Ann and Nancy's War

Ilse Bleck, representing the 7,000-member Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club, echoed McCampbell's untruths at the New Mexico Game Committee meetings that antimycin had been "banned in the state of California," recycled her misinformation about dangers to amphibians and macroinvertebrates, questioned whether the pure wild stock held in hatcheries could "adapt," and opined that saving Rio Grande cutthroats "does not outweigh the potential harm done to an otherwise healthy, self-sustaining ecosystem."

Lilly Rendt, another witness educated by McCampbell, likened piscicide formulations of antimycin and rotenone-which don't kill air-breathing organisms and are as close to silver bullets as chemical pesticides get-to DDT. And she said that, having seen the "eagles die," she didn't know "why we have to go through that again." As an alternative she suggested underwater TV cameras so managers could, well, kind of keep on eye on things.

However, there was much accurate testimony from state and federal fisheries managers and anglers, including TU's state chairman, William Schudlich, who passed out copies of my April 2004 FR&R column. Despite the histrionics of the McCampbell camp, sound science and good stewardship might have prevailed had it not been for the testimony of two respected outdoor writers from Silver City-Stephen Siegfried, outdoor editor of the Silver City Daily Press; and Dutch Salmon, author of seven outdoor books. "You're killing the threatened [Chiricahua leopard] frog," proclaimed Siegfried. (Adult frogs are unaffected and, if there's a frog or toad population in a project area, treatment is put off until tadpoles, which are usually unaffected anyway, have metamorphosed.) "What happens if an osprey has eaten a fish in the next drainage and flies over and drops the eggs? Do we poison the whole works again?" (Apparently, Siegfried is under the impression that unfertilized, digested fish eggs hatch.)

Both Siegfried and Salmon repeated most of McCampbell's misinformation, but their main contention (now part of McCampbell's standard harangue) was that introgressed fish are good enough if they're, say, 80 to 90 percent pure. As an alternative to poisoning mongrels they suggested the same non-solutions McCampbell endorses-electro-fishing and genetic swamping. They hadn't heard, didn't believe, or didn't care that subsequent cross breeding can increase alien genes.

Having assimilated all this testimony, the game commissioner who cast the deciding vote against piscicides, Peter Pino of the Zia Pueblo tribe, declared: "What if we came up with a poison that killed all the white people and left all the native people here? Would we like that? I think that's what we're talking about."

According to Sam Hitt, McCampbell was calling the meeting "a miracle in the making" before it even took place because she had been assured by Game Commission chairman Guy Riordan during one of her lobby sessions that he and "most of the board" agreed with her notions and found them "refreshing" and that, even before hearing a word of testimony, they "opposed" piscicides.

With this victory in hand, McCampbell and her network turned their attentions to Silver King Creek in California. Here they linked up with energetic ally Nancy Erman. The previous year Erman had single-handedly shut down Paiute restoration by convincing the Center for Biological Diversity to sue the US Forest Service, thereby frightening away the California Department of Fish and Game, which has jurisdiction over native fauna and didn't need the Forest Service anyway. To her credit, Erman has great knowledge of and affection for insects, some of which do indeed die during piscicide treatments. But she is unwilling to concede that bugs quickly recolonize from untreated water and that, when they do, they often fare better because they no longer have to cope with alien predators with which they did not evolve.

Like McCampbell, Erman plays fast and loose with the facts; and she cultivates a similar network of loud, aggressive, ignorant chemophobes. "Pisces"-the newsletter of the California-Nevada Chapter of the American Fisheries Society-allowed her to draw the old spurious connection between piscicides and DDT and to make the following false statements in its Winter 2004-05 issue: "Further poisoning is unnecessary for recovery of the Paiute cutthroat trout and may even threaten its future" and "many terrestrial mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians . . . are put at risk from these projects." Perhaps the most dishonest statement in the piece, a mantra of Erman, McCampbell and their followers, was this: "'Management' that sacrifices other species and natural processes for the sake of one species is a betrayal of the public trust." To the general public, politicians and the media, that means piscicides "sacrifice species." They do no such thing; they occasionally "sacrifice" non-target individuals. The local population then recovers.

When it looked like Paiute restoration was going to get underway in the fall of 2003, TU volunteers helped the state and feds electro-shock as many mongrels as they could from Silver King Creek and evacuate them to nearby water in order to placate local anglers for whom "a trout is a trout." But in "Pisces" Erman falsely accused managers of dumping the mongrels into pure Lahontan cutthroat habitat: "CDFG, Trout Unlimited, and the US Forest Service moved hybrid Paiute cutthroat/rainbows into other waters including Poison Lake. Poison Creek, the outlet of Poison Lake, had been a source for pure Lahontan cutthroat trout." I knew this to be false, and when I asked Erman where she'd gotten her information she hemmed and hawed and said: "Well, we found a reference that they had been using that stream for pure Lahontans." But the reference she produced talks about the Lahontan population introduced about a century ago to "Poison Flat Creek," a tributary of Poison Creek and isolated from it by a long series of impassable waterfalls.

Also testifying was Laurel Ames of the California Watershed Alliance. A month before the board meeting she had circulated an action alert entitled "Stop Poisoning of Sierra Nevada Creeks" that parroted Erman's and McCampbell's bogus claims: "It is well documented that non-chemical alternatives are available. . . . We shouldn't poison wilderness streams and lakes for fishermen who want to catch a certain kind of fish. . . . There is also new evidence that rotenone has long-lasting, possibly even permanent impacts on stream ecosystems." I pled with her to cease and desist, explaining that native-fish restoration isn't "for fishermen" any more than condor restoration is "for birders," that there are no "long-lasting impacts," that she was jeopardizing the last best chance to save a beautiful and unique creature from extinction, and that, although native trout are rarely seen by non-anglers such a herself, they're a vital part of natural ecosystems. I might as well have been speaking Chinese.