Let There Be Feral Cats. APRIL FOOLS!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s almost an old story now, but I hope it won’t die just yet. In a March 14 OpEd in the Orlando Sentinel, a name brand pain reliever was noted as being toxic to feral cats. Ted Williams, the author of the piece and one of our most respected writers on the subject of environmental stewardship, also opined that the practice of trapping, neutering, and releasing (TNR) feral cats did little to reduce their populations and nothing to reduce their unconscionable toll on wildlife.

Taking angry exception to Mr. Williams article, feral cat advocates took up their torches and pitchforks and got Mr. Williams suspended from his editor-at-large post at Audubon Magazine, where he’d been an institution for over 30 years. This move by Audubon in turn incited outrage in the conservation and sportsmen communities (Mr. Williams has long inspired fly fishermen to stand up for aquatic habitat). Then Audubon – perhaps realizing that the people to whom it had initially kowtowed were not only irrational but universally recognizable as such – reinstated Ted Williams.

Now everything is the same as before, with a few exceptions. For their deer-in-the-headlights response to the cat lunatics, Audubon will continue to get ass-whooped, and it will probably be a while until they regain the respect they once deserved. The cat advocates will continue to gun for Ted Williams, probably until they see his head on a spike. Most important, though, people who care for nature are waking up to the fact that the cancer of ferals is quite advanced.

Feral Pig Eating a Deer

Extremely and tragically so, in fact. By the thousands of acres, feral horses have defoliated, dewatered and otherwise pulverized high desert rangeland, rendering it prone to erosion and inhospitable to native wildlife. Feral hogs root up farmland and wildland with equal gusto and will eat anything they find, be it scaled, feathered or furred. When it can catch one, a feral hog will eat a cat. Burmese pythons, star players in Florida’s feral-induced wildlife holocaust, snarf their share of feral hogs.

"Uh oh. Time to get up. Here come the horses to eat your breakfast."

Feral pythons and horses probably number in the tens of thousands. Add a couple zeroes for pigs. Nationwide, however, the population of feral cats absolutely smokes all that. There are tens of millions of them, along with tens of millions of house cats that also kill. In his article, Ted Williams cited a Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute study that put the annual bird and mammal body count in the billions.

Bye Bye Birdie

Feral animals destroy directly and indirectly. They create sudden shocks to habitats that have been flexibly balanced for long periods, systems that achieved such resilience by adapting to and incorporating specific inputs over the same many years. In other words, feral cats can kill snakes not only with their teeth but by decimating the snake food supply as well.

Unless that snake happens to be a venison-eating python in Florida.

To the purely objective eye in the sky, there is no controversy as to the damage ferals inflict on stable ecosystems. None whatsoever, though there is plenty regarding how we might reduce these impacts. If it was up to me, we would employ every available means to completely eradicate feral cats, dogs, hogs, horses, pythons, and any other invasive animal known to be detrimental to regional species diversity (with one major exception, of course, out of respect to our laws against homicide).

Many if not most would reject my approach. Personally, I’m not comfortable with its proximity, or that it entails the actual laying on of hands and the associated accountability. In the case of cats, though, we would do well to admit to ourselves that accountability is everywhere we look. To keep my own cat from yowling around the house and waking up my son, I let her outside at night, fully aware of the hell I am visiting upon the critters in my neighborhood. I feel no better in the morning, especially if she’s brought me a decapped horny toad and I feel like drowning her in the bathtub.

Or making her do some mileage in another critter's shoes.

Especially in morally absolute America, we inevitably bend and twist and snap under the weight of playing God. Cat enthusiasts, for example, have become drunk on the same upside-down, defensive-righteous hypocrisy of gun huggers and climate change deniers. One hundred fifty rounds were used to mow down the innocents at Sandy Hook, which kind of isn’t but kind of is our collective fault. By not taking our petroleum addiction seriously, we didn’t invite Katrina to New Orleans so much as we ignored the years of urgent emails in which she told us she was coming. And although we love our cats, the feathers across the grass comprise an undeniable wrong. There is no refuting any of this.

Something I’ve written several times since starting this blog bears repeating in a different way: sometimes it sucks to be on top. By virtue of our membership in one of the most dominant and influential species in the history of life itself, we each have blood on our hands from birth. This is a truth I try to remember when I fish a cutthroat stream and consider it my duty to kill all the feral brown trout that I’m allowed. I remember it also when I fish a well-established brown trout fishery that hasn’t naturally reared a cutthroat trout for almost a century. Fight the fish fast, try not to touch it, take a picture while it’s catching its breath. But most of all, do the best you can.

Cactus Rebellion? Como No?

The New Mexico state legislature is considering a bill that would transfer title of federal public lands within New Mexico’s borders to the state. At first glance, it appears that there is no compelling need to do so. That is, unless we assume that the state would manage these lands better than the feds currently do, and that all New Mexicans would consequently benefit from the perspectives of job creation, education, recreation, and reverse environmental degradation (which might include ground refoliation, stream desiltation, species uneradication and groundwater nonirradiation and nonacidification).

I can see them lining up to take advantage of this progressive approach. Cattlegrowers, who currently feed each animal for about 15 bucks a year on federal land, will undoubtedly comprehend that the population socializing/subsidizing their livelihoods will shrink from 350 million to 2 million, and they’ll be happy to pay higher fees to compensate for this difference. During this extreme drought, they will voluntarily reduce their impacts. Same with all industries; private profit will come only after water, air and wildlife have been protected at no cost to the public. After all, when all that matters is the wellbeing of the citizenry, be they hunters, fishers, tourism-related employees, or just people who prefer ample and potable drinking water, these are the sacrifices one must be willing to make.

Not in New Mexico you don't!

Of course, given the drought, the low price of natural gas, homes, and labor, as well as the fact that none of these conditions is expected to move a whole lot in the right direction, costs to industry might grow burdensome. Perhaps New Mexico could sell off some of its newly acquired assets. But land of the acreage that would offset the costs of state ownership is expensive. Who can afford that?

I’ll tell you who can afford it. The same people who for generations have paid pennies for public chi-chi for every dollar they’ve kept for themselves. They’ve gotten rich that way, and I honestly have no problem with that outside of the fact that – really, let’s not kid ourselves about the intent of this legislation – they want to own it all even more than they already do.

I guess it also irritates me that they sometimes can’t just leave it at that. More and more these days, they rub salt, assessing those who can’t buy huge tracts of land as “entitled” or “takers”. For one thing, Mr. Pot, how dare you call us kettles black?

Wayne Hage, aka Mr. Pot - Godfather of the Sagebrush Rebellion

For another, you should consider whom you’re talking about, say, the disabled war veteran, the social worker, the hundreds of millions of their brothers and sisters who’ve devoted no less of their lives than you have to this country’s greatness, a greatness unique on the planet for the stake they’ve each been given in the material, absolutely unabstract, dirt of the place.

Never forget, folks, it’s that dirt that gives us the will to fight as hard as we always have. Because it’s something we can lose.

WIMBY: What Is My Backyard?

In the wake of a visit to Taos, NM by Interior Secretary to discuss National Monument designation of the Rio Grande del Norte area, House Rep. Rob Bishop commented thusly from afar:

“It’s nice that Secretary Salazar held a meeting on Saturday but many would argue that the gathering failed to provide sufficient opportunity for real public input and participation from the community, stakeholders, and local leaders. This is not the appropriate course that should be taken when considering new policies and land designations that affect so many livelihoods.”

For the record, the gathering he references was populated by over 300 souls, from every conceivable local interest group that could be affected by the designation. The Secretary asked for opposition again and again. No one stepped forward.

Question: What place does a congressman from Utah have in the discussion about the designation of a National Monument in New Mexico? Does he have one at all? You’ve heard Truchacabra on the rightness of our nation’s public lands system. I don’t know, I feel we all should have a say in what happens with Newtown, or on how weather catastrophes on the eastern seaboard are dealt with. And yes, on how my – because the public lands are as much mine as anyone’s – lands are disposed of in another state. But I still feel that Bishop is sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, in the middle of my fishing.

Hunters, Fishers, and Fragmented Habitat – A Love Story

The American public lands institution mandates that our common property be managed in ways that enhance the overall wellbeing of the citizenry. Public property, in other words, must be managed so as to provide materials, energy, employment, and recreation – among other societally indispensible goods – now and into the indeterminate future. I’m guessing this was the philosophy swimming around in Theodore Roosevelt’s mind as the Public Trust Doctrine was sinking its taproot. Along with several of his contemporaries, TR introduced the logic that proper and sustainable land management is natural law, essentially stating that he who uses his family’s roof shingles for firewood will eventually kill the function of his house.

This year, two bills (not passed yet) in Congress aimed to enhance the Doctrine’s depth. The Hunt Act responsibly sought to untangle access issues pertaining to public lands surrounded by private holdings. The Sportsmen’s Act is a Senate bill addressing a breadth of issues having to do with access, habitat, funding and wildlife management. Another thing the Sportsmen’s Act does is eliminate parts of the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act (H.R. 4089) that have nothing to do with either sportsmen or America’s outdoor heritage.

Having passed the House this year, the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act intends to improve access by hunters and fishermen to public lands. The bill also recognizes that designated status (national monuments, for example) sometimes needs to be reconciled with on-the-ground management realities (elk exist in New Mexico’s Bandalier National Monument where they didn’t historically, so management for hunting is an attractive, revenue-generating option). Along with addressing access issues, 4089 proposes that management of public resources will improve if local and regional voices are considered in federal land discussions.

Sounds reasonable. Yet in addition to 4089’s better elements, the Congressional Research Service has concluded that Titles II and VI of 4089 could be interpreted to allow motorized travel and development in federally designated wilderness areas. In addition, by subordinating presidential powers to state governors and legislators (the bill requires governor and legislature consent before executive orders can be exercised), the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act is transparently hostile to the Antiquities Act, the legislation used by Teddy R. and subsequent presidents to protect countless national treasures and essentially bring us all the weekend.

"Sure I'm a horse. Come on, guys, pull me in."

Motorized travel, though right and good, can be destructive to wildlife habitat. Well-worn paths concentrate runoff and cause erosion, which reduces plant cover, which results in more erosion. In deserts, high elevations, and other ecologically sensitive places, motorized vehicles are often more effective erosion inducers than nonbovine animal feet. We all know the erosion story, but many of us aren’t aware that engine noise and fumes can and do alter wildlife migration routes to the significant detriment of the animals concerned. It all comes down to habitat, why game animals favor places where they won’t encounter vehicles.

Except for this guy. Animals LOVE this guy.

In light of these simple truths, why would a true sportsman – as opposed to, say, a high-fence hunter, or an angler who views hatcheries and clean spawning gravel under the same dim light – want deeper motorized access into wilderness, the seed stock of resilient game and fish populations? Why would a true sportsman want monument designations left up to governors and legislators, the people most vulnerable to the charms of special interests?

And why, in light of all the positive features of 4089, wouldn’t its sponsors simply remove the parts that threaten the best habitat and ultimately reduce opportunities for sportsmen? The cynic might cite past and current connections between key 4089 lobbyists and the industry groups that would stand to profit not only from motorized access to all public property, but from a factionalized sporting community promoting pet causes (gun rights, OHVs, sound science) at the expense of the unity required to stand up for habitat. Unfortunately, the realist might give the same answer, since even a cursory examination of 4089 strongly suggests the strong influence of people who are no more concerned about the real sportsman than cognizant of who he is.

H.R. 4089, Sections II and VI, Abridged.

Please contact your congressional delegation. Ask them to eliminate H.R. 4089′s negative impacts on wildlife habitat and encourage them to support legislation such as the Sportsmen’s Act and the Hunt Act. For more information, contact us at truchacabra@gmail.com. Or use this letter as you wish: 4089 Sportsmen Letter Sep 2012 final copy. Don’t let them get through!

Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 3 – As the Century Turns, in Which Teddy F@%#ing Roosevelt

As the 1800s came to a close, it was clear to men like Theodore Roosevelt that some resource planning was necessary to save a nation seemingly hellbent on eating itself. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 allowed the government to withdraw from settlement portions of forests in the interest of flood prevention and the protection of headwater streams and timber supplies. In 1905, Roosevelt’s good friend Gifford Pinchot became the first head of the Forest Service in charge of forests as agricultural entities; his agency and others were dreamed up by the two friends in their efforts to right our listing ship.

Who says Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon?

Listen up, Truchacabrones:

“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people. The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.” - Theodore F. Roosevelt, 1907

Land agencies had existed before, but their missions had generally been to exploit public lands instead of preserve them. The Forest Reserve Act was the shift toward stewardship Roosevelt envisioned. Since formalized as the Public Trust Doctrine, his vision holds that our natural resources – trees, wildlife, grass, and ecosystems – should be managed for the general well-being of society and future generations. Thus, from a fly fishing and posterity perspective, the turn of the 20^th century was less attractive for its bushels of big trout than for the insurance policy Roosevelt took out on nature’s future.

Lands removed from settlement would henceforth be our house and yard, and the government would be the daddy. Over time, this parental analogy has drifted away from metaphor and towards the true state of affairs. After all, Daddy bought the house (Louisiana and Florida Purchases, the Oregon Territory, Alaska, won the rest in wars he paid for) and has always put food on the table (homestead giveaways, interstate system, reclamation projects). On birthdays and holidays he’s come through with the presents we begged for (a national choo-choo train set), has kept us safe from threats (Hitler), and is often there at the exact moment we need a cool washcloth on our foreheads (dustbowl relief, terrorist attacks) or someone to bail our asses out of jail (corporate rescues).

Frequently of late, Daddy isn’t appreciated for his efforts on his family’s behalf. Many have gone so ignorantly far as to insist that a person in this day and age can sustain him or herself without a helping hand from anyone, let alone the government. In the arena of public lands, these folks have suggested that the commons should be sold or otherwise opened wide to time-tested American entrepreneurship.

Problem is (not a lot of exceptions in our history), American entrepreneurship in many industries – grazing, logging, and mining to name three – is only profitable if costs for things like road construction and maintenance, tumultuous markets, or resource degradation are externalized, and to whom you need not ask. Good old Daddy, always leaving the tank full so that Junior can afford the milkshakes and rubbers.

OMG! Have you seen that new car my dad bought me? Totally gross!

As a father, the U.S. government has been reasonably responsible, but he has admittedly been far from perfect. Strong, kind, generous, and protective, he can also be overbearing, and arbitrary to the point where we sometimes aren’t sure whether a hug is coming next or the bullwhip. I was often annoyed when my dad ordered me to do something when he could either have tasked the sibling next to me or gotten his goddamn beer himself. Like most kids, I grew to hate the four words, “because I said so.”

What makes these words so suckingly perfect, though, is that they are understood by both parent and child as the very same things: a razor-sharp limit to freedom as well as a billboard that says, “Even if you wanted to pay the mortgage on this place, you couldn’t.”

Waaah! Daddy makes me do stuff!

You don’t have to be a Teanderthal to have a beef with governmental limits, but at some point after reaching legal adulthood, you’re supposed to understand that your present and future are inhabited by people other than yourself – children, grandchildren, people they’ll marry and befriend, as well as people you don’t even know whose unseen sacrifices have a habit of landing on your doorstep like a basket of Christmas cookies. Oh, and all of these people need places in which to live, with food in the pantry and water from the tap that’s hopefully from a clean place.

And they’ll need money, which in so many ways is generated by our well kept yard. “The Outdoor Recreation Economy”, a 2012 report by the Outdoor Industry Association, revealed that outdoor recreation accounts for 6.1 million American jobs, 646 billion dollars in consumer spending, and 80 billion dollars in local, state, and federal tax revenue BY ITSELF, and the vast bulk of this productivity is generated on public land.

Good fathers teach the art of critical thinking. Bad fathers believe that the best they can do for a child is to let him do what he wants. Everyone around the kid can just deal, same as Mama and Daddy done. It’s easy to see how living this way can make you mad all the time. You think you’re in complete control, but you spend your days adjusting to everyone’s selfish agendas. Makes you hate, especially that which you refuse to educate yourself about.

So what if he was drunk? At least no one was telling him what to do.

My father, a lawyer and the person I admire most in life, was the first boss I ever asked for a raise. At a full family dinner (we were Catholic), I called for silence and pitched my case. I had dutifully managed the household garbage and had made myself available as a spur-of-the-moment raker and bagger, and general doer of whatever I was told. In support of my position, I had my siblings at my back (I was demanding a better deal for the entire staff) and my written claims on spiral notebook paper.

“Your argument is fair,” my father essentially told me, “and you are indeed of increasing value.” He might have wiped his chin with his napkin at this point, or employed some other courtroom trick to put me on my heels. “Which is good, because you are growing older and the gas bill is going up. The five of you take more showers, you see. You consume more food, which requires more cooking. You are right to increase your earning power to compensate for these additional costs, especially in light of your impending college educations.”

“Regarding practicalities,” he would have been smiling now, “shall I send your updated invoices to this address or somewhere else?”

"And don't come out until you learn how to behave like a grownup!"

Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 2 – Hats Off to Orvis

Throughout the 19^th century, there was plenty of fly fishing in America, particularly among folks who’d retained a taste of British culture, the tradition of the art, and, of course, the wealth. Others fished, but it was mainly to feed families who were under constant pressure from underpaid work or no work at all. Again, Pa wanted his Little House on the Prairie (read Part 1) because he felt pushed out of his Little House in the Big Woods by the expansion of industry and population. The east was choked with people who wanted better, and most of what was there had been gotten.

By the time Pa hit the prairie, Indians were on the run, the east was firmly settled, and California was bustling with its mining boom. In search of mineral riches, fertile homesteads, or just open space, people were hauling ass to fill the vacuum in the middle. There was immigration, Asians coming east, Europe hustling west. From all sectors of power and vision, there was unanimity of belief that our nation needed a railroad to sew itself together. Throw in the Civil War and its aftermath, and it’s safe to say that America was little if not chaos and inertia. In summary, poor Pa.

Like Black Friday at Walmart, only for land.

And poor every other living thing. Not only were the plains-blackening bison reduced to zoo populations, but whitetail deer were devastated by commercial and subsistence hunting. Fur bearers were trapped to within an inch of extinction (watersheds of today still bear the wounds of a lengthy, trapping-induced absence of beavers’ critical influence on riparian ecology), and birds were annihilated for meat and for plumage.

Native trout were far from immune to this suffering. Irrigation and overfishing made sure of that. As the 1800s passed the halfway mark, the fly fishing you take for granted was headed for a death so certain and so complete that today might have come and you might never have even known trout existed.

Charles F. Orvis started his business in the late 1850s to serve recreational tourists who came to the Berkshires on trains from New York and Boston. As a reader of this blog, you might be addicted to fly fishing. Maybe you remember how you came to be that way, so you can understand that if Charles F. Orvis was peddling the fishing drug, it definitely wasn’t long before he’d grown himself a serious gang of junkies. Thanks to him and other tackle dealers of his day, fishing with a fly ceased to be something people did, became something they loved, and then something they could not live without.

Breaking bad, gots me some dog beds too!

In the Charles F. Orvis era, what the junkies had been seeing for quite some time was the rapid decline of brook trout from overfishing and industrial pollution. Remember when you were a meth addict? How it felt to imagine – because your friends who weren’t stealing from you weren’t cooking either because there definitely wasn’t any Sudafed within a three county radius – that the crank you couldn’t live without was nowhere to be found when you needed it, like, fricking yesterday? Now imagine that same desperation in the late 1800s, when getting bailed out of rough situations was a lot tougher than stalking truck stops for suckers or moving back in with your parents. Not so nice.

Yellow Sallies under my skin.

America back then had a couple reliable options for salvation. Known as Europe and California, these options were home to two species of trout, the brown from Germany and Scotland, and the rainbow from the San Francisco Bay area. These fish were nothing if not hearty. For that reason, they were stocked pretty much everywhere in this country to compensate for the demise of other trouts. As we know, they have since thrived wherever they’ve been introduced (brookies too, when transplanted to colder and cleaner habitat). As we know too, this thriving came at the further expense of native trout.

If it makes you feel better, remember Glen Canyon and the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which now only exist in the recesses of your imagination.

Still, brown trout and the rainbows are perhaps equally responsible for fly fishing and, as a result, native trout existing at all. It’s a tree falls in the forest exercise to be sure, but our fantasies of uncrowded streams take place in a world that doesn’t care about trout. And for the most part, we care about trout because, for better or worse, browns and/or rainbows live in most of the waters we fish (even in Texas, home to the largest and richest chapter of Trout Unlimited, which funds cutthroat restoration in the Rockies). It simply could not be otherwise.

In closing, I must confess to my discomfort at admitting that Charles F. Orvis had a significant hand in making lemonade out of the lemons of our historic rapaciousness (yeah, I’m one of those). As a man over forty years old, I experience a similar discomfort at my annual physical, that rubber glove snapping behind me and what happens next. But as a man over forty, I also have a greater understanding of what is true in life, and just because something is true does not make it pretty. It just makes it real, and the better I understand reality, the better odds I have of surviving it.

OK, I love Orvis. I swear I love Orvis!

The Me Party Leaves the Pavement Again

I have recently become somewhat of a fan of a group of hunters and fishers that drive Off Highway Vehicles to their chosen recreation spots. Their mission is to police their own riding in order to minimize negative impacts on the resources they enjoy, and to educate others to do the same. They believe that there is nothing wrong with vehicles used responsibly in designated areas, and they also believe that certain habitats cannot withstand sustained human travel by any other means than the seemingly forgotten art of walking on two feet.

To my mind, such goals are modest and sensible, perhaps to the point of not warranting action at all. Nevertheless, Sportsmen Ride Right has come under fire from the zealot wing of the OHV riding world, a mob that seems to feel it should be allowed to ride anywhere on public land, if not through your city park. According to these ideologues, SRR’s interest in unfragmented wildlife migration corridors, watersheds, and erosion is an abomination, earning them the labels of “anti-access” and worse, “enviros.”

Just where do you think this is anyway, the U.S. of France?

These folks define themselves as conservatives. Yet conservatives at their classic best grapple so constructively with life’s harsh realities, a process that seems to make the OHV zealots break out in hives. To make things really confusing, the pejorative liberal stereotype – an advocate of making whatever choices we want and leaving society holding the bag – could be the mirror image of the zealots themselves. Picture one astride the new Polaris Carbon Assprint 9000. He’s rutting a meadow that might be critical to keeping a stream wet through the heat of August, a stream with trout in it, in a watershed above a town. This guy drives away, his T-shirt splattered with mud. Does the shirt have a picture of Ted Nugent on it or of Che Guevara? If Me Party behavior were interpreted at face value, I think it could be either.

Motor City Madmang!

Motorheads want to ride into wilderness, and if they start a forest fire up there, they’d like the bulldozers to come in and mop up. In the wake of the dozers, there will be roads, roads that must be ridden, that eventually should lead to private residences and even more roads. Which should be ridden some more, in the supposed interest of “preserving our natural resources FOR the public instead of FROM the public” (growing the profits of the off-road vehicle industry should also be included in that slogan, at least explicitly).

Lord knows there aren’t enough roads through public land (the Santa Fe National Forest alone has a paltry 2,400 miles – the distance between Las Vegas and Washington, D.C. – of roads and trails open to motorized use). If anyone suggests that roads be closed for any valid reason – erosion control, redundancy, watershed protection, fire prevention, wildlife sanctuary, to name some practical ones – the extremists have a cow, because they should have access to everything.

Fortunately, as a matter of indisputable fact, they already do.

Well, legally anyway.

It’s just that some modes of access, particularly the most impactful, aren’t allowed in some places. A great many OHV riders understand the ecological imperatives behind this, because hunters and anglers generally possess a working knowledge of how ecosystems work. They will ride where they can and walk the rest of the way, relishing the experience instead of whining about it.

Anyway, in 21^st century, 350 million person, broke-ass America, I suggest we adopt the following ideas regarding public lands, whether you ride on them, hunt and fish on them, or just look at them:

As a matter of national security, very large acreages of roadless wilderness need to be preserved at the headwaters of watersheds that contribute to urban supplies.
Management practices such as selective thinning and prescribed burning need to be applied in road-accessible areas on a widespread basis to minimize crown fires and the associated destruction of human and animal habitat.
Fires in the wilderness will burn (or be controlled as possible, which is not very well), and the sky will not fall. This will be especially true when lowland buffers become better maintained. Everything, watersheds included, will benefit from the reduced upland fuel load.
Streams must be connected to their floodplains so that runoff and sediment will improve ecosystem resiliency and nutrient cycling.
Extreme environmentalists and motorheads must learn to absorb simple ideas, or be excluded from conversations concerning community welfare and public lands. These people need to stop wasting so much of their neighbors’ valuable time with ideological drivel.

Speaking of environmentalists, we must remember how many regular old folks are among them, insofar as anyone who desires such things as clean drinking water is an environmentalist. Someone who prays for rain is an environmentalist, who buys local whenever possible or plants a xeriscape garden so his neighbor can grow veggies, who loves a perfectly cooked elk steak that came from an ATV ride to the trailhead and then a hike. Basically, any person who is truly interested in a region being able to support life over the long haul is an environmentalist. It doesn’t matter if this person works at the farmers’ market or for an oil company; if she’s hitched her well-being to the sustainability of her human and biotic communities and the services they must provide, then we call her an environmentalist. Don’t be ashamed, people, say it with pride, no matter who you end up voting for in November.

As for you Me Partiers, it’s time you honored your own environmentalist tendencies and, yes, your environmental responsibilities as well. It’s as though you’re this fat gigantic baby screaming at the top of your lungs, so well taken care of and yet so inconsolable until you’ve awakened everyone in the house and eaten every last scrap of food. You are entirely self-interested, which should be an embarrassment to you if not a definite sign that your diaper is overflowing.

It's starting to smell around here. Time for a change.

Public Lands Cage Match

In one corner a team that, at its worst, is extraordinary for its sentimentality, at its best, for its passion. A mixture of red and blue, give it up for Team Purple:

HUNTERS

WEAKNESSES: It occasionally satisfies you to arrange birds you’ve killed into the letters P, E, T, and A. This behavior dishonors your quarry, is juvenile, stupid, and reeks of the hypocritical righteousness you abhor in anti-hunting zealots. Take Ted Nugent. Those familiar with his oeuvre know of his ability to sustain a guitar fart for a really long time. In spite of being excellent to the max, this talent is no excuse for Nugent being a rotten ambassador for your sport.

Saluting means you're American. Or Sadaam Hussein, or just someone who thinks smart people are fooled by random saluting.

STRENGTHS: Pursuing wild creatures in their native habitat promotes the only practices and philosophies that can save humanity from itself. From hunting and fishing we learn about death and grief, compassion, respect, mercy, wonder, forgiveness, humility, and most of all, love.

BAIT AND LURE FISHERMEN

WEAKNESSES: You do not clean up after yourselves very well. The fish you hook happen to die in large and frequently illegal numbers. Also, all commercially-produced baits and most homemade ones taste like crap.

STRENGTHS: Circle hooks enable catch and release bait fishing, and in one Behnke-cited study, treble hooks caused less mortality than single barbed or barbless. You have an enviable ability to wake up, see a pretty day, and get out in it with your toes in the water and your fingers around a can.

FLY FISHERMEN

WEAKNESSES: Not only do many of you confuse catch and release with the moral high ground, but you are too often averse to sharing. All it takes is you believing your favorite spot is a secret (which is rarely, if ever, true), and suddenly nobody but you has a right to go there. You behave as though you invented rivers, if not water itself. Anyway, lots of people find you arrogant, often for good reason.

STRENGTHS: Not to say releasing most of your catch is a bad thing. And you love rivers, need them in fact. If not for rivers, you would go insane.

OTHER OUTDOOR RECREATIONISTS

WEAKNESSES: You take too much for granted, figuring that since you and your friends love skiing, birdwatching, and mountain biking so much, your favorite mountain can’t get hurt by anyone, including you. Many of you seem to think that wildlife and trails exist due to the efforts of hikers and mushroom hunters instead of management agencies that operate on the dollars of people who buy licenses and permits.

Oh yes you did.

STRENGTHS: Many outdoor pastimes are expensive to engage in. Affording snowboards for the kids requires a healthy income, which is usually associated with challenging yet stressful jobs. Outdoor recreation, being an easy way to alleviate stress, addicts many highly functional people to clean and abundant wildlands. Addicts get mean when they don’t get their fix.

VEGANS

WEAKNESSES: While trumpeting the high morality of your eating habits, you ignore the cloudy morality associated with not eating animals. By not supporting hunters and farmers who treat food animals with respect, you make it more difficult for natural and wholesome animal products to make the necessary impression on the mainstream palate. As a result, factory farming will endure.

STRENGTHS: Hard to knock people who dedicate their lives to minimizing cruelty and maximizing compassion towards sentient beings. Not to mention, anyone contributing to the global availability of steak, bacon, farm fresh eggs, lobster and butter, sharp cheddar cheese, and pastrami. You consume the world’s muddest tasting foods so the rest of us don’t have to.

Oh boy! Someone's eyes are getting bigger than his stomach.

SECOND AMENDMENT HUGGERS

WEAKNESSES: Too many of you think that giving your daughter a Glock for her first birthday, a kid being shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer, drug cartel firepower, school mowdowns, household defense, and hunting must all be viewed through the same lens. Your blindness to the color gray manifests itself politically in ways that are needlessly detrimental to society.

You got a problem with that?

STRENGTHS: Guns are used for hunting; hunting is good. Guns are used for personal protection; personal protection is good. The Outlaw Josey Wales is hands down the best movie I’ve ever seen.

The Original Gun Nut

LEAVE-IT-ALONE ENVIRONMENTALISTS

WEAKNESSES: For the sake of your definition of pristine, you sometimes stand in the way of healing the land and restoring ecological function. Your righteousness is frequently unearned and unproductive.

Guys, could we do a prescribed burn first and save the lawsuit for later?

STRENGTHS: You’re nasty fighters who never back down. Plus, in this day and age and especially in the United States, being left alone once in a while is really sweet, and pleasant, and quiet, and………..

FARMERS AND RANCHERS

WEAKNESSES: In the mistaken belief that you always act in society’s long term best interest, you sometimes consume too much water, fodder, and land.

STRENGTHS: Land is something you’re particularly good at. You might not want to admit it, but you have a knack for using science to solve problems.

ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

WEAKNESSES: The animal rights you seek come at a cost in animal welfare. For example, pets and feral animals have huge negative impacts on wildlife and natural ecosystems, and you are unwilling to accept aggressive measures to mitigate this. Also, by opposing hunting and fishing, you build walls between children and the outdoors.

How beautiful, they're running. To the one patch of grass they haven't eaten.

STRENGTHS: You love animals. Animals are cool.

NUMBERS GUYS

WEAKNESSES: Bulls and lunkers, doesn’t matter if they come from pens or the wild, just that they come. Over the last few years, this quantity-over-quality attitude has led to a rash of unnecessary lobotomies being performed in the name of government-funded predator control. It also threatens initiatives to restore sensitive habitats and species.

Numbers guy. Hatin' on the cutthroats.

STRENGTHS: Since quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive, it helps to know how upset you’d get if neither standard were being attained.

In the other corner, into which all light is absorbed, and from which none escapes, Team Black:

SPECIAL INTERESTS

WEAKNESSES: None, because screw everybody. To you, fish, wildlife and public lands only exist as objects for you to exploit to the exclusion of all, even your society. Seriously, if there was such a thing as the grandmother of special interests, you would tackle her for a crust of bread.

You eyeballing me Grandma?

STRENGTHS: You have the ability to divide your enemy into factions that, while enormously powerful when united, fight like cats and dogs otherwise. In fact, you excel at making the segments of your enemy behave as special interests themselves, though without enough muscle to accomplish much of anything. You also use your magic to charm or, as some would say, “own” the referees.

You know the drill. If Team Purple wins, there will be an immediate rematch and another if need be, until such time as Team Black takes the crown. At that point, the whole thing is over.

Cavernoscopy

As a born New Mexican, I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never been to Carlsbad Caverns before President’s Day weekend. I am definitely a big fan of geological wonders, even bats, but I guess I don’t crave them like I do trout streams and verdant mountainsides. I think that’s all changed now.

So this is really going to be about Carlsbad Caverns.

One of the great things about the desert is that it forces you to mentally plant trees and shrubbery in the sand and to populate your view with animals of yore if not those already existing but holed up out of the sun and heat and wind that are probably thinking “Why the hell did I evolve where you can’t just go out and get a sip of water when you want one?”

Another thing is the slowness of process, the growth of what will and its decomposition. A type of evolution, though what’s so striking about the caverns is not the timeline of living things but the story of the earth as told by rock. In the Grand Canyon, you can read the story on the multicolored cliffs and even from an airplane. But at Carlsbad, you literally have to penetrate the story in order to understand it.

In the parking lot, you stand on a reef at the edge of what was once an inland ocean spreading south and east before you. Then down you go into thousands of feet of dead and carved marine life. While Dimetrodons became T-Rexes became T-Mobiles, drop by drop of mineral-laden and acidified groundwater calved out chunks of limestone, made rooms, then proceeded to decorate them with speleoforms of every conceivable shape in the divine universe.

Nope, still about the caverns.

The kicker is that if it weren’t for the installation of electricity, Carlsbad Caverns would be amazing in the dark. Talk about trees falling in the forest. “It’s like going into a butthole,” said my nephew, who, like most 7 year olds, has a knack for boiling life down to its most basic truths. Given the theoretical state of our near future world, I fear the worst for my family’s youngest generation, which is why I was quick to take advantage of such an obvious teaching moment. “Mind you, not just any butthole,” I said. “It’s the butthole of time, so of course no light can get through.”

My weekend epiphany came from that. It’s something I’ve been chasing for years, and I finally see that to qualify as a national park, a wild place must be able to cause you to say or feel anything without appearing ridiculous. In other words, a place must be so awe-inspiring, must possess so much cosmic, psychic, and spiritual space that everything that every imagination can and will ever produce fits easily inside it.

Yea, and the Lord spoke verily unto them, "Oh this little old thing? Just something I've been toying around with for a few billion years. You like?

In this respect, I believe we have chosen well – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Denali, Carlsbad, to name a few – and I believe we still have a national soul as a result. I hear often of eliminating the Park Service. Parks are wasteful luxuries. We can’t afford them. National soul, I said. That’s something we can never not afford.

Playing God As If God Weren’t Paying Too Much Attention

I don’t have the skills to express exactly why native rainbow trout are my favorite fish, so I won’t even try. They take your breath away the way ice-carved, black, Dracula’s castle peaks are breathtaking. Alaska, in other words. And the speed of the rainbow will never stop amazing me. Suffice it to say that my reincarnation will begin somewhere on the Pacific Rim.

Good Fish

I have different feelings about rainbows beyond their ancestral range. I must admit that they’re a heck of a lot of fun wherever I find them, – the Bighorn, the Missouri, Madison, Green, or San Juan – but I sometimes get a really strong feeling of “you should have been here yesterday” when I survey the big country around these places, as in “you should have seen the trout that were here before the cows and the mines and the dams and browns and rainbows were invited over.”

What can you do, right? We played God, and this is our heaven (isn’t it though?).

Bad Fish?

A couple years ago, I and several Trout Unlimited friends fished Tusas Creek, a gem of a trickle flowing south out of the gentle yet forbidding mountains northwest of Tres Piedras. We caught rainbows first, tip-finned streamborn fish that were as plump as they were gorgeous. After cresting a good sized but barely passable (for trout) waterfall, we caught fish that were more cutthroat in appearance, and the farther we went upstream the more phenotypically pure the cutties became. Then, at our farthest advance into a high alpine elk meadow, we caught a couple fish that looked almost pure rainbow.

For a number of reasons, I don’t like killing trout. I don’t like the taste of them, especially if they were caught downstream of mines, agricultural lands, golf courses, nuclear research facilities, or the set of Jersey Shore. I don’t like how trout look dead. It’s too obvious that life isn’t there.

Yet, although I could never kill an Alaskan rainbow, I did not hesitate to kill those rainbows on the Tusas. I honestly couldn’t help myself. Something extracorporeal pressed my thumb against their heads as I broke their necks. The area I was in was too wild, or too much from another time, of grizzly bears, Apaches and trappers, streams full of cutthroat trout.

The time for the cutthroat could very well be past us. I read in the paper the other day that feral pigs are becoming as common in New Mexico as 40 year old grandparents gassing up at Allsups with their engines still running. In the Jemez, locust trees are succeeding the ponderosas in the wake of the previous big fire, and any day now I’m expecting to find a hearty brown trout swimming around in my morning coffee. Definitely can’t get too wistful around this place. Hope for less societal erosion and you risk some serious heartbreak.

So what's the big diff?

I’m actually hearing noise about just waving the white flag and letting human enhanced nature take its course. Really? Is homogenization really so easy to swallow? With brown trout doing just fine (though they’ll be in trouble next) and cutthroat in their current straits, we are a couple bad forest fires from being Arkansas or Missouri as far as trout fishing is concerned. Nothing against those places, or Oklahoma or Texas where artificial trout fisheries have been successfully created. People love catching trout and should do so wherever they can, but people should also catch native trout wherever they can as well.

In Alaska it’s easy, in New Mexico, not so much. That is not necessary, nor is it right.

Truchacabra

Conversations About Fly Fishing and the Outdoor Life

Category Archives: Conservation