Fishable Waters

The environmental community keeps saying it needs to work with sportsmen for common goals such as clean water, but all the talk never seem to beget action. “Environmentalists don’t reach out to sportsmen,” remarks Chris Potholm, professor of government and legal studies at Maine’s Bowdoin College, who 21 years ago founded The Potholm Group, a national polling-and-strategic-advice company that has engineered 60 environmental referenda victories in 30 states. “If they did, they’d be invincible. Whenever sportsmen combine with environmentalists, you have a minimum of 65 percent of the population, an absolutely irresistible coalition. If we can get environmentalists and sportsmen working together, we can win anywhere.”

The upcoming campaign for the Fishable Waters Act provides a superb opportunity for NRDC, the Sierra Club and other members of the Clean Water Network to start forging a lasting alliance with sportsmen. This is especially important in light of the bitterness many sportsmen currently feel toward that element of the environmental community that helped emasculate the Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA), a bill that would have annually allocated $2.8 billion in federal offshore oil-and-gas royalties to conservation [Conservation, July/Aug 2000]. If the Network supports the Fishable Waters Act, it can soothe a lot of hurt feelings, and it can then look to sportsmen to help it reauthorize a stronger Clean Water Act. Meanwhile, the fish need help now.