Sportsmen for Bush: Wise Up!

"They’d move into them for refuge during winter rains when the mainstems were raging," he reports. "At that time, developers were diverting and damming these streams, cutting down their riparian forests, building houses next to them, all because they were thought to be inconsequential."

Martin and his colleagues learned all this in the 1970s. But these are facts the Bush administration doesn’t want to know. Now, lakes, reservoirs, even municipal water supplies can be fouled by, say, factory feedlots discharging into feeder streams. It makes as much sense as screening human blood for HIV and hepatitis, then freezing it in unwashed milk cartons.

Recently, a few of the hook-and-bullet magazines that helped put Bush in power are criticizing him. But I still see those bumper stickers, and not just because the drivers are too lazy to peel them off.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a columnist for several outdoor magazines and writes from Grafton, Massachusetts.