A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to assist with a desert bighorn sheep (ovis canadensis nelson) recovery and translocation project in the Chihuahuan Desert of west Texas. We captured 82 bighorns by helicopter, carried them to a processing station where we collected blood samples, hair samples, nasal swabs and the like; GPS […]
I remember fishing like the ocean would never run out of fish. I’m 92 years old today, and I was 52 when the Magnuson-Stevens Act was written. Back then I didn’t know anything about it. It seemed like any other Washington, DC project happening at the time: far-out ideas a faraway place. I was more […]
Photo: Oregon coast, via Wikipedia Just like a day on the water, if you pay attention, you can learn something every day, even stuck in a large meeting room full of representatives with diverse interests. I attended the first (hopefully annual) Roadmap to the Outdoors Symposium sponsored by many great companies, agencies and organizations. It’s […]
Photo: Tamara Mautner from Garibaldi Charters with a large lingcod taken from a deep reef out of Garibaldi on October 12, 2016 Not in my wildest dreams did I think I’d wake to a welcoming ocean on January 1st; it was truly a metaphor for the possibilities that lie ahead. I think I may have […]
It seems that humans are the only members of the animal kingdom who care about drawing arbitrary lines on a map and then making a big deal about who should or shouldn’t stand on either side of those lines. While fish are not afflicted with this trait, they are often the victims of it. The […]
In his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry identified two poles running through America’s engagement with its natural resources. These two poles he calls exploitation and nurture. “The exploiter is a specialist,” says Berry, “the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The […]
A thought that saturates my consciousness with respect to conservation in general is what I have come to think of as the psychological problem of urbanization. Since the high middle ages, in the West, people have been increasingly, gradually, aggregating in cities. And this aggregation is speeding up. A threshold was crossed in the American […]
The start of a new year is a chance to reflect on the work the Marine Fish Conservation Network has done and start thinking about the year ahead. The end of 2017 marked the completion of my first year at the Network. To say it is all I expected is to understate it by a […]
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