One of the features of life in Paxson is that, given the length of time modern man has been in the area, the region remains one of the least-impacted stretches of road-accessible portions of this planet. There never has been any agriculture here, nor forestry, nor appreciable industry. Our air, soil and water remain for the most part as pristine as they have been forever; our night skies are free from light pollution; our airspace is off commercial traffic routes. There is no freeway or railroad track for hundreds of miles - no distant sounds.  The waters flowing in our streams and Gulkana River pass through lands that have been unaffected by human presence forever, for all intents and purposes. Our roads are not salted nor are their margins sprayed with herbicides, so we haven't those potential sources of contaminants to affect us.

On a smaller scale, we do our own part to minimize our impact on the local environment. We use low-impact, biodegradable soaps and detergents in all our cleaning activities. We heat our water with clean-burning propane, and all our water heaters are ultra-high efficiency tankless heaters. Our communal rooms and our own house are heated with fire-killed wood and burned in woodstoves equipped with catalytic convertors to maximize heat output and minimize effluents. Our home does possess an oil-fired burner but it rarely turns on unless we are absent from the house for more than two days.

Our greatest efforts, however, have been concentrated in our electricity production.  We have spent enough decades in remote Alaska to know well the terrible inefficiencies and pollution profiles that small-scale diesel-burning generators possess, and when the combination of crushing price, unacceptable reliability and poor quality of the electricity provided forced us to remove ourselves from the minuscule downtown Paxson grid, we did so by emplacing one of the larger privately-owned solar electric systems in Alaska.  Our photovoltaic panels stand on various sites throughout our compound, and our long summer days provide this system with enough power to enable us to run our lives and our accommodations business in a manner that all our visitors find essentially identical in fashion to life in a grid-tied system.  An oversized bank of storage batteries smooths our production and consumption profiles so that clean, highest-quality electricity is available 24 hours of every day; the backup generator that we do maintain almost never has to be made use of unless we have a period of two or more days of non-stop rain.  We do implore our guests to work within the spirit of conservation and to be conscientious of their use of electricity, as we ourselves are.