. Kitsap County has the opportunity to control its growth, provide attractive urban areas with all amenities, including parks and recreation, while at the same time protecting much of its great natural lands, streams, lakes and shorelines in perpetuity.

Lang Smith

Lang Smith has been a KEC member since 2023. He retired and moved to the Illahee area with his wife, Laura, in May. Lang is originally from Wyoming and Montana, where he worked first as a journalist in weekly and daily newspapers and then in communications for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC), a regional environmental group in Bozeman, Montana. At GYC he led the group’s efforts to support Yellowstone wolf reintroduction. After earning a Ph.D. in environmental geography, he taught courses in environmental studies and sustainability for 22 years at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. His research focused on the relationships between people and public lands. Lang is excited to learn about the Kitsap Peninsula and help KEC protect the natural landscapes and the quality of life that attracted him to his new home.

Service Honorees

We thank KEC Members Reed Blanchard, Lisa Hurt, Beverly Parsons, Carol Price, and Margaret Tufft for their multiple terms of service and are honored by their continuing dedication to Kitsap Environmental Coalition.

Reed Blanchard

Lisa Hurt

Lisa has been a Kitsap County resident for 58 years and has always been a lover of the outdoors, parks, and an advocate for environmental awareness. Her concerns about the use of toxic spraying in the county, the increasing population density in the area, and the diminishing wildlife corridors led her to Kitsap Environmental Coalition.

Beverly Parsons

Beverly is a 15-year resident of Kitsap County. She connects her role as director of InSites (a research nonprofit with a national and international focus on large scale systemic change) with her passion to rebalance the relationship of humans with the rest of life on this planet. She has a PhD in social science research.

Carol Price

Carol is a lifelong Washington state resident. Over that time, she has lived on both sides of the state. For the last 27 years she has called Kitsap County home. Having retired from nursing some years ago, she is taking the opportunity to explore our changing world.

Margaret Tufft

Margaret has taught music on three continents during her musical career. During that time, she has been exposure to the ways different cultures deal with challenges, especially concerning nature, culture, community and coming together. Currently, she is finishing her certification as a life coach. Her major interests are ecosystems and permaculture.