Fish Poison Politics

The most beautiful creature in Massachusetts, if you ask me, abides in Hyla Brook, an icy rill bright with cowslips and watercress, undefiled by hatchery trucks and, because Boston drinks it, embraced by big, roadless woods. And I'll go on to opine that the ugliest creature in Alberta abides in Moraine Lake - the 50-acre slab of polished turquoise you used to see on Canadian $20 bills. In both cases I'm talking about fish - the same fish, the brook trout. Before managers started flinging them around the continent like wedding rice, they used to call them "Eastern brook trout."

Native ecosystems, like great works of art, can be rendered repulsive when smashed and smeared. Treasuring them is hardly a new or radical idea. More than 50 years ago Aldo Leopold advocated it when he called for an "ecological conscience." More than a century ago George Bird Grinnell, editor of the sporting weekly Forest and Stream, advocated it when he called for "a refined taste in natural objects." Today America and the rest of the world value fish and wildlife more than ever, but anything will do; there is scant concern for the conservation of genes or the sanctity of species.

One would expect that sportsmen, because they interact more directly with nature, would lead the effort to repair native ecosystems. Certainly this would be in their best interests. For one thing, fish and wildlife generally do better in their native habitats than do aliens that evolved elsewhere; witness, for example, Colorado's robust greenback cutthroat trout in the streams formerly polluted with scrawny, stunted browns, rainbows, hybrid cutts and brookies. But "better" means much more than increased size and condition of quarry. In healthy, native ecosystems the acts of hunting and fishing take on new meaning and significance; the sportsman becomes a true participant in nature instead of just another interloper in a ruined system.

Some sportsmen are indeed leading the way, but the majority can't educate the ecologically illiterate because they qualify as such themselves. With only a few exceptions, the sporting press doesn't provide them with useful information but instead plays to their fears and superstitions, the better to hawk ad space. Meanwhile, the chemophobic general public—no better served by its media—imagines that the short-lived and utterly benign chemical piscicides rotenone and antimycin are somehow going to pollute their surface and even ground water.

Where fisheries professionals have not been hamstrung, their work with chemical piscicides has produced spectacular results. In California alone, Little Kern and Volcano Creek golden trout, as well as Lahontan and Paiute cutthroats, owe their continued existence to the use of rotenone by state and federal agencies. A decade ago Utah spent $3.7 million applying 878,000 pounds of powdered rotenone and 4,000 gallons of five-percent liquid rotenone to Strawberry Reservoir in order to provide a sanctuary for Bonneville cutthroat—presumed extinct until they were rediscovered in a few desert streams that still run into the dry basin of ancient Lake Bonneville. Since 1992 the wild Bonnevilles—which grow much larger than the introgressed and ill-adapted alien trout that had formerly populated the reservoir - have provided a sport fishery worth $6 million a year.

The bull trout—a big, square-jawed char of western North America—is listed as threatened in the United States and as a "species of special concern" in Canada. One of its major problems (virtually its only problem in Canada's Banff National Park) is genetic swamping by brook trout. Brook trout—stocked in the days when managers, too, were ecologically illiterate—have taken over most of the park's streams and lakes. To its credit Canadian Heritage, the federal agency that oversees national parks in Canada, has decided that Banff's Moraine Lake should be as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. Four years ago it announced that the park should restore bull trout, Alberta's provincial fish. In order for this to happen brook trout and introgressed cutthroats and rainbows will have to be removed. Physically, the task won't be difficult. For one thing, it's a headwater lake and its three feeder streams are too cold to support the alien trout with which it has been defiled. For another, it's small and easily accessible by truck and snowmobile. Politically, however, the task may be impossible.

If you would like to learn about proposed bull trout restoration in Moraine Lake, don't read Real Fishing Magazine. "Trout genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" is what editor Craig Ritchie calls it. "No one," he wrote in the April 2000 issue, "knows how long it will take insects, amphibians, plants, aquatic invertebrates, birds and other creatures that will be killed off in the process to repopulate—or even if they will."

But people who read the literature do know. Amphibians, few of which are killed by rotenone and fewer still by antimycin, bounce right back, as do the few insects and other invertebrates that are killed. Piscicides don't affect birds or plants, though I suppose it's conceivable that a plant or two or a bird or two might be killed if explosives are used in conjunction with chemicals. The real motive of Parks Canada, Ritchie averred, is that it "wants to outlaw fishing, and this is a way of pushing it through." But fishing—including catch-and-release for bull trout—is part of Banff National Park's plan, a plan approved by Parliament. The park couldn't change that plan even if it wanted to—and it doesn't want to, says Charlie Pacas, the biologist who will head bull trout restoration if it ever happens. Ritchie says he never contacted Pacas or any other Banff official (the only thing Pacas agrees with him on). However, Ritchie did tell me he erred in reporting that TU Canada (which he also failed to contact) is an enthusiastic accomplice in the proposed trout genocide. He says he's since learned that "TU is very much opposed." But even this turns out to be untrue. While TU Canada heartily endorses "recovery efforts for native species at risk such as bull trout," it has no official position on what's been proposed for Lake Moraine, because there is as yet no written plan.

Ritchie has succeeded in whipping up Citizens for Private Property Rights, based in Santa Ysabel, California. "Brook trout," the group sardonically proclaims, "are bad, evil trout and must be eliminated and . . . bull trout are ever so much more precious in God's eye." And the Canadian Taxpayers Federation echoes Ritchie in calling bull trout restoration "ethnic cleansing." The Canadian Alliance Party calls the proposal "obscure" and worries that it could offend "the animal-rights people," not explaining why anyone should care. If the Canadian Alliance Party cares, then it has reason for concern: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-whose members don't give a damn what kind of animals inhabit the planet so long as none of them die-calls the proposal "cruel" and declares that it is "unconscionable" to kill one species so that another may live.

When I interviewed Brad Bischoff, the media point man at Banff, he seemed jumpy as a dusted grouse. "Any decision we make will be posted for public comment, and no final decisions are going to be made until those public comments are reviewed," he told me. About the third time he said the park hadn't made any final decision, I began to wonder if it ever would.