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By Bill Schneider

When I was a kid, about all I ever did inside was sleep, eat, and torment my grade school teachers. Every other waking moment was spent outside – not just fishing, hunting, and camping, but doing all the little things I thought up myself, like catching nightcrawlers, investigating anthills, watching toads come out on a rainy night, or making my first backpack from wood scraps, wire and burlap (that was before they invented duct tape).

I never even thought about what was happening, nor did my parents. But during these critical, formative years, I was becoming an outdoor person, a conservationist, a person who’d never enjoy inside toys like TV, computers, or game stations as much as fly rods, bicycles or binoculars, still among my favorite toys.

Kids today aren’t so lucky. Most are under a societal, parental, or self-imposed form of house arrest, with access to a wild world shrunk down to the size of a computer screen. Little wonder they’ve been called the Screen Generation.

This is largely why one in three United States kids is overweight and headed toward an adulthood likely dogged by diabetes, heart disease and other health problems. And things are getting worse, says the Institute of Medicine, which blames the problem on a junk food diet, too much TV and computer use, urban and suburban environments that discourage walking, and decreased opportunities for exercise in or out of school.

But for once, there is good news out of Washington: a bill meant to reverse this dire state of affairs. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) and Congressman John Sarbanes (D-MD) have introduced Senate and House versions of the historic No Child Left Inside Act of 2009 (S. 866 and H.R 2054). If passed, it would mark the first environmental education legislation to pass Congress in more than 25 years, and would begin to get kids back outside.

The bill (currently referred to the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education) authorizes $500 million over five years for states to offer higher-quality environmental education and to support outdoor learning activities. Similar bills died a silent death during the Bush Administration.

Now, though, this bill might have enough political tailwind behind it to advance through the new, blue Congress. The legislation’s primary promoter is the No Child Left Inside Coalition (NCLIC), a massive combine of 1,300 conservation and education nonprofits representing over 50 million people. Adding to that support is a long list of congressional co-sponsors, 10 senators and 38 representatives.

NCLIC describes the Act as a “non-partisan effort,” but that is, regrettably, a stretch. Out of 50 sponsors, 48 are Democrat. Republicans have, in fact, already panned it as wasteful spending and a way to spread environmental propaganda through the public school system, setting up another partisan fight in Congress.

But truly, the Act is an outgrowth of a movement started by Richard Louv, author of a best-selling book, “Last Child in the Woods,” where he describes the dramatic decline in our children’s ability to connect with nature because of what he calls Nature Deficit Syndrome.

This disorder, he says, “describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities.” Though research is still scanty, Louv argues that less nature in our children’s lives can lead to higher crime rates, depression and other urban maladies.

Louv points to still another serious likely result of Nature Deficit Disorder. The long-term impact is fewer grown-up children connected to nature and willing to work to protect it. With the problems we now face, ranging from climate change to disappearing natural resources and wildlife, the No Child Left Inside Act is an important step toward protecting our nation’s future.

“Environmental education must be a part of the formal pre-K-12 education system if we are to fully prepare students to become lifelong stewards of our natural resources and compete in a green economy,” says bill sponsor Congressman Sarbanes.

So take a moment and contact your senator or representative and urge him or her to support the bill’s passage. Yes, it’s extra tax dollars, but a $100 million per year seems like pocket change compared to the billions Congress has devoted to Wall Street bailouts.

As someone put it to me: This is not a conservationist’s issue, or a left-leaning environmentalist’s issue. This is everyone’s issue. It’s a small investment in the health of our children and our planet.

And one last thought. After you send that e-mail to Congress, shut down the computer, and go take the kids for a walk in the park. It’s good medicine!

Bill Schneider works as travel and outdoor editor for the online magazine NewWest.Net where a version of this commentary originally appeared.

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You think the wolf controversy couldn’t get more divisive? Ha. Even though domestic dogs kill dozens of people every year in this country, one death by wolf can make headlines forever.

By Bill Schneider

Anything wolf makes big headlines–and, it seems, is never old news.

For fourteen years since conservationists and the federal government brought the wolf back to the northern Rockies (plus several years leading up to the reintroduction), anything and everything about the Big Dog has been, to say the least, controversial.

But something hasn’t happened yet that could make it much more contentious.

Many westerners have seen the conflict-ridden canine as an agent of change, desired or despised, depending on your point of view, with not many people holding in the middle ground–and an expensive change, too, considering how much money goes into managing and litigating issues surrounding the return of the wolf. Plus, of course, the master predator kills and eats things like elk, livestock, and even a few of its domestic cousins serving as our faithful pets.

But all that controversy will pale by comparison if a wolf bites somebody. We’ve heard many stories about people feeling threatened, but no incident where any member of humankind was actually attacked.

In winning approval for the reintroduction, conservations frequently used the assurance that the wolf posed no threat to humankind, and that nobody had ever been killed by a wolf in North America, ever. Back in 1995 and 1996 when we carted the wolves down from Canada to Yellowstone and central Idaho, that was true. Then, four years ago, we had the much-publicized incident that became the first official, documented fatality.

It happened in far north Saskatchewan. On November 8, 2005, a pack of four wolves killed and ate 22-year-old Kenton Carnegie, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo working at a remote mining camp near Points North Landing in the Wollaston Lake area.

After two years of dispute over what really happened at the camp, a Canadian coroner’s jury officially declared that wolves were to blame for Carnegie’s death.

Although I’m sure nobody was delighted to see a man die a horrible death, anti-wolfers, always skeptical of claims that wolves pose no threat to people, were delighted to have some documentation that the oft-stated claims of conservationists weren’t completely true. Conservationists, predictably, continue to dispute the coroner’s findings, claiming a bear actually killed and consumed Carnegie, and the wolves came around later to be falsely implicated.

Circumstances of the incident were sketchy if not predictable. At the camp, both bears and wolves had become conditioned to getting human food rewards at a large open garbage dump nearby, so in any case, wolves or bears, it was classic human misconduct and mishandling of garbage that eventually led to the tragic death.

Valerius Geist, perhaps Canada’s most noted biologist, gave testimony at the coroner’s inquest that supported his belief that wolves killed Carnegie. He didn’t dance around his conclusion and called it “the first direct human fatality from a wolf attack in North America.”  Previously, he noted, rabid wolves have bitten people, but the rabies virus, not the wolf, caused any subsequent death.

But Geist, who has studied wolves, went a big step beyond that key point and said he has noticed a behavior shift in wolf populations that weren’t hunted and consequently had a diminishing fear of humans. These populations tend to be more aggressive than wolves he has studied in the wild.

As we all know, a couple generations of wolves, about 1,600 of them, currently roam around the northern Rockies. Although federal and state “management actions” remove a couple hundred animals from the population every year, these wolves have never been hunted until very recently when Idaho and Montana opened seasons in September. That’s the intriguing point for me. Are we creating populations of more aggressive, more dangerous wolves? Now, that could get controversial, eh?

“The argument, that there is little danger from wolves because they have rarely attacked humans in North America, is fallacious,” Geist emphasized in an article about the Carnegie incident.
Of special concern, he wrote, are “tame and inquisitive” wolves. When you see such a wolf, “get out of there quick,” he advises, “but without undue haste…Running away invites an attack.”

As for my $0.02, I may be among the minority in the middle ground. I like wolves, supported the reintroduction, and want to see wolves and people peacefully co-exist in the northern Rockies. But I also favor getting the Big Dog off the endangered species list and managed by the state wildlife agencies, which would lead to carefully regulated wolf-hunting seasons.

Endless litigation and disagreement among stakeholders has slowed the process, but nonetheless, we’re on the right track. I hate to think what might happen if we have even one incident similar to what happened up at Points North. Let’s collectively hope it never happens here.

So, Big Bad Wolf, for several reasons, please don’t bite anybody. ◊

Bill Schneider works as travel and outdoor editor for the online magazine NewWest.Net where a version of this commentary originally appeared. Contact him at waschneider@qwest.net.







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WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging review of how Americans engage with and value the nation’s land and water resources and its outdoor recreation assets calls for a comprehensive overhaul of programs and policies to safeguard these resources for future generations and to meet the needs of a growing population.

The report by the private, bipartisan Outdoor Resources Review Group (ORRG) was presented July 6 at a Capitol Hill briefing to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-New Mexico) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), who served as honorary co-chairs of the project.

In its report, the task force analyzed efforts to conserve and protect the nation’s outdoor heritage — including parks, wildlife refuges and open space. The report draws a strong link between the availability and quality of these resources and the health of Americans, the economy and communities nationwide. It also points to the tremendous hurdle in securing adequate funding for parks, recreation and related purposes at the state and local levels, which are on the front line in providing these services.

In the foreword to the report, Senators Bingaman and Alexander said, “Americans all across the country, of all backgrounds and of all political views, care deeply about the health of our land and water resources – the wildlife, parks, forests, farms and ranchlands, and historic places that have sustained and enriched us as a people over generations….We are past due for a serious look at where we stand as a country in achieving our goal of safeguarding these resources…. Today, with a new President and a new administration, we have the opportunity to put our conservation efforts on solid footing for generations to follow.”

“Healthy, productive land and water resources, wildlife habitat, parks and open space, culturally and historically significant landscapes, and available and accessible recreation lands are fundamental to the American way of life and our future prosperity,” the report notes. “At stake now and for future generations is the health of our people, our economy, our communities and the lands and waters on which we depend, in short, the quality of life we enjoy in our cities and towns and rural places.”

Needed: Sustainable Funding Stream

A key proposal in the report, which is flagged for further study, is the development of an independent conservation trust within the federal establishment, with dedicated and sustained funding reaching $5 billion annually. One potential funding source, the report suggests, could be a percentage of royalties and revenues collected from development of new renewable and conventional energy resources and transmission capacity on public lands and on the outer continental shelf. The report anticipates conflicts over specific projects if a substantial push is made to develop energy resources on public lands that are valued as wildlife habitat or for recreation. It also calls for a national climate program to help fund the adaptation of land and water resources in a warming world.

The ORRG report is the first major assessment of outdoor resources since the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors in 1987.

In the more than 20 years since that study, a wide range of outdoor pursuits — including such activities as bird watching, water-related sports, rock climbing, mountain biking and off-road vehicles — have grown in popularity, even as more traditional activities such as hiking, camping, hunting and fishing retain strong core followings. The report recommends creating a new nationwide system of “Blueways” and water trails to energize grassroots activity to improve water quality and water-related recreation opportunities.

The 17-member ORRG task force was organized by Henry Diamond, partner at Beveridge & Diamond, P.C., an environmental law firm headquartered in Washington, and former commissioner of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation; Patrick Noonan, chairman emeritus of The Conservation Fund; and Gilbert Grosvenor, chairman of the board of the National Geographic Society.

The panel’s findings and recommendations were informed by analysis from a year-long research effort by Resources for the Future (RFF) examining trends in recreational land use and new issues affecting recreation, conservation and open space. RFF is releasing its research report later this year.

Trends and Changes Affecting Outdoor Resources

The ORRG report identifies a number of recreational trends, policy failures, and technological changes that have affected outdoor resources. Among the findings and recommendations:

• The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), created in 1965, has declined in significance and utility, a victim of undependable appropriations. This has made it difficult for public agencies to plan for and develop needed park and recreation lands and related facilities for outdoor use. The group recommends funding LWCF at its highest authorized level, adjusted for inflation, that is, at $3.2 billion a year, with a share guaranteed to the states and, in turn, to urban areas. By 2015, when the fund’s statutory authority expires, a new funding mechanism will be needed to ensure that demand can be met, including for a projected population increase of 100 million more Americans by 2040.

• Federal, state, and local funding and planning for conservation goals is fragmented and inefficient. Better coordination among numerous programs and jurisdictions is needed to meet recreational priorities. New technologies, such as geo-spatial mapping tools, offer a proven way to array large amounts of information to aid in planning and to provide transparency for outdoor resource investments.

• Both children and adults are struggling with obesity and related health problems. Participation in outdoor recreation activities is fundamental to overcoming these problems, but modern lifestyles, reduced vacation time, changing family structures and a lack of parks and recreation areas near where people live have made such participation more difficult. More attention to these problems is needed, including vigorous promotion of outdoor activities, especially in schools, to reconnect individuals at an early age to nature and physical pursuits.

• Public/private partnerships offer a proven way to protect land and water resources and advance outdoor recreation. Entrepreneurial land trusts in states and localities have protected millions of acres of land and wildlife habitat, according to the Land Trust Alliance. Local conservancies have protected and restored parks and open space for public use. Such efforts can supplement governmental programs, particularly when public budgets are insufficient.

• Development of outdoor recreation facilities, it appears, has not kept pace with population growth, demographic changes and participation rates. Moreover, trends in technology and travel that could not have been forecast a generation ago — including such activities as eco-tourism and geo-tourism — require further analysis of the implications for the supply of and demand for outdoor resources.

Financial support for the ORRG work was provided by the Laurance S. Rockefeller Fund, the American Conservation Association, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The project also worked closely with The Conservation Fund and the National Geographic Society, which provided additional resources and support. ◊

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By Bill Schneider

For years, I’ve been writing about natural alliances, or lack thereof.

First, I bemoaned the riff between two key constituencies who should work hand-in-hand, hikers and mountain bikers, who became adversaries instead, mainly over the issue of wilderness. Hiking groups want it; mountain biking groups oppose it. Consequently, efforts to preserve roadless lands suffered mightily.

Then, I wrote about a natural alliance that still had a chance, hunters and wildernuts. Ironically, the Sierra Club deserves the credit for creating this concept – even coining the words “natural alliance.” Back in the mid-1990s, the Sierra Club launched its Natural Alliance program to convince hunters they had a common ground with Sierra Clubbers, primarily the protection of wild land. A positive stroke by the Sierra Club, no doubt, but the bond never developed because some Sierra Club chapters, not the parent organization, have taken anti-hunting stands. The National Rifle Association rushed to the podium and shot down the Natural Alliance idea and told hunters that getting cozy with the Sierra Club was sleeping with the enemy.

That background seems important because of a press release I received. Actually, I receive enough PRs to wear out a delete key every three months, including five or six each day from Ken Salazar’s office, plus two or three daily from his boss in the White House. But unlike 98 percent of the PRs, this one was a Red Alert for me, as it should have for anybody interested in keeping roadless lands roadless.

Here’s the first paragraph: “A consortium of prominent outdoor-oriented groups has united in support of responsible management of inventoried roadless areas with a goal of sustaining the high-quality sporting and recreational opportunities provided by America’s backcountry. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Outdoor Industry Association and Outdoor Alliance, together representing millions of public-lands users, have sent a letter to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging that a directive be issued requiring high-level review of proposed development of roadless areas until permanent rules for their management can be resolved.”

The wording might be a yawner to some, but to me, it shouts “About Time!”

A triumvirate of powerful coalitions all pulling hard, side-by-side, in the same direction – like a troika – could quickly become the most influential lobby in protecting roadless lands and nonmotorized recreation. Finally, anglers, climbers, hikers, hunters, mountain bikers, paddlers and skiers all on the same page! To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, I feel a great disturbance in the (Political) Force.

It might be easy to underestimate the significance. Most media didn’t cover the creation, let alone earlier joint efforts by the same consortium in support of ongoing climate change legislation and the Omnibus Public Lands Bill signed by President Obama in March. In addition, I suspect many readers don’t know much about these three collectives. Each is actually a combine of partners representing many thousands if not millions of like-minded people.

The Outdoor Industry Association is a trade group for most outdoor manufacturers and a few retailers – hundreds of companies that make virtually anything you buy at an outdoor retailer.

The Outdoor Alliance is a relatively new union of six “human-powered” recreation groups that really needed to get together: Access Fund, American Canoe Association, American Hiking Society, American Whitewater, International Mountain Biking Association and Winter Wildlands Alliance.

The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, only formed seven years ago, has rapidly put together a stunning consortium of major “hook and bullet” groups such as Bass Anglers Sportsman Society (BASS), Ducks Unlimited, Izaak Walton League, Mule Deer Foundation, North American Grouse Partnership, Pheasants Forever, Trout Unlimited, Quail Unlimited, Whitetails Unlimited, plus professional groups like the American Fisheries Society and Wildlife Management Institute, plus land trusts like The Nature Conservancy and Trust for Public Land, plus the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which represents most state and federal land-managing and wildlife agencies, plus the Union Sportsman’s Alliance, which represents 20 trade unions, plus many hunting and fishing equipment manufacturers such as Benelli, Beretta, Buck Knives, Chevrolet, Orvis, Patagonia, Remington, Scott Fly Rods and Triton Boats.

Bet you’ve never seen those companies and nonprofits (and I listed fewer than half of them) on the same list going the same direction on the same issue. If I were a lobbyist for the motorized recreation, mining or other single-use industries that fight every attempt to protect roadless lands, I’d add up the numbers and start thinking career change or retirement.

Now, back to the subject of the press release – urging Vilsack to put a hold on any development (translate, new roads) that might compromise roadless lands. (Click here to read the letter.)

I called all three members of the new troika to drill down a little deeper. What they want is no more roads for two or three years. In the meantime, they will, hopefully, develop and go to Congress with a detailed strategy for the future of those 58.5 million acres of national forest. We have 193 million acres in our national forests, roughly two-thirds already devoted to natural resource extraction and crisscrossed with around 375,000 miles of roads, but we have been running in place for 20 years trying to decide what to do with the remaining one-third.

Let’s be clear. This consortium immediately becomes the 900-pound green gorilla with enough political muscle to finally make something happen. When talking to the groups, I detected some hesitancy on whether they would collectively come up with a plan for those 58.5 million acres, but to me, they must take the lead. They can’t just say: Protect them until somebody else decides what to do.

But developing a plan will cause some internal strife, to say the least, hopefully not too much to rip apart this desperately needed coalition. Witness the incredibly skillful wording of the press release and letter, obviously intended to avoid stepping on the toes of that proverbial Elephant in the Room – wilderness.

Assuming Congress finally gets in the mood to actually do something to protect roadless lands, our elected representatives have three general options:

1. Codifying the Roadless Rule and leaving us with more or less what we have today, one-third of our national forests open to all forms of muscle-powered recreation and two-thirds devoted to motorized wreckreation. (Interesting, don’t you agree, that two-thirds is not enough for motorheads.)

2. Designating many roadless lands as wilderness, which thanks to the Forest Service’s questionable interpretation of the Wilderness Act of 1964 would ban mountain biking.

3. Opt for an alterative designation (yet to be named) allowing bicycle use, climbing anchors and some other current prohibitions, but otherwise providing the same protection wilderness does. I’ve started calling this the “Wilderness Lite” option.

For many roadless areas, the Wilderness Society, Sierra Club and many groups won’t want anything less than wilderness. But will the Outdoor Troika support wilderness? Probably not. The internal debate for the future will certainly test the will of partners of today, especially in the Outdoor Alliance where the International Mountain Biking Association casts a long shadow and has been fighting wilderness proposals for decades, but also in the Outdoor Industry Association, which represents some bicycle manufacturers and retailers selling bicycles.

It seems likely to me that avoiding an implosion within the triumvirate will be so important that in line with the current craze for collaboration, it could lead to a national Wilderness Lite proposal. If this happens, and I hope it does, it should have enough political wind behind it to blow over objections from not only the usual suspects who oppose anything without roads, but also opposition from wilderness groups. To me, this seems like nothing less than a Perfect Storm for roadless lands.

This article originally appeared at www.NewWest.net.

Bill Schneider is travel and outdoors editor for NewWest.com. He is a former book publisher who for 30 years has been filling in the spaces between fishing trips, hikes and bike rides by writing books and articles about the great outdoors.

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By James A. Swan

Good stories stalk us, as much as we stalk them.

I grew up on an island in Lake Erie at the mouth of the Detroit River, where there were abundant fish and wildlife and horrific air and water pollution. When I went to the University of Michigan, aside from playing football, my other goal was to study something that would help me do something about pollution in Southeastern Michigan.

On my first day in the School of Natural Resources, my adviser asked me what I wanted to be. I told him I wanted to be a game warden. He laughed and said that game wardens did not make any money, and so he convinced me to study wildlife biology. I later switched my major to psychology when I decided that all pollution begins in the minds of people.

Thirty years later, I published “Nature As Teacher and Healer,” which summarized my research about how people develop what Aldo Leopold called an “ecological conscience.” On the book tour, I visited my family back in Michigan. One day I took over the family retail store while my father ran an errand. During a lull, a man walked in, saw some of my books on display, picked one up, saw my picture and began a conversation. After a few minutes, he said, “You’re a professor of environmental studies, but I bet you don’t know a thing about what I do.” For the next half hour he introduced me to the world of being a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent – a federal game warden.

I realized that while I had taught at major universities, consulted with federal and state resources agencies, and hunted and fished all my life, I had never even talked with a game warden, although when I went to college, I had said I wanted to be one.

I started to read and ask questions.  I became a hunter education instructor, and suddenly I was talking with game wardens and discovering what they actually did. That was a shock. California, I found, had the worst wardens-per-capita ratio of any state or province in North America, and that translated into a $100 million-a-year black market in wildlife trafficking in the state.

I wrote an article on game wardens as being unsung heroes of conservation for my ESPNOutdoors.com column.

In 2006, two California game wardens, Jerry Karnow and Jake Bushey, took my son, Andrew, and me on a weekend chukar hunt in Northern California. We got some birds, but the upshot of that outing was hatching the idea of my producing a documentary on the state’s game wardens.

Sure, we filmed compliance checks for hunters and fishermen, but we also videoed takedowns of bear and abalone poachers, street gangs, crime syndicates, meth labs and Mexican drug cartels running marijuana groves on recreational lands. We even bagged a story of one warden who had found a terrorist cell training with automatic weapons in the desert prior to 9/11.

Two years later, on Jan. 17, 2009, “Endangered Species: California Fish and Game Wardens,” a 66-minute documentary narrated by actor/author Jameson Parker, premiered at the International Sportsmen’s Exposition in Sacramento, “The biggest crowd on the biggest day of the biggest outdoor sports show,” according to Tom Stienstra, who appears in the documentary. (Here’s a three-minute trailer for the documentary.)

On Feb. 25, a group of wardens saw to it that every member of the California Assembly and Senate received copies. Their mission was so timely. Days before, a notice had been sent out that all wardens would be furloughed two days per month, and 98 wardens and cadets had just received layoff notices. That translates into 100 wardens in the field for 38 million people. Idaho now has more wardens than California, and only 1.2 million people.

The frontline of conservation – game wardens – have been overlooked in the surge to go green, even though the wardens were wearing the color long before the environment became fashionable. Without wardens, poaching flourishes, resources dwindle and the woods become less safe. As warden numbers have declined in California, for many species of fish and wildlife – deer, abalone, lobster, sturgeon, striped bass, rockfish, and salmon – seasons and limits have become more restrictive, and regulations have increased as poaching escalates. And numbers of sportsmen go down, as does the amount of money generated by outdoor sportsmen.

There are more than 830,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the U.S., only 7,100 of which are game wardens. When you come to see what game wardens really do and learn how critical they are to conservation, you can understand why Chief Nancy Foley says in the documentary that she could use 7,000 game wardens in California, instead of 198 – and that was before the layoffs were announced.

I’m afraid that I’m now too old to be a game warden. But at least I did not let that story get away. And for a trophy, I have a mini-warden badge proudly mounted on my wall. ◊

James A. Swan, Ph.D., of Mill Valley, Calif., is freelancer, book author, television and screen actor and producer, and a columnist for ESPNOutdoors.com. He operates Snow Goose Productions. More information on “Endangered Species: California Fish and Game Wardens” can be found at: www.jamesswan.com/snowgoose/wardendoc.html.

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For two days in April every year, the natural cycle of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., provides center stage for a fishing event intended to connect everyone – from urban youths to the nation’s highest elected officials – to the importance of fish, fishing and aquatic habitats. The Potomac’s run of shad, America’s “First Fish,” itself is a testament to the success that can be achieved when citizens and policy makers work together to conserve our waterways. With the stage set in late April, the Family and Youth Casting Call and the Jim Range National Casting Call honor these successes and set the stage for future conservation efforts.

Hosted by the American Fly Fishing Trade Association (AFFTA), the National Park Service, and dozens of other partners, the Family & Youth Casting Call provides D.C.-area youths with perhaps their first taste of fishing. There can be no more tangible a connection to nature than through a wiggling fish on the end of a taut line. That link becomes practically electric, and inevitably sets the hook for the child to see the great outdoors in a whole new light. At the event, a section of the C&O Canal is netted and stocked with native fish to ensure every child who attends has the opportunity to have that light turn on.

Over recent years, the Family & Youth Casting Call has blossomed into one of the finest youth fishing events in Washington, D.C. Last year, at least 350 children, accompanied by their parents, ventured down to Fletcher’s Boathouse in the C&O Canal National Historical Park for the event. Beyond the joy of fishing, children journey through education stations on the quest to earn their National Park Service Junior Ranger Badge. From fly-tying and casting to fish art to touch tanks to water quality testing, there are experiences for every age group to expand their knowledge of nature; and it satisfies that primal urge for all kids to get just a little bit dirty. This year the Family & Youth Casting Call will be held on Sunday, April 26.

In a similar vein, the Jim Range National Casting Call strives to use fly-fishing to make the connection between fun on a river and the challenges and opportunities to improve fisheries conservation. The event focuses on bringing federal decision-makers out – just a short trip from the nation’s capital – to a river that has seen the benefit of cooperative conservation efforts. The shad that the participants fish for during the Jim Range National Casting Call were largely decimated at the turn of the century, and now the Potomac is one of the only rivers on the eastern seaboard where shad are largely self-sustaining.

It was through creative conservation partnerships that shad in the Potomac have been restored and AFFTA, the National Fish Habitat Action Plan and other partners use the National Casting Call as a platform to spotlight similar efforts around the country. By focusing on the Potomac shad restoration program, the groups hope to make these issues relevant to the people who ultimately make policy decisions on fisheries and aquatic resource conservation.

This year will be particularly poignant as we celebrate the life and vision of Jim Range, AFFTA’s legislative representative and the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Range, who succumbed to cancer in January, was a true conservation champion in the federal policy arena, and it was he who envisioned the National Casting Call a decade ago. The Jim Range National Casting Call will be held on Monday, April 27, this year.

AFFTA encourages OWAA members to attend the events or, if you are unable to be there, we can provide information to help you cover them. For more information about the Family & Youth Casting Call, go to www.familyandyouthcastingcall.com. For the Jim Range National Casting Call, go to www.nationalcastingcall.com. Or contact Jodi Stemler, chair of the events’ communications committee at jodi@stemlerconsulting.com or 703-915-1386.

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The Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center has designed a poster to illustrate how to handle bass in the way best for their health. Through the years TPWD biologists have found that handling bass using two wet hands and supporting them at tail and head as shown is the safest way.

Please help the center spread the word by printing and posting this poster (download the pdf here) and/or by sending it to others who will do the same.

A note about the poster: The original size is 18 inches by 24 inches, and most people cannot print a document that size without tiling. However, by setting the view to 22.3 percent (“fit page”) and then printing, you can print it on an 8.5-by-11 sheet of paper. You will need Adobe Acrobat to be able to view PDF files.

For more information contact Larry D. Hodge, information specialist, Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center, 903-670-2255.

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