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June 1, 2017

Retreating From World Climate Accord Does a Disservice to Fish and Wildlife

Sportsmen will follow the science and do what we can to conserve our natural world for those still ‘within the womb of time’

President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement is a step in the wrong direction for our country’s fish, wildlife, and sportsmen, says Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

“Hunters and anglers are on the front lines of the changing climate. We witness firsthand the changes that are happening to our fish and wildlife populations and natural systems across the nation: Lengthier fire seasons, delayed duck migrations, shrinking coldwater fisheries, dying coral reefs, tick-ridden moose, intensifying algal blooms, and much more,” says Fosburgh.

“Smart people can disagree about the solutions to climate change, but the science clearly shows that we need to do something. The Paris agreements might not be perfect, but they are voluntary measures embraced by almost all of the nations in the world. As Americans who enjoy so many privileges afforded by the outdoors, we must all help ensure that our natural world is conserved for our children and for, as Theodore Roosevelt stated, those still ‘within the womb of time.’”

With the absence of federal leadership, the TRCP counts itself among the NGOs that will need to join with states, local communities, corporations, and American citizens to follow the science and do what we can to conserve our outdoor heritage.

Top photo by Rick DePaiva.

2 Responses to “Retreating From World Climate Accord Does a Disservice to Fish and Wildlife”

  1. Fortunately, you don’t seem to know the hunters I know. Spend some time browsing red-state deer hunting forums and you’ll see that many are cheering today’s decision by Trump. This is a defeat for godless, liberal tree-huggers, so it must be good for ‘Merica. I’ve seen enough to know that the average whitetail deer hunter is a climate-science-denying social conservative. Even Dr. Grant Woods, who holds celebrity status in the whitetail hunting community, is on the climate science denial team. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. These are the same conservative sportsmen who have nothing intelligent or reasonable to say when their fishing laes end up on a mercury watch list from atmospheric mercury contamination from coal plants. Besides, when prayer is the answer for everything and God controls climate change, who needs climate agreements?

  2. Michael Dec

    The billions the U.S. would be required to pay to “developing” nations could best be spent on meaningful conservation efforts. We are conservationists, not preservationists. The earth’s climate is always changing; we humans can do little to affect that, anymore than Canute could stop the tides. This accord was a vast money transfer, mostly to dictatorial countries with no plans to promote environmentally sound policies.

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What Pennsylvania Farmers Have to Do With Chesapeake Bay Rockfish

Solutions for the biggest conservation challenges plaguing the Chesapeake Bay actually start at the farthest reaches of the watershed—on out-of-state farms and in Capitol Hill offices

The Chesapeake Bay watershed is one of the most impressive in the world. It covers 64,000 square miles across six states and the District of Columbia. It is home to about 18 million people and 2,700 species of plants and animals—more than any other watershed in North America. Prized sportfish like striped bass (locals know them as rockfish) swim and spawn here, and waterfowl hunters from all over visit for the annual Canada goose migration.

It is truly one of a kind, and D.C. residents are lucky to have the Bay right here in our backyard.

But this watershed also faces some serious challenges. By the mid-20th century it was clear that a few hundred years of intensive urban, agricultural, and industrial development had left the waters toxic and hypoxic, or lacking oxygen. Fish, wildlife, and anyone living or recreating in the watershed had been affected by the negative impacts of pollution.

To help track and improve the health of the watershed, the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science releases an annual Chesapeake Bay Report Card which scores the Bay on its water quality, fisheries health, and other vital signs. The first report card in 1998 gave the Bay a failing grade of 27 out of 100, but the results just released in May scored it at 54 out of 100—a strong uptick, but also showing there’s still a long way to go.

With clean-up efforts showing steady progress right where D.C. policy makers can see it, the Chesapeake Bay watershed could become a true conservation success story and model for the country. Over the next three weeks, we’ll be highlighting some of the major conservation issues remaining for Bay fisheries, some possible solutions, and what this means to sportsmen and women across the region.

Let’s start with what Pennsylvania farmers have to do with Chesapeake Bay rockfish.

A Committed Coalition

With a watershed extending across so many state borders, and with so many species, businesses, and American pastimes at stake, in 1983 an impressive coalition came together to take action. The governors of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania joined the mayor of D.C., the Chair of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency—operating on behalf of all federal agencies—to sign the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement, an unprecedented commitment to watershed-wide cooperative action to restore the health of the Bay.

But even after three decades, there is much left to be done. So in 2014, the six original partners recommitted to a new Chesapeake Watershed Agreement, and brought the remaining Bay states—New York, West Virginia, and Delaware—into the fold. This new agreement will provide a framework for achieving watershed restoration in the next ten years and beyond.

A Watershed-Wide Responsibility

When thinking about how to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, it’s important to note that the Bay’s waters don’t generally empty out into the Atlantic Ocean. More than 180,000 miles of rivers, streams, and creeks starting as far away as Cooperstown, N.Y. ultimately deposit their waters in the nation’s largest estuary, mingling with tidal waters from the Atlantic. Most of what goes in stays in, so thousands of miles of upstream impacts are concentrated in one downstream basin.

This means that the state of the Bay really depends on what happens in and near the tributaries leading to it. For instance, nutrient pollution from urban development and agricultural lands upstream have negative impacts on rockfish in the estuary, which are sensitive to low oxygen conditions created by toxic algal blooms. (You can read more about what nutrient pollution means for sportsmen right here.)

Farmers are the Keystone of the Bay’s Restoration Efforts

This is why the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement focuses on reducing the excess amounts of nitrogen, phosphorous, and sediment loads in the Bay, mostly by helping farmers upstream to keep nutrients on their fields and out of our public waterways.

There is no place more important to this effort than Pennsylvania.

For instance, the total goal is to reduce nitrogen pollution in the Bay by 40.7 million pounds per year. According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), stakeholders have so far only been able to achieve 18.7 million pounds of reductions per year, watershed-wide. But if Pennsylvania were to achieve 100 percent of its state goals, most of which could be addressed through better farming practices, the state could knock out another 19 million of the remaining 21.3 million pounds per year, or 86 percent of the overall Bay’s nutrient reduction shortfall.

To dial it in even further, most of that shortfall could be addressed by tackling farm runoff in just five counties in south-central Pennsylvania.

Chesapeake Bay
Header image courtesy of the Chesapeake Bay Program/Flickr.
Enter the Farm Bill

Chesapeake Bay stakeholders have a plan. If Pennsylvania can help its farmers to fully implement a handful of farmland conservation practices, the state could achieve most of the nutrient reduction goals for the entire Bay system. Farmers would get assistance in restoring forested areas alongside streams, strategically converting cropland to grasslands and wetlands, storing manure more safely, and building fencing to keep livestock out of streams.

The problem, as usual, is a lack of local funding to make it happen. Fortunately, the federal Farm Bill is intended to support exactly these types of initiatives.

For instance, the Regional Conservation Partnership Program has a funding stream dedicated to innovative, collaborative, landscape-scale solutions to nutrient reduction challenges in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. And the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which helps farmers, ranchers, and foresters to conserve environmentally sensitive land, is being deployed across the region to help farmers turn unproductive cropland into pollution-reducing stream buffers. CRP’s enhancement program is especially effective at contributing to clean water and better fish habitat in the region.

The Farm Bill’s Future

These critical programs are set to be reauthorized by Congress in 2018. They’re not perfect, and they don’t work everywhere, but we’ll be fighting to renew and improve them for places like the Chesapeake region. Because without $5 billion in annual Farm Bill conservation funding, we have little hope of solving the Pennsylvania problem, and there are similar situations all around the country.

You can help TRCP fight for Bay restoration funding. Tell Congress that you support Farm Bill programs that reduce nutrient pollution, benefit farmers, provide habitat for fish and wildlife, and help to guarantee all Americans quality places to hunt and fish by signing the petition at CRPworks.org.

And of course stay tuned for the rest of our series on efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and rebuild its fisheries, from the bottom of the food chain on up.

 

May 18, 2017

Groups Created to Provide Local Input on Public Land Management Are Told to Stay Home

The suspension of the BLM’s local advisory committees threatens transparent and collaborative management of America’s public lands

In a world that seemingly becomes more polarized and political by the day, public-land resource advisory councils—commonly known as RACs—have represented a last bastion of cooperation in public land management. These collaborative committees are made up of individuals from diverse interest groups, including ranchers, local agency representatives, environmentalists, commercial interests, and sportsmen-conservationists. RACs serve the important purpose of bringing diverse local perspectives to the table to find agreement over competing demands on our public lands, like grazing, development, recreation, and conservation. They have been very successful in shaping positive public-land management outcomes.

The Department of the Interior oversees more than 200 individual advisory committees, including 38 RACs that meet with the Bureau of Land Management—the largest public-land management agency in the country, responsible for 245 million acres of our public lands. In fact, three TRCP field staffers serve on full RACs in Idaho, New Mexico, and Oregon, and weigh in on issues affecting BLM lands.

That is, until their meetings were indefinitely suspended.

Per instruction from the Department of the Interior, the BLM recently notified all RAC members that future meetings will be postponed until at least September in order for the agency to review the “charter and charge of each Board/Advisory Committee.” In the meantime, local decisions about the management of our public lands will continue to be made, but without input from local stakeholders who are trying to find common ground and who are actually out there using the lands.

Resource advisory councils – commonly referred to as RACs – have been suspended until at least September. Pictured here, the Idaho Falls District RAC. Image courtesy of the BLM. Cover image of the Southeast Oregon RAC courtesy of Larisa Bogardus.
The Local Success of RACs

As a part of these committees, sportsmen and women have helped to shape the future management of world-class fish and wildlife habitat in places like the High-Divide of east-central Idaho and the Owyhees of southeast Oregon. These are places that we depend on for our hunting and fishing opportunities, and when ranchers, business owners, environmentalists, and sportsmen are all on the same page about how these lands should be managed, we all win.

Our Oregon field rep, Mia Sheppard, serves on the Southeast Oregon RAC, where recently they’ve made collaborative recommendations to state and BLM-district managers about everything from fire management to handling wild horse and burro populations. Mia has witnessed their recommendations having a real impact on the ground and sees her RAC’s involvement as critical to finding balanced solutions on Oregon’s public lands. To remove RAC members from the process would further disconnect and delay resource policy and planning.

Groups created to provide local input on #publicland management told to stay home Share on X

Down south, our New Mexico field rep, John Cornell, serves on the Las Cruces District Southwest New Mexico RAC. Currently, they are helping to shape a plan for the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, focusing on improving access and maintaining sensible restrictions around historical sites—part of the reason this monument was designated. Stakeholder representation and input from hunters and anglers, specifically, is crucial and could be cut out entirely if these meetings are postponed until at least September.

In Idaho, Coby Tigert, deputy director of our Center for Western Lands, serves on the Idaho Falls District RAC, where they’ve been actively involved in management decisions that will affect more than four million acres of BLM lands. “In addition to upcoming land-use plans,” says Tigert, “the Idaho Falls District manages grazing, sage grouse habitat, and extensive phosphate mining leases on public lands. The diverse membership of our RAC helps balance the interests of the public with the BLM’s multiple-use mandate.” The postponement of RAC meetings could put all of this into question.

The Idaho Falls District RAC. Image courtesy of the BLM.
Keep It Collaborative

These are just a few examples of the collaboration and public input that would be lost if RACs were disbanded across the West. Moreover, the suspension not only threatens the responsible management of our public lands—it could further build disdain for the federal government.

RAC members have committed their precious time to do what’s best for our public lands, and now the agency risks sending the signal that it may not value their opinions or, in some cases, their years of hard work. This is the kind of action that encourages discontent and adds to the misguided sentiment that transferring public lands to the states may be a better alternative.

At a time when the public’s trust in the federal government is at an all-time low, the Dept. of the Interior and administration should be holding up RACs as the standard for how we should be working together to best utilize our natural resources in a way that benefits the most amount of people. We encourage the agency to restart the RAC meeting process as soon as possible.

In the meantime, watch for more from the TRCP on how the threats to public land management are just as real as the movement to transfer or sell off your public lands access—enthusiasm for public lands is at an all-time high, but it’s not enough to simply keep it public.

May 11, 2017

Sportsmen Concerned for Wildlife Conservation in USDA Department Shuffle

Department changes could shift the focus of the Natural Resources Conservation Service away from habitat programs to farm services

At a press event today, Secretary Perdue announced restructuring at the U.S. Department of Agriculture that would move the Natural Resources Conservation Service to a newly-created Farm Production and Conservation mission area to also house the Farm Service Agency and Risk Management Agency. A new undersecretary position has been created to oversee all the on-the-ground needs of America’s farmers, ranchers, and private foresters.

The move could provide opportunities to better align farm programs and improve conservation delivery. However, the concern from the sportsmen’s community is that this could shift the priorities at NRCS—the agency responsible for hugely successful programs benefiting water quality and game species like sage grouse—to focus more on farm productivity and perhaps give short shrift to fish and wildlife conservation on private lands.

NRCS is one of the most important federal agencies for conservation in America, wielding approximately $4 billion annually in conservation funding and boasting great success working with farmers and ranchers to improve soil health, water quality, and fish and wildlife habitat. The stewardship of private landscapes through voluntary actions by agricultural producers has helped create rural American sporting destinations that support jobs and healthy communities.

With so many benefits to landowners, hunters, anglers, and businesses on the line, sportsmen’s groups hope that USDA moves forward with this reorganization plan in a way that maintains the department’s integrity and focus on soil, water, and wildlife program goals.

The National Wildlife Federation, Izaak Walton League of America, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and the rest of the sportsmen’s community look forward to working with Secretary Perdue to learn more about this transition and find ways to ensure that NRCS wildlife conservation efforts are strengthened, not weakened.

Read Perdue’s report to Congress on these changes.

Learn more about TRCP’s work on agriculture and private-land conservation here.

Photo courtesy of USDA/Flickr

Creating Drought Solutions for the Overworked Colorado River

It may be “America’s hardest working river,” but the drought-hammered Colorado River can’t support current demand from cities, farms, and fisheries without collaborative conservation

No offense to your trout stream back home, but only the Colorado holds the title for being “America’s hardest working river.” If you live in the Southwest, chances are the water you drink came from the Colorado River Basin. Want a salad in January? Well, 70 percent of the river’s water goes to irrigate millions of acres of cropland, where virtually all of the nation’s winter lettuce is grown. Turbines on the river’s dams power large swaths of California as well as Arizona’s cities and farms.

Along with its major tributaries—iconic waterways in their own right, including the Green, Yampa, Roaring Fork, and Gunnison—the Colorado is part of a massive river network that encompasses some of the most legendary fish and wildlife landscapes, winding through seven states and ten of America’s national parks, including the Grand Canyon. In Wyoming, Colorado, and along its Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona tributaries, sportsmen and women can hunt mule deer, elk, and pronghorns and fish for native cutthroats and other trout.

The river supports an estimated $1.4 trillion in annual spending and supports 16 million jobs. Water and nearby recreation accounts for $27 billion a year. It is, quite literally, the lifeblood of the region, but many of the hunting and fishing opportunities the river supports could dry up if sportsmen and women don’t take action.

Restoring Balance to the Colorado River Basin

Sportsmen, farmers, businesses, and families all depend on the Colorado. But a 2012 federal and state joint study confirms that there’s more demand for water in the region than is available in the river, and this problem becomes compounded as the population grows and droughts worsen. While 2017 has been a wet year for most of the basin, it doesn’t fix the growing imbalance between water supply and demand.

coloradoriverbasinviausgs
Image courtesy of USGS. Header image courtesy of Patrick Lewis/Flickr.

That’s why local stakeholders, including sportsmen and conservation groups, are trying to incentivize users to share and conserve water in ways that maintain farms, let cities grow, and keep the rivers flowing, all within the confines of the Law of the River. The federal government and U.S. water interests are working with Mexico, too, to update the treaty governing how we share the river.

California, Arizona, and Nevada are working on a drought contingency plan that will actually pay water users to conserve water and store it in Lake Mead, the giant reservoir near Las Vegas that is currently only half full. Meanwhile, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico are also trying to find ways to conserve, share, and maybe even “bank” water to ensure it would be available, even during a drought.

Along with realistic conservation plans and a sober-eyed assessment of what additional new water development might be sustainable, sportsmen agree that these state plans must also create incentives to keep water in the river for the benefit of fish and wildlife. This would bolster the American outdoor recreation economy in basin states and have additional benefits downstream in Mexican communities that have traditionally fished on their side of the border.

With so many interest groups in the ring, hunters and anglers must stay engaged to speak for fish and wildlife and our sporting traditions.

The Value of Water Transcends Politics

Luckily for us, folks in the Colorado River Basin have learned to work together on water issues. Ensuring that every interest has access to clean, reliable water really isn’t a partisan issue in our communities, and it shouldn’t pit rural users against city dwellers.

Local stakeholders are finding more and more ways to partner with federal agencies on water issues. A century ago, the federal government played an outsized role in creating the West’s water infrastructure through the Bureau of Reclamation’s work to build dams and pipelines in the Colorado River Basin. Today, Reclamation and other federal agencies still bring funding and programs to the region that are key for modernizing water management.

But lawmakers need to keep hearing from us. Sportsmen and conservation groups are currently asking members of Congress to maintain the critical funding that keeps key federal programs and policies working in the Colorado River Basin. (Read the TRCP Water Working Group’s letter here.)

Water programs within these agencies received some good news in the fiscal year 2017 omnibus spending bill, but President Trump’s vision for the fiscal year 2018 budget includes deep cuts, and we won’t get more detail on how conservation will fare until at least May 22. It is imperative that sportsmen remain engaged to advocate for federal programs and policies that protect the fish and game we love to pursue.

We’ll make sure you hear about every opportunity to speak up and remind lawmakers not only of the dollars we need to make conservation happen, but also of the dollars we spend in rural communities across the Colorado River Basin and the rest of the country. Make sure you’re signed up for our weekly Roosevelt Report to be the first to know.

With a new team in place to tackle water issues, the TRCP will be working as hard as America’s hardest working river to ensure hunters and anglers continue to have quality places to hunt and fish.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

For more than twenty years, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership has been at the forefront of conservation, working diligently on behalf of America’s hunters and anglers to ensure America’s legacy of habitat management and access is protected and advanced. Your tax-deductible donation will help TRCP continue its mission, allowing you to keep enjoying your favorite outdoor pursuits. Whether those pursuits are on the water or in the field, TRCP has your back, but we can’t do it alone. We invite you to step into the arena with us and donate today!

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