For this year’s Earth Day, we’ll highlight five issues relating to conservation, restoration, and general stewardship of the place we all call home. Over the last few years, we’ve seen tremendous progress on some truly transformational conservation initiatives. But at the same time, human development and our own destructive tendencies continue to outpace our meager, but critical, conservation successes. Climate change, an 8.2 BILLION person population, and ever growing need for energy and natural resources. Sure, the future can seem bleak, but small actions can snowball, especially in this country, and produce measurable, lasting progress.
So, do not lose hope, pick up that piece of trash, fill up your yeti instead of buying another water bottle, stop fertilizing your lawn, and keep supporting the many great conservation organizations. We have one planet we call home, let’s make it better today and for future generations.
- Klamath River Restoration: without a doubt, Northern California’s Klamath River running free for the first time in decades was one of the biggest victories we saw in the last 12 months. Years of tireless work from on-the-ground advocates and large groups like Trout Unlimited and Cal Trout made this possible. We cannot wait to see the Klamath system spring back to like much like the Elwha did.
- Abandoned Mine Legislation Signed Into Law: Another victory out west, getting sorely needed good samaritan abandoned mine legislation across the finish line was a tremendous achievement. Throughout much of the Mountain West, abandoned mines scatter the landscape and leach toxic pollution into waterways. Up until this year, well-intentioned organizations couldn’t effectively conduct remediation projects to restore these abandoned sites because the threat of liability was completely prohibitive. This law, a huge priority of TU and others, opens the door to hundreds of restoration projects–our water and cold-water fisheries are cheering.
- Captains For Clean Water: The efforts to restore Florida’s natural flow of water through the Everglades and secure clean water and healthy ecosystems for much of South Florida remains one of the most unifying initiative in the fishing and conservation space. Captains for Clean Water deserves a lot of that credit. Progress continues on major Everglades restoration projects such as LOSOM and fortunately Big Sugars lawsuit to stall progress was shot down by federal courts.
- Now for the bad. Threats to Public Lands are mounting in the last few months. Privatizing public lands is number one in the playbook, but expect more development and destructive extraction activities to become more the norm over the next few years. America’s public lands are sacred and make so many of our favorite pastimes possible. Keeping public lands accessible, largely intact, and wild is critical to keeping fly fishing and outdoor recreation whole.
- The United States’ total abandonment of Climate Change research and significant cuts to federal conservation programs. Deleting “climate change” from federal government documents and intimidating entities that work on climate change issues does not magically alter the fact that we are fundamentally altering our planet’s natural processes. In reality, it’s no different than sticking our heads in the sand, while environmental disasters increase in frequency and ecosystems are changing before our eyes. But now, and if the current administration’s budget becomes real, we will have no way of tracking it or mitigating against the impacts, because federal agencies that do great science and resource management budgets are being slashed and effectively terminated. Some of the fisheries-related headlines coming out of the White House the past few weeks will have lasting, disastrous impacts if they come to fruition. It’s a shame that the US wants to relinquish its leadership on an issue that impacts every single one of us locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.
There are definitely some bright spots to celebrate this Earth Day, but serious threats remain, and new threats pop up all the time. We hope everyone gets a chance to spend some time outside and enjoy this incredible planet–catch a fish, take a breath of fresh air, or go climb a mountain. All the while, however, think about what you can do to make this planet cleaner, more resilient, and fishier for future generations.
