Environmentalists Vs. Native Trout

I see a different irony: It was Aldo Leopold who wrote the following in his essay Wilderness for Wildlife: "If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new."

Acid rain is not the main threat to brook trout in New York State's Adirondacks. In fact, compared with alien fish introductions, it's unimportant. Perch, sunfish, bass, pike, bullheads, etc. got flung around so long ago that there's not even a record of what used to be trout water; and these aliens-particularly bass-are still being flung around. Thus defiled ponds and lakes in this country simply cannot sustain wild brook trout.

But since the early 1970's the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has been guided by the State Land Master Plan. This far-sighted document prescribes various managements for various land classifications. For each wilderness area it requires the department to formulate a plan and, for that plan, to inventory all plants, fish and animals. While it forbids permanent structures in wilderness, it provides a few exceptions essential to wilderness management-such as fish-barrier dams. It forbids helicopters and other motorized vehicles in wilderness except in "extraordinary conditions"-such as rescuing people from disaster or brook trout from alien fish. It establishes that the single most important thing managers must do for wilderness is to preserve and restore native flora and fauna.

Following the mandates of the State Land Master Plan, DEC fish managers have identified what they call "heritage trout"-pure strains of brook trout that evolved in the Adirondacks and that, apparently, have never been contaminated by hatchery genes. Mostly, DEC has been working with three of these strains, named for the lakes from which they were collected in the nick of time-Windfall (where they've since been lost to alien fish), Little Tupper (where they're in the process of being lost to alien fish), and Horn Lake (where they've been lost to acid rain). In the last 15 years managers have restored heritage trout to about 50 remote ponds. Domestic brook trout live about three years, but heritage trout live six or seven; so they grow lots bigger. Four-pounders are now common. "When I was in the office our single most requested piece of literature was the reclaimed pond list," says Larry Strait, DEC's regional fish manager who retired in 2001. "That was no accident."

The Adirondack Council, another environmental group that does great work and for which I have raised lots of money, exists, in its words, to "sustain the natural and human communities of the region." Log onto its Web site, and you'll get hollered at by a loon. Loons are a symbol of wilderness, but the wild brook trout loons depend on aren't-at least not to the council which doesn't see or hear them. Nor do wild brook trout count as part of the "natural community" the council is pledged to defend. The council rails against helicopter and motorboat use by DEC trout managers and says it wants them "to follow the same wilderness rules as the public." It says it finds the practice of reclaiming ponds with rotenone "offensive" and wants it banned.

When I interviewed communications director, John Sheehan, he repeated all the standard wives' tales: For example: "There appears to be a relationship between rotenone use and Parkinson's disease." And: "Rotenone essentially kills everything that breathes with gills." It was clear that the council hadn't bothered to learn the first thing about fish restoration or wild brook trout. "The trout they're putting back generally exist in another place or several other places or are the same acid-resistant strain of Little Tupper trout that they've been stocking," Sheehan declared.

But Little Tupper trout are natives, not the supposedly acid-resistant Canadian-domestic hybrids DEC used to play around with. Heritage trout recovery is all about sport, he explained: "The problem we've had is that rotenone is generally used to create sporting opportunities, not as a means of preserving specific species necessarily. Generally we're not thrilled about killing off entire ponds and replacing them with monocultures." Yet Adirondack brook trout evolved in monocultures; in fact, they can't survive without them.

Armed with all this misinformation, the council urged DEC to adopt a rule that forbids managers to fly or drive into wilderness except in "off-peak seasons"-i.e. before Memorial Day and after Labor Day. DEC-increasingly staffed by young enviros who don't see, handle or understand fish and who fear all pesticides-complied in November 2003.

The only time you can check to see if ponds are thermally suited for brook trout is when they're stratified, and they're stratified only in summer. You can't reclaim ponds when everything is iced up. And because brook trout are fall spawners and rotenone doesn't kill trout eggs, you can't eliminate domestic and introgressed fish much after Labor Day. So the new rule effectively ends heritage trout recovery in wilderness.

"The department has made it impossible for resource managers to engage in meaningful debate," says Strait. "Trout Unlimited [pushing heroically and lonesomely for virtually every native trout restoration project across America] was denied the opportunity for a public hearing, and their comments were given short shrift. The Adirondack Council has rejected science. That's a shame because they could be great allies if they'd look at what we were able to accomplish over the last 15 years."