Policy News
I was one of perhaps 25 AFS members who attended the 23rd biennial Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) meeting in November 2015. The general theme of “Grand Challenges in Coastal and Estuarine Science: Securing Our Future” included a series of presentations on new and lingering threats to fish habitat. The conference theme was coastal... Read More
Kevin Bogardus, E&E reporter Published: Wednesday, January 13, 2016 U.S. EPA’s internal watchdog has cleared the agency of harboring any bias when conducting its controversial assessment of potential large-scale mining in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed. The report, approved by EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins and released today, said the agency went by the book, following the... Read More
This column coalesced around four actions last October. First, as a frequent partner with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the American Fisheries Society (AFS) was invited to a presentation on the agency’s river restoration efforts, land-use planning, and regional mitigation strategies in the Arctic. Second, President Obama announced plans to pursue two new... Read More
This month’s column is about the intersection of human and biological diversity with history. According to McGinley (2014), “[s]pecies diversity is a measure of the diversity within an ecological community that incorporates both species richness (the number of species in a community) and the evenness of species’ abundances.” Beyond biology, and bridging the social and... Read More
The Obama administration announced on September 22, 2015, that it would not list the greater sage grouse under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). That decision, anchored in the vast western sagebrush ecosystem from Washington to New Mexico, has major implications for fish everywhere. Along with the Oregon Chub Oregonichthys crameri recovery, we now have... Read More
Fish and wildlife programs in the United States are suffering from a financial wasting disease of staggering proportions. Governments struggle mightily to sustain basic research, management, regulatory, and education programs, losing each year in the battle for citizen support and discretionary dollars. Against that backdrop, former Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal and Bass Pro Shops CEO... Read More
“The Cost of Trout Fishing,” a recent op-ed piece by Douglas Thompson in the New York Times (Thompson 2015), included several inaccurate statements and fundamental misunderstandings of fisheries management and aquaculture. As fisheries research and management professionals, the American Fisheries Society would like to set the record straight. The mission of the American Fisheries Society... Read More
Douglas Austen, AFS Executive Director Back on April 11, 2015, the New York Times (NYT) published an op-ed by Douglas Thompson on trout fishing and hatcheries that some AFS members found to include some truths but also a troubling amount of erroneous information and misrepresentations of facts. Until relatively recently, AFS has not been actively... Read More
Thomas E. Bigford, AFS Policy Director [email protected] Finally, courtesy of a federal rule issued in late May, society can push the pause button on the long debate about wetland policy and science. While the central issue of what is and is not a wetland was addressed in the final Clean Water Act (CWA) rule released... Read More
“Silt happens!” That simple riff off a common bumper sticker is a quote from Gary Esslinger, manager of the Elephant Butte Irrigation District in southern New Mexico (Weiser 2011). His sentiment arose from desert country but might have been uttered by Exelon Power about its Conowingo hydropower project on the Susquehanna River or the owners... Read More
