State of Our Trout Part I

Lately, McCampbell, who claims to be chemically sensitive, has been melodramatically slapping a respirator over her nose and mouth between sentences as she testifies on the evils of piscicides. And she lives in a 1983 Chevy when she perceives elevated chemical contamination in the air.

This time Fish and Game wisely left most rebutting of McCampbell and her flock to outside experts. For example, when Dan Wilson—the elementary-school teacher who founded “Save Lake Davis Committee”—attempted to link the earlier rotenone treatment to local cases of autism, Down syndrome and cancer, Dr. Hank Foley of The Plumas County Public Health Agency promptly informed the public that this was bunk.

Fish and Game’s outreach effort even worked on Bill Powers who, in 1997, as mayor of Portola, had chained himself to a buoy. “I think at least we can say it’s going to be a one-shot deal and pose no health effects to the public,” he told USA Today less than a month before the September 2007 treatment. That treatment, more thorough and with much better equipment than the first, went down without incident, killing at least 11,000 pounds of pike.

On May 16, 2008, Fish and Game hosted a Lake Davis victory celebration at the dam, releasing some of the nearly one million Eagle Lake–strain rainbows it will stock this year. Department biologist Julie Cunningham reports good karma: “White pelicans, western grebes and Canada geese and their goslings were out on the lake. And an osprey, clutching a fish and pursued by a bald eagle, came flying over the podium.”

Paiute Cutthroats

Since I last interviewed Paiute cutthroat advocates for FR&R, they’ve been stuffed a fourth time by chemophobes. So in 2008 I was astonished to find them energized and upbeat. California Fish and Game’s Paiute project leader William Somer admitted to being “frustrated” but offered this: “I think the tide is slowly turning; the Lake Davis treatment created a lot of good press.”

I can well understand why Somer is frustrated. What I can’t understand is where his patience and commitment is coming from. The Paiute recovery plan came out

in 1985. What should have been a simple, straightforward stream reclamation that, for the first time in history,  would have restored a fish to 100 percent of its native range, has been paralyzed by all manner of bureaucratic hurdles, most of them (including two lawsuits) engineered by Nancy Erman.

After 23 years of endless and duplicative environmental review, scoping sessions, public commentary, hearings, protests, administrative appeals, litigation, court orders and inertia and timidity on the part of the permitting agency, the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the Paiute’s entire native range is still occupied by alien fish.

“Dr. Robert Behnke”—generally acknowledged as the world’s leading authority on trout and salmon—“flew up and testified before the Water Quality Control Board,” reports TU’s John Regan. “He did a great job, and we got the go-ahead. But Erman”—this time using CATs, Wilderness Watch, Friends of Hope Valley,