Environmentalists Vs. Native Trout

Having been an environmental activist for most of my life and having worked for and with national environmental organizations for 30 years, it grieves me to report that the biggest and, in many cases, only impediment to recovery of vanishing native trout is the environmental community.

That's not to say that most environmental outfits actively oppose trout-restoration projects. And that's not to say that the few who do wouldn't back off if they'd stop talking long enough to listen to biologists.

Enviros tend not to see, handle or understand fish and to distrust the motives of agencies dedicated to their recovery. Thus, in announcing a lawsuit to halt use of TFM, a remarkably safe and selective chemical used since the 1950's to kill sea lampreys, a splendid organization like the Vermont Public Interest Research Group can advance the argument that Atlantic salmon-native predators every bit as ecologically important to Lake Champlain and its basin as wolves to greater Yellowstone-are being restored "strictly for sport fishing."

Without two naturally derived piscicides-rotenone (from derris root) and antimycin (from bacteria)-most native fish restoration simply cannot happen. Rotenone has been used to kill fish for centuries on two continents; modern fish managers have used it for the last 70 years. In all that time there has never been a documented human injury. There's no record of antimycin, introduced for fish control in the mid-1970's by Searle Pharmaceuticals, harming anyone either. Both rotenone and antimycin are easily neutralized with potassium permanganate, and both break down fast in the environment. In fact, one of antimycin's few drawbacks is that it sometimes breaks down too fast; under some conditions its half life is less than an hour. Antimycin's great advantage is that the recommended dosage is usually between 8 and 12 parts per billion, so you can strap a bottle on a pack horse and treat a whole chain of high-country lakes. And, unlike rotenone, fish can't smell it and therefore don't take evasive action.

But enviros tend to fear all pesticides. Moreover, they frequently reject as spin all data that proves a pesticide safe even as they spin data themselves to depict it as dangerous. For example, the environmental community parrots the fiction that rotenone, applied to fish habitat at 0.5 to 4 parts per million, has been "linked to Parkinson's disease." It conjured this from an unrelated study in which Emory University researchers induced Parkinson-disease-like symptoms (not Parkinson's disease) in lab rats by mainlining concentrated rotenone into their brains.

Although rotenone and, to a much lesser extent, antimycin kill a very few non-target gill breathers such as insect larvae, these organisms bounce back within weeks-and, with their alien fish predators removed, they are far more prolific.

One of the most effective environmental outfits I know is the Center for Biological Diversity. I work closely with it in my environmental reporting, and I have helped raise thousands of dollars for it through my work on a major charitable foundation. As its name implies, it exists solely to protect "biological diversity." Except that the threatened Paiute cutthroat, probably the rarest trout in the world, doesn't count with the center.

Citing wives' tales and spewing pseudo science, the center has derailed Paiute recovery by suing the US Forest Service and thereby frightening away the California Department of Fish and Game, which has jurisdiction over native fauna and doesn't need the Forest Service anyway. About 11 stream miles of California's Silver King Creek watershed in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness of the Toiyabe-Humboldt National Forest comprise the entire native range of the Paiute cutthroat. In 1912, before bucket biologists made mongrels of all the fish in all their natural habitat, another bucket biologist-tending sheep in the area-inadvertently saved the Paiute by transporting a few trout to a fishless stretch above impassable Llewellyn Falls.

Had the Forest Service proceeded in the fall of 2003 as planned, it would have accomplished a first in salmonid management-restoring a native to 100 percent of its historical range. Then the Fish and Wildlife Service would have removed the Paiute from the Endangered Species List, another first. But could delisting have been an unwelcome development for the litigious center, reducing its arsenal of legal weapons? Yes, according to one professional trout advocate who worked hard for the project, even helping managers evacuate some of the mongrels to a different watershed in order to placate local sportsmen: "When an organism loses its Endangered Species Act protection it's no longer any use to groups like the Center for Biological Diversity."

"If you're attempting to fix an expensive watch, you don't reach first for the sledgehammer; neither should the state necessarily be poisoning streams in a wilderness area without looking at other options," proclaims the center. Had it read the literature, it would have understood that there are no other options. The stream's too big for effective electro-shocking. And, while antimycin (classified by EPA under "no threat to human health") would be great, it's no longer registered in California because the only manufacturers (Nick and Mary Romeo, working out of their home) can't finance the endless lab tests required by the state's new pesticide code."