(First airdate: December 26, 2016) This week on the Compass we talk with the Senior Editor of Wooden Boat Magazine about a very old tall ship that is the last of its kind, and whose history opens a window on a lost world.

(First airdate: December 19, 2016) This week on the Compass we take a tour of an award-winning local artisanal craft brewery that has garnered high praise for its unique herbal beers, and then we attend the ceremonial burning of a six-foot high basket sculpture.  (Featuring interviews with Propolis Brewing proprietors Piper Corbett and Robert Horner, and Alaskan artist Mavis Muller about her sculpture titled Rising Times.)

(First airdate: December 12, 2016) This week on the Compass we attend an open house at which representatives of the U.S. Navy face a pretty tough crowd in the roll-out of their Growler training expansion plans.

(first airdate: December 5, 2016) In a surprising eleventh-hour announcement with an extraordinary timing, the Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday afternoon declared that it would not grant an easement for the nearly complete and hotly contested Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River at Lake Oahe, the reservoir from which the Lakota Sioux of the Standing Rock Reservation draw their drinking water–a plan which has drawn many months of protest from hundreds of tribes and many thousands of others from around the nation and the world in a conflict that has thrown in sharp relief issues from the hundreds of years of transgressions against Native American treaty rights to the very current conflict between the commercial interests of big oil and the rights of everyone to a livable planet.

What made the Army Corps’ Sunday announcement particularly peculiar was that it came literally on the eve of a deadline the same agency had set for the evacuation of Oceti Sakowin, the largest of three encampments—makeshift towns, really — that have been set up to carry out what may be the longest single sustained example of civil disobedience in American History.

In last week’s KPTZ Compass, we covered the departure from Port Townsend of a caravan bringing support to that effort on Thanksgiving week. Among that contingent was KPTZ Correspondent Chris Bricker, who this week brings us a view from on the ground at Standing Rock.

P.S. In a live interview following this week’s KPTZ Compass, KPTZ DJ and Correspondent Cris Bricker, Pacific Northwest Standing Rock delegation spokesperson Megan Claflin, and local Standing Rock “truth-keeper” and webmaster Lois Barnett join KPTZ News Director Steve Evans in a discussion of the Army Corps of Engineer’s decision to deny an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River on Sioux Treaty Land.

(First airdate: November 28, 2016) In a volunteer effort that reminded many of the participants of the massive local outreach that followed Hurricane Katrina more than a decade ago, a convoy set off last week from Port Townsend to bring Thanksgiving and a truckload of supplies to the Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota and support for the resistance to the completion of the Dakota Access oil Pipeline. And KPTZ was on hand at the send-off.

It’s Thanksgiving week, and with the holidays officially upon us, this week on the Compass we take a tour around town to see who’s doing what for whom and what plans are underway in our amazing volunteer-driven community to assure a cheery season for all. We include interviews with COAST Winter Shelter Director deForrest Walker, Boiler Room Executive Director Amy Smith, Port Townsend Food Bank Manager Shirley Ross, Main Street Program Director Mari Mullen, Olympic Steam Director Nathan Barnett, and Key City Public Theater Director Denise Winter.

This week on the Compass, we take measure of the toll last week’s election has taken on the collective psyche of eastern Jefferson County.  Then we watch a local snowball build support for the water protectors at Standing Rock.

This week on the Compass, we pay a visit to ECHHO, an unique Port Townsend charity that supplies the sick or disabled with everything from sick room supplies to free rides to distant doctors’ appointments. Then we talk with a local transgender woman about the struggle for acceptance.

We talk with a couple who have just returned from the front lines in the latest battle of the Sioux tribe to maintain control of their Treaty lands, which turns out to also be a battle against climate disruption and ecological devastation. Then we take note of the historical openings of two new local institutions.

It’s Pledge Week, so this week for KPTZ Compass, we’ve gone into the archive and pulled out a rich array of vintage and recent reportage.  It is our earnest hope that as you listen and review this pastiche of the ways we have been your ears on the ground, you will recognize the value of the community service we provide, and give generously to help us realize our dream of securing this service to the community for the future.  We’re doing our part, and we’re relying on you to do yours.