A few days ago, I came across a press release from the American
Fly Fishing Trade Association announcing the expansion of the “AFFTA
Fisheries Fund,” which it describes as a fund established in 2014
“with the main objective of funding organizations and
projects focused on fisheries conservation and education.
“’The Fisheries Fund is a unique opportunity for not only
AFFTA, but everyone whose vocation or avocation is fishing, to give back. To protect what we hold most dear…”
To date, the Fund has, among other things, supported efforts
to restore steelhead and salmon habitat in Oregon, helped Trout Unlimited fight
a proposed mine that would threaten an healthy, clear-running river in Montana
and funded work to permanently end the threats to the spectacular Bristol Bay
salmon and steelhead runs posed by drilling and mining interests up in Alaska.
All of its advocacy has been related to anadromous and strictly
freshwater fisheries so far, but given the growing importance of salt water fly
fishing, I have no doubt that if a worthy project came forward to help protect
striped bass, redfish or tarpon, the AFFTA Fisheries Fund would give it serious consideration as well.
Such an industry-wide commitment to conservation is
admirable. It’s also a classic example
of doing well by doing good, for as I noted in a blog that I wrote eighteen
months ago, if
you want to have a fishing industry, it helps to have fish.
By funding conservation projects, AFFTA is helping to assure
that future generations of anglers will get the opportunity to enjoy some of
the pleasures that we already know, while at the same time assuring that their
businesses also survive. For if the fish disappear, the
fishermen will disappear shortly thereafter.
AFFTA’s wise actions contrast with those of the American
Sportfishing Association, the trade organization that represents the greater
part of the tackle and angling-related industry. ASA sees a threat to angling’s future, too,
and created an organization called “Keep America Fishing” designed to help
perpetuate the sport.
But where AFFTA concentrates on protecting the
fish and the waters they swim in, Keep
America Fishing announces on its Internet home page that it is
“PROTECTING YOUR RIGHT TO FISH.”
Protecting the fish appears optional—or perhaps undesirable,
given that ASA
supports H.R. 1335, the so-called Strengthening
Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act,
a bill just about identical to one introduced in the previous session of
Congress that was so bad that conservationists called it the “Empty Oceans Act.”
Although H.R. 1335 would allow managers to perpetuate
overfishing for an indeterminate amount of time, and delay the rebuilding of
overfished stocks, ASA calls House passage of the bill last spring
“a victory for recreational anglers,”
and insists that
“the Senate version of the bill still must [be] passed.”
The whole notion of assuring healthy fish stocks in the
future, in order to assure a healthy fishing industry as well, seems to have
escaped ASA.
Even when it comes to such a simple issue such as litter,
ASA’s views seem skewed. It tells
anglers to clean up soft plastic lures, and not leave them littering the
waters, which is a good thing. But the
motivation isn’t to perpetuate beauty or to have anglers clean up their mess
so that the next angler can enjoy unsullied waters, but rather the cynical
“Our waterways are being littered with worn-out soft plastic
lures. If this habit doesn’t stop, we
are giving the environmentalists and politicians adequate ammunition for making
fishing with these lures illegal.”
So it seems that the whole notion of doing something just
because it is right has escaped ASA, too..
Maybe that’s why, while AFFTA’s Fisheries Fund is helping to
fight drilling and mining that could destroy pristine waters in places such as
Alaska and Montana, ASA has no problem cozying up to someone such as Senator David
Vitter of Louisiana, who has criticized
actions by the Environmental Protection Agency to protect the Bristol Bay fishery,
and has actually sponsored
legislation that would take away much of the agency’s authority to do
so.
The same legislation would remove
the EPA’s authority to veto permits for “mountaintop removal,” a form of coal
mining which is much what it sounds like—a process in which overburden removed
from above Appalachian coal seams is dumped in the valleys and cool mountain
streams which, often right up until then, held populations of
rapidly-disappearing native brook trout.
But ASA
thinks Vitter is a good guy, because he supports legislation that would allow
anglers in the Gulf of Mexico to kill more red snapper than either the
science or current law would allow.
And killing more fish is, I suppose, good for ASA’s members’
business—at least until the supply of fish starts to run out.
It always leaves me more than a little amazed that so many
bright people—and the folks who run ASA certainly fall into that category—can’t
look ahead for more than a season or
two, and realize that the health of the fishing industry is directly related to
the health of fish stocks.
Maybe it’s because the industry, and its allies in the marine
trades business, are so caught up in their pretty fishfinders and GPS units and
such, which make it easier for even mediocre anglers to find a few fish when
populations are down, that they don’t understand that there comes a point when fishing becomes so poor even the best electronics can't help.
And maybe that’s why the fly guys get it right. They still keep things simple.
“fly-rodders are the proverbial canaries in the coal
mine. The technique we use makes it
harder to catch large fish, and we are the first to see the effects of a
decline.”
That makes a lot of sense.
And what AFFTA is doing makes a lot of sense, too.
What doesn’t make sense is that rest of the angling industry hasn't yet reached out to lend AFFTA’s conservation efforts a hand.