Like many of our fly fishing focused kin in the web and print arenas we devote a fair amount of Chi Wulff real estate to fish and fisheries advocacy; we’re damned happy to do so.
Truth be told, there are hoards of critical fish and fisheries issues out there clamoring daily for your precious attention, your sweat equity and a piece of your pocketbook.
Hells bells, you could read just three or four selected fishy bloggers and advocacy sites a day and perceive the world, at least from a fishy environmental standpoint, was going to hell in a handbasket.
(More cynical acquaintances in the marketing and public relations arenas love to point out that trauma and crises viscerally provide stronger calls to action and defend pushing the limits of truthfulness to spike fundraising; even fly fishing advocacy groups play this card now and again.)
On the other hand, fishy success stories don’t get the same press.
Success stories should be ‘top-of-the-fold’ but rarely are. When friend of Chi Wulff Tom Sadler’s Celebrating the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture post popped up yesterday, it hammered home a few principles we’ve espoused for years, namely that of crossing traditional boundary lines to form cooperative solutions to critical issues using ‘outside the box’ approaches.
From Tom’s post…
The steering committee shared an incredible, lifelong, visceral passion for the brook trout, did not feel compelled to color inside the lines and were willing to put regional and state boundaries behind them for the greater good of the brookie. We channeled that passion and went directly to the fish and game departments in the 17 states that encompassed the Eastern Brook Trout’s native range. We got buy-in to our ideas for the joint venture and, at a meeting a year later, the EBTJV became a reality….
Tom’s post is well worth a read today, as is nosing around on the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture site if you’ve not before.
Some other folks who sat down at the table with people ‘from the other side of the fence | issue’ and got things done for the better of all, most notably nifty watersheds, include the Henry’s Fork Foundation and the Big Hole Watershed Committee.
Cooperative, roll-up-the-sleeves-and-get-it-done solutions beat doom and gloom, the sky is falling hand-wringing any day. Well done Tom and the other founders of the EBTJV.
