Sustainable Fishing Lessons for a Sustainable Climate - 275

It is a sunny morning and as I write I am grateful for the opportunity to sit in the warm sun. Marquette Public Radio is broadcasting a reading from Hemingway’s “A Sun Also Rises.” His description of trout and trout streams is always a chance to reflect on the beauty of nature.

Hemingway spent much of his youth in Michigan, and it is here where his passions for fishing, wild places, and adventure were sparked.

When looking at the pictures of Hemingway’s catch of fish, or for that matter, pictures of my father’s stringers of Walleye, there must have been a lot of large fish. Harvesting this many fish was sustainable in the early 1900s. In 1900, there were 76 million citizens. Today, there are over 330 million.

Conservationists have long cautioned us to discipline our tendency to over-harvest. We did not listen with tragic results. Passenger pigeons in the US once numbered some 3 to 5 billion. The birds had survived for at least 100,000 years. In 1900, a kid with a BB gun shot the last pigeon named Buttons.

In the early 1900s, the last Badlands/Audubon Big Horn Sheep were hunted to extinction.

Awareness in the general population takes a while. Today, we have laws which regulate how we harvest animals and plants from the wild. We employ biologists to monitor the numbers of wild animals and fish. More importantly, these professionals supervise the health of the environment (habitat) which these creatures need to survive.

I flew animal surveys supporting biologists working for the Nevada Division of Wildlife. In my 45 years of flying for various organizations, the people who worked for the NDF were the most intelligent and dedicated I have ever met.

We have, belatedly, learned we can send animals (and potentially ourselves) into the folder labeled extinct. Sometimes by ways less direct than shooting them.

Leading to the creation of the United States Environmental Agency and the passage of the Clean Water and Air Acts, it became obvious we were capable of poisoning nature and ourselves with industrial effluents and pesticides. The most famous and celebrated environmentalist sounding the alarm was Rachel Carson, whose landmark and beautifully written book, “Silent Spring” helped start an environmental movement.

What we were discovering again, thanks to conservationists, was that we were capable of not only killing the trout in streams but everything in the stream and many of the plants and animals living beside it.

Congress and the Senate, moved by a curious and well-informed citizenry and led by Senators like Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson, pushed through the bi-partisan Clean Water and Air Acts. In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was created and signed into existence by Republican President Richard Nixon. These laws and the creation of the EPA elevated the role of scientists in protecting us from our tendency to kill our planet and ourselves.

We finally came to understand by 1970 that we can drive trout and any other creatures to extinction not only by overfishing or hunting, but by poisoning the habitat with our waste. We did not know we could do the same by elevating the earth’s temperature with unseen air pollution and greenhouse gasses.

Trout are the poster fish of creatures who live only within a narrow set of temperature boundaries. The fact is all animals and plants have temperature limits. Trout live in cold water because cold water holds more oxygen. As streams warm, the trout cannot breathe.

Fishermen, like members of Trout Unlimited, know this well. For years, they have been improving trout streams by stirring up the flow with stream obstacles and shading them with vegetation. These efforts fall into the category called “adaptation.” The problem is we can only adapt so much.

The only cure for a warming planet is to mitigate and eventually end the burning of fossil fuels. And this is why Trout Unlimited petitions the government to take climate action.

At one time, hunters and fishermen protested the setting of bag limits. Today, they know limits are necessary if our kids want to enjoy hunting and fishing in the future.

At one time, we and our industries mindlessly dumped our waste into streams and spewed toxins into the air. Industry protested regulations against pollution, saying the solutions would eliminate their profits. We know these dirty and old practices are unsustainable, and solutions are affordable. Today, most educated citizens support EPA scientists.

At one time, despite the warnings of scientists in the 1980s about Anthropogenic warming of the earth, we did not act. We did not understand that the rapid and relentless warming of the planet would increase dangerous weather. We could not conceive it was real, nor did we know we had the tools to stop it.

Awareness is changing. The Yale Climate Communications Department surveys American opinions.  The number of Americans deeply concerned about their and their children’s future is rising. I suspect the indisputable rise in worldwide climate disasters has fueled and will continue to fuel citizen’s concern. This unease increases the number of people willing to process climate science information. I refer to those willing to challenge themselves and learn as “intellectually courageous.”

Luckily, within this growing group of curious citizens, some people are willing to respond to information from reputable institutions. These I refer to as “morally courageous.” Our youth are heavily represented in this group. Luckily both the young and old are talking about the climate.

This turnaround has stoked my optimism. The goal is to create a future where we avoid costly mistakes. I imagine it as a future where we, as a way of life and governance, promote stewardship, respect, and sustainability.