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How conservation can save our politics and save America
Wednesday afternoon, a day that America won’t soon forget, I was on a phone call just across the river in Trout Unlimited's Arlington, Va., headquarters. A group of us at TU were talking about recovering Snake River salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest when my phone began blaring with a message from the mayor of Washington, D.C. In response to the attacks on the Capitol, she was ordering a city-wide curfew in three hours. TU staff and volunteers regularly go…
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Pigeons, persistence and hope
I recently read an essay where a priest on a mission to Guatemala discovered that artists from the village painted museum-quality artwork on the inside walls of a bell-tower—a place where only pigeons would see them. The story reminded me of Trout Unlimited’s work—behind the scenes, often unnoticed, complicated, hard, and, ultimately, beautiful. What a year. We reckoned with racial injustice as a nation, and looked inward to the fact that we need to become…
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Remembering Jim Greene, the best of TU volunteers
I first met Jim Greene as a relatively new employee of Trout Unlimited. He was an incredibly energetic earnest, and gregarious man. We went to lunch and I listened to how he and others—Jim would always insist on crediting others—helped to grow the Trout in the Classroom program in Maryland from a handful of schools to…
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Reknitting connections
Why do we need wild salmon and steelhead to thrive in the Snake River? Because they make connections. Wild salmon connect the Sawtooth Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Fish born in the rivers find their way to the sea, only to return at the end of their lives to spawn, die and decay—in the process…
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Fixing what ails our western forests and communities
The haze over the early morning sun spurred a call from a friend. “Did you see the moon this morning? It’s wild!” It wasn’t the moon, but it was wild. Wildfires 3,000 miles away shrouded the sun in smoke. The light smoke in Washington, D.C., signaled devastation in the West. In California, for example, at least 26 people have perished from wildfire, and more than 7,000 structures were destroyed. In…
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Native and wild
A few weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was catching wild trout in western North Carolina with a guide who had rejoined TU because the local chapter decided to stop helping the state to stock hatchery fish, and instead chose to focus exclusively on creating the flow and habitat conditions necessary to support wild and…
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Public lands, past and future
September is Public Lands Month, and few places are more important to trout and salmon than our public lands. Half of all the blue-ribbon trout streams in the West, for example, flow across public lands. Our public lands are often the last and best strongholds for many species of native trout and char. My exposure…
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