A gumbo of fly-fishing, conservation, politics and days afield, for what it is worth....
Here is a an update on the conservation funding bill that is headed to the House floor next week. The administration weighed in this afternoon with a STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY on H.R. 2584, The Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act.
The SAP, as they are known, is five pages of details of the funding and policy problems created by this bill should it become law. Worth a read if you are still unsure how bad this is…
Stay tuned.
UPDATED:
July 21: Veto Pen for the Rusty Machete
July 12: The Full Appropriations Committee put the boots to the corpse leaving the work of the Subcommittee unchanged.
Thanks to Moldy Chum, Headwaters (with a hefty dose of info on the appalling bad HR 2018) and MidCurrent for helping get the word out. If you have added you voice let me know so I can thank you here.
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An Appropriations Subcommittee in the U.S. House left conservation funding and policy a mutilated corpse on the floor of their hearing room yesterday.
The funding cuts don’t put conservation programs on life support, instead they just left the body on the floor to bleed out. And to make sure they sent a strongly worded message to those of us who care about conservation, they added provisions to the legislation that undermine critical conservation and environmental policies.
Here is a sample courtesy of TU and NWF (follow the links for more details):
They hung a sign around the corpse with these provisions:
Folks, it is time to raise a stink about this and make our elected officials understand that habitat equals opportunity that creates economic activity!
If we don’t then we only have ourselves to blame.
“Fishing and hunting generate $76.7 billion annually in economic activity in the U.S.,” said Steve Moyer, VP for Government Affairs at Trout Unlimited. “We can’t expect to sustain this powerful economic engine if we’re removing the very conservation programs that make it run.”
“Clean water is an incredible economic engine, driving such industries as commercial and recreational fishing, hunting, boating and tourism. When water quality degrades, as we see in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay and now dismayingly on the Yellowstone River, the national economy suffers. We can ill afford to lose the millions of American jobs that depend on clean water, and unfortunately today’s subcommittee action may put our nation’s clean water jobs in real jeopardy,” said Steve Kline, director of the Center for Agricultural Lands at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives zeroing-in on natural resource conservation programs at a time when conservation, tragically (and temporarily I hope) has become a political football toted mostly by Democrats.
Some of it has less to do with backlash politics than it does some shrewd elected lawmakers, schooled well in the grim arithmetic, who understand that slashing Medicaid will result in a kind of Frankensteinian flash-mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks, while defunding the clean water protection that has so vastly improved our waterways and lakes, even as our population has doubled, will go largely unnoticed (at least in the short-run) and may even win them some powerful friends in the would-be polluter lobby.
My concern right now is that while it’s right to balance the state and national budgets, infrastructure / transportation / industry / energy have strong lobbies that make sure that those sectors are preserved. And while they are important to sustain a way of life our waters sustain life.
Leaders lose sight of the biggest things, or think that they’ll take care of themselves. Left alone, they probably would, but we won’t leave them alone (see infrastructure / transportation / industry / energy).
And yet … hope and perseverance. This is no time to put down our shovels or our pens.
If they don’t see the light let them feel the heat.
Our elected officials either ignore the interests of anglers and hunters or they think nature will take care of itself. The case for other sectors is being made more effectively than the case for outdoor recreation. We are seen as “hobbyists” and our venues will take care of themselves or are not as important as the other sectors. Our interest are economically legitimate but poorly understood.
This is the worse I have ever seen in 30 years of doing conservation work. Unfortunately our years of wishful thinking that Republican’s care about sportsmen may finally be catching up with us. I don’t care whether you label it politics or culture, we are seeing how the Republicans in the House value our community and what we know is essential for hunting and fishing to survive in this country.
If the hunting and fishing community does not step up and express outrage over this assault on the very foundation of our traditions then we only have ourselves to blame.
NOTE: This post is being updated as more information comes in, check back now and then.
Stay tuned, this is only gonna get worse…
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On Thursday the Huffington Post posted “Republican NY State Senator Roy McDonald’s Awesome Defense Of Gay Marriage”
Did you see it?
The quote that captured many peoples attention was brilliant, whether you agree with his views of gay marriage or not.
“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,” McDonald, 64, told reporters.
“You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.”
“I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”
Wow, courage, candor, common sense and the conviction “to do the right thing.” Pretty damn refreshing.
It would be nice to see the Members of Congress in our nation’s Capitol start doing the right thing for the country. I think we need to start asking them what is more important, the party, their job or the country.
What do you think?
Last week The American Fly Fishing Trade Association announced a matching fund to support the Utah Stream Access Coalition.
Only AFFTA members qualify for the match but anyone can donate! This is going to be a big and costly fight so donations are needed and most welcome!
Go to www.utahstreamaccess.org
Read the full release after the jump: [Read more…]
Responding to the draconian cuts passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in HR 1, 42 of the country’s leading hunting, fishing and outdoor organizations sent a letter to the U. S. Senate today urging restoration of funding to conservation programs.
The key point for me:
While we fully acknowledge that conservation programs should shoulder a fair and proportional burden of reductions to the Federal budget as required to address the budget deficit, these provisions of HR 1, in our view, represent a deliberate move away from America’s long conservation tradition and, specifically with respect to the interests of the hunting, fishing and outdoor community. We are very disappointed that the House considered these actions without consultation with the hunting, fishing and conservation community, and appeal to you to please give significant and favorable consideration to our perspectives. These vital conservation programs with long-standing track records of success are foundational to fish, wildlife and habitat conservation, good for the economy in creating jobs particularly in rural communities, and critical to providing opportunities for access to and enjoyment of fish and wildlife resources by America’s sportsmen and sportswomen. [emphasis mine]
You can add your voice with this Action Alert from Trout Unlimited
Full letter after the jump.
[Read more…]
Kirk Deeter recently posted on Field & Stream’s Fly Talk Blog, “I get angry when a discussion about a conservation concern — like oil and gas drilling in Wyoming or Utah, or maintaining roadless areas in Idaho or New Mexico, or a proposed pit mine in the headwaters of the world’s largest wild salmon fishery — degenerates into a “political debate.”
[Read more…]