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Habitat = Opportunity = Economic Activity

Victims of Deficit Reduction

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Nicholas Kristoff offered a provocative column; Republicans, Zealots and Our Security, in Sunday’s New Your Times. Kristoff opens with an intriguing notion. If foreign fanatics were to take our country to the brink of financial crisis we would be up in arms. He makes a compelling case that ideology by the more conservative wing of the GOP should be no different.

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

In other words, Republican zeal to lower debts could result in increased interest expenses and higher debts. Their mania to save taxpayers could cost taxpayers. That suggests not governance so much as fanaticism.

We should be alarmed and outraged.

How did we get to this point? When did politics become more important than responsible governing?

Kristoff focuses on the damage this mania for budget cuts does to education. The same could be said for conservation and environmental programs. Try substituting conservation or the environment for education, Kristoff’s words ring just as true.

More broadly, a default would leave America a global laughingstock. Our “soft power,” our promotion of democracy around the world, and our influence would all take a hit. The spectacle of paralysis in the world’s largest economy is already bewildering to many countries. If there is awe for our military prowess and delight in our movies and music, there is scorn for our political/economic management.

While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts — especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.

This is going to be a long hot summer…

Another Reason Clean Water is Important

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Most of the time when you hear “Superfund site” you think “well that can’t be good.” And you are likely to be right.

So when the work done by EPA to clean up a Superfund site results in stories like this one: Eagle River west of Vail back to being a fun place for fishing, it grabs your attention.

Ravaged by toxins spilling from the abandoned Eagle Mine near its headwaters, the Eagle River went sour in the early 1990s before the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program helped it return to life over the course of a 10-year cleanup.

If the fishing downstream from the mine this week serves as any indicator, the resilient river has mounted quite a comeback.

Just another example of that simple equation: healthy habitat equals opportunity that creates economic activity.

Think Congress will get the message? Yeah that’s what I thought.

But hope, like the Eagle River, springs eternal.

 

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Veto Pen for the Rusty Machete

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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.

 

U.S. House Votes to Dirty Your Water

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Just to prove it is not just the renegades over at the Appropriations Committee trying to undermine conservation and environmental policy, the U.S. House of Representatives voted last week to gut the Clean Water Act by passing  H.R. 2018, The Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act.

Conservation, Sportsmen’s and Outdoor Industry Organizations Oppose H.R. 2018

Before the vote, The American Fly Fishing Trade Association, Trout Unlimited, The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, The Izaak Walton League of America and The National Wildlife Federation sent a letter strongly objecting to this legislation.

The bill would adversely affect waterways nationwide, and would lessen protective standards provided by the Clean Water Act for 38 years. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held no legislative hearings on the bill, and rushed to pass it through committee. The bill deserves far more scrutiny.

Yup, you read that correctly. This legislation didn’t get a hearing, in fact the bill was introduced at the end of May and apparently the need to gut the Clean Water is such a high priority for the Republican leadership in the House it got to the floor in short order.

Puts nation’s waters, fish and wildlife at risk.

H.R. 2018 proposes sweeping changes to the Clean Water Act that would undercut the progress the Act has made in restoring our waters over the last four decades. The bill purports to strengthen “cooperative federalism” by giving the states more control over EPA’s Clean Water Act oversight. In fact, the bill undermines the federal‐state partnership on which the Clean Water Act is based.

We would welcome committee consideration of an appropriate increased role for the states. However, as written this bill clearly is intended to weaken implementation of the Clean Water Act.

Of course water tends to travel across state lines so while one state might hold the water in the state in high regard, their up stream neighbor might not be so conscientious. That was one of the reasons for having the Clean Water Act in the first place.

Habitat equals opportunity that creates economic activity

Clean water is key to 40 million anglers who spend about $45 billion a year  and about 2.3 million hunters spending $1.3 billion each year hunting ducks and other migratory birds. The U.S. House continues to ignore the simple economics of outdoor recreation in favor of poorly conceived “solutions” to unfounded “problems”.

Who voted for this?

Wondering how your Representative voted? You can check the final vote results for Roll Call 573 here.

Why not write your Representative  and let them know what you think of their vote.

Fortunately if the Senate is silly enough to pass this legislation the Administration has put the word out that the veto pen will be uncapped.

Stay tuned…

What R & R looks like in Rhode Island

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There is a special place in Rhode Island that I can retreat to to recharge, regroup and catch my breath. It has been a safe haven for my family for 3 generations.

I greet and end each day with this view.

My favorite view in RI

It is an 9 hour drive from the Washington, DC madness, which has shown an incomprehensible disregard for places like this and what it takes to keep them like this.

Tomorrow I will continue the intermittent work that has intruded on this vacation, but today I will soak up the serenity that this special place offers.

 

Conservation Gets the Rusty Machete Treatment

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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.

How bad is it?

Here is a sample courtesy of TU and NWF (follow the links for more details):

  • The Land and Water Conservation Fund: cut by 80%to $62M, an all time low for the program
  • North American Wetlands Conservation Act funding cut by 47% to $20M
  • USFWS Resources management budget cut 95% to 2.85M
  • State Wildlife Grants cut 64% to $22M

They hung a sign around the corpse with these provisions:

  • Stopping EPA from finalizing protections for wetlands and streams
  • Stopping a rulemaking to protect streams from mountain top removal mining
  • Blocking recent protections for the Grand Canyon watershed from mining

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.

Add your voice!

TU’s Steve Moyer aptly points out in their press release:
“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.”
TRCP’s Steve Kline had this to say about the EPA provision:
“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.
Hal Herring gets it right in his post on The Conservationist

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.

Teeg Stouffer, who runs Recycled Fish, emailed this:

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.

It is time to light our torches.

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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