 Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Montana State University Library's Trout and Salmonid Lecture Series. My name is Kenning Arlich, and I'm the current Dean of the MSU Library. Thanks so much for coming tonight, and thank you to our host, the Museum of the Rockies. The Trout and Salmonid Collection was launched in 1999, and I encourage you to visit it in our special collections. We have in our audience tonight the people who had the foresight and generosity to establish this world-renowned collection 16 years ago. I'd like to ask them to stand and be recognized, and please hold your applause until they're standing. First, former Dean of the MSU Library, Bruce Morton. And then, some generous donors. Hang on, hang on there more. Bud Lilly, and Vern Gallup. These are the people who formed the foundation of the collection 16 years ago, both with donations in funding and resources and actual materials. So thank you very much to these people. There's one other person I'd like to recognize tonight if she's still here. I know she was at the dinner. I met Esther Lilly two years ago. Is Esther here? Unfortunate. You had to go feed the dogs. I still want to say a couple of words about Esther because I was quite surprised to learn some things about her tonight. Esther, it turns out, once held the equivalent position that our speaker tonight holds. In other words, Esther was the executive director of Trout Unlimited, and the only woman to ever hold that office. Beyond that, it gets even better. Esther also once served as the executive director of the Federation of Flyfishers. Again, the only woman to ever hold that office, as far as I know. So these are tremendous accomplishments. I wish she had been here this evening to receive your recognition, but still, I think it's great that we recognize her. So the generosity of our donors also established the annual Trout Lecture Series, and that's the reason that this event is free and open to the public. If any of you bought tickers from scalpers outside. We are dependent on donations to grow this collection and the lecture series, and we would love your help. If you're interested, please speak with me or with our development officer, Jane Howard. Jane, where are you? There she is. So we have two goals for this lecture series. One is to raise public awareness of the collection as an educational and research resource on the environment, economics, and topics that inform public policy. And the second is to connect the dots between the collection and academic and research areas at MSU. So tonight, we are honored to have Chris Wood, President and CEO of Trout Unlimited as our speaker. Here to introduce Chris Wood is Tom Reed, Northwest and Northern Rockies Director for Trout Unlimited. Please welcome Tom. Well, thanks a lot for coming as I was introduced. On Tom Reed, I work for Trout Unlimited and I live in the Valley West of here in a little town named Pony. If any of you know where that is. So 10 years ago, I was a guy without a job and a man named Chris Wood called me up and he said, Tom, I've been reading your stuff and I really like it and I'd like you to come to work for Trout Unlimited. And I'd like you to drive around Montana and Wyoming and talk to sportsmen, get people excited for standing up for public lands, take them fishing. You know, I'll buy your beer and I'll buy your gasoline. And I thought, well, that doesn't sound like a too bad of a deal. So I took him up on the job and turned out to be probably the best job I've ever had. And at one point, I can remember putting a throw in a saddle, two bird dogs, two fly rods, a shotgun, a sleeping bag and a tent in my truck. And I'm thinking, I am in pretty tall cotton here. And so let me just fast forward 10 years. And you know, I got promoted and Chris got promoted and Trout Unlimited has saved probably millions of acres of public land and thousands of miles of Trout River and Stream since that time. And, you know, I'm now the guy that gets to offer those plum jobs, those plum outdoor jobs to lucky, hardworking people. And Chris is the guy running the outfit. So, but one thing I realized in the past 10 years is you can have those plum jobs and you can have, you know, all those, you know, accruity runs of a good working place. Have the freedom to travel, work outside. But what really matters is to have a guy that has your back, you know, has a vision, but also has the ability to put that vision into action. I think that's the key thing, putting that vision into action. Because if you just have a vision without action, it's just a fantasy. And so what I wanted to talk about just real briefly was the fact that Trout Unlimited was all alone 10 years ago in motivating sportsmen to get involved in public lands issues. Whether it's, you know, protecting the roadless area, protecting the river, whatever it was. Trout Unlimited was pretty much all alone. Now, frankly, Chris was the visionary that put that together. That said, you know what? Sportsmen need to be involved in public lands issues. And it really filled a void that had been absent since back to the 30s, really, if you do the duck stamp and Jay Darling, who, you know, started, designed the very first duck stamp. So sportsmen were just absent in conservation. Well, it was Chris's vision that put that together. Today, I think sportsmen are the driving force behind many issues in the West. Whether you vote D or R, sportsmen's votes matter. And frankly, I think that's because of Chris Woods' leadership, Chris Woods' vision and action, and the way he put it all together and made it happen. And so I'd like to introduce my boss and my friend, Chris Wood. Thank you, Tom. That was overly generous on Tom's part. But what you don't know is that yesterday at around 8.30, I got a call from Tom's partner saying, hey, listen, I don't think Tom's gonna be able to make it tomorrow. I just dropped him off at the emergency room. He was lying in pain with an infected kidney. And the fact that you made the effort to be here today, Tom is heroic and I really appreciate that and appreciate you, thank you. Tom is one of the 19 staff that we have here at Trout Unlimited who work in the state of Montana, including six who work for the Montana State Council. And I'll tell you that one of the great pleasures in my life, beyond my family, is the fact that I get to go to work every day and work with a group of incredibly hardworking, incredibly passionate and incredibly fun and effective people like Tom. So for the, I know there's several TU staff here. If you would all just stand up, let everyone recognize you, but then please take a moment, folks, to spend some time with these guys. They're the ones who actually get the work down here in the state of Montana. I'd really like to thank MSU for inviting me here. Dean Arlish and his staff have been incredibly gracious and hospitable. I've had three of the largest meals I've eaten all year today. And I had another first. This is the only time in my life that I have left a river of rising fish with bugs everywhere to go to a library. And I'm really glad I did. It's a wonderful institution. And if you haven't had the time to go back in and see this special Trout Unlimited collection, I'd really encourage you to do that. So what a tremendous treat it is for me to be here at Trout University, surrounded by and having sampled one of the West's most iconic rivers today. Before I get started with my presentation, I wanna plug another event that MSU is hosting later this summer. It's the World Trout Congress, or as I like to call it, Troutapalooza. This is going to be the Woodstock of Trout. And MSU is hosting it on July 26th to July 31st. It will be the first time that people from around the world will come together and celebrate the science, the conservation, the literature, the art, and the history of trout around the world. So if you're interested in that and you wanna find out more information and look at the program, you can go to troutcongress.org. And I'd encourage you to do that. What a tremendous idea by Bud Lilly and the university to create such an inspiring and impressive library that so perfectly captures our dual passion for both fishing and for protecting and restoring the places that those fish are found. Intertwined in that collection that I had the pleasure of touring today is the history of Montana angling and of Trout Unlimited itself. And so what I thought I would do before I get started with my presentation is just share a little bit about my own background and entry into conservation to give you a little bit more of a perspective on me. So I did not grow up in the West. In fact, I grew up in New Jersey. And when you grow up in New Jersey, there's never a reason to leave. And I didn't until I went to college. I had never been outside of New Jersey. In fact, what I was going to say until I told my wife this was I had never been west of New Jersey until I went to Ireland. And Betsy informed me that Ireland's actually east of New Jersey. But it wasn't until I went to college and discovered fly fishing and fell in love with fly fishing that I had actually left the state until and then I returned back to New Jersey after graduation and put my liberal arts degree to good use by working in an ice cream factory and coaching high school football. And my buddy Mickey was similarly putting his liberal arts degree by bartending in Homer, Alaska. And Mick encouraged me to come out and visit him and see Alaska and maybe even do some salmon fishing. And I had heard about salmon but I didn't really know much about them. And so I went out to Alaska. I brought my fishing gear with me and Mick allowed me to use his old VW rabbit to drive from Homer down to the Kenai Peninsula to fish the anchor river. And I ended up getting to the anchor at about 5, 6 o'clock. I set up camp on the beach, parked the car next to the tent and made dinner and went to bed and woke up at about three in the morning with the tide rolling in my tent. In New Jersey we have 18 inch tides. In Alaska they have 10 foot tides. And the real problem was that the VW rabbit was parked in front of the tent. So needless to say I didn't get out early the next day. It took me a while to get the car pulled out and several cans of gum out to get it started again. But I did. And I began walking up the anchor river and as I rounded a bend I began to notice these giant dead and dying fish with these big hooked jaws and these big humpbacks and they were sloughing flesh. And I distinctly remember to this day taking the tip of my fly rod and poking one of these zombie fish and seeing it sort of much to my horror sort of like sidle out into the stream and just sort of float down river, half dead. And I thought, and this is the God's honest truth, I thought, you know, this is unbelievable. I finally get a chance to go west to Alaska and somewhere up river a train fell off the trestle and dumped a bunch of acid in the river and has killed all these fish. So what I didn't realize at the time was that these are, of course, King's salmon or Chinook's salmon. I was there to fish for silvers and they had already spawned out. And I walked a little further up river paying special care not to allow any of that toxic material in the river to get on my waders. I had a sweet pair of, remember these, the ranger waders, the uni-wader, the rubber ones? I had just bought a pair for this trip. And I saw this fool standing in the middle of the river fishing and I stopped to watch him for a while and as often happens when two people are alone and one person is staring at the other, this guy looks over at me and he says, what? And I looked at him and I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm fishing. I said, aren't you worried about whatever killed all these fish getting on your waders? And he looked at me and he said, dude, those are salmon. I mean, that's part of what happens and out of my head. I never stepped foot in the river that day. I turned back, I walked to the car. I got the waders off and I drove to the Anchorage Public Library and I got a book out on salmon that I read by Campfire that night. And I learned that these magnificent creatures can travel a thousand miles in places like the Yukon and they undergo this remarkable transformation as they migrate up the river. They drop their scales, they begin feeding off the fat that they've consumed in the ocean and they go through this extraordinary physical transformation that physically alters the shape of their bodies until they return to their natal stream, the place that they were born. And they spawn one time and then they die and then their bodies provide the nutrients that allow their progeny to thrive and eventually complete the cycle. And I thought, man, that is really cool. That's what I wanna do. I wanna work with salmon. So I, not knowing that you didn't need to write a letter of resignation from an ice cream factory, I wrote a letter of resignation from the ice cream factory that night and I went back home to New Jersey and after the vacation was over and I was in my parents kitchen on Monday morning and my father came downstairs and my father said what every father should say to a child when they are in their home after graduating on a Monday morning. What the hell are you doing here? And I said dad, I quit my job and he looked at me and he said, well, what are you gonna do? And that morning, this is the truth. That morning in the New York Times there was a picture of a guy kneeling next to a lake and his name was Keith Edwards and the caption under the photograph said it saddens me that I work at a lake that's named for a fish that doesn't return anymore. And that was the year that one sockeye salmon made that 800, 768 mile journey gaining 7,800 feet in elevation to get back to Redfish Lake only to find that no other sockeye had returned to spawn with. It was the sockeye that the wags called Lonesome Larry. And I pointed to that photograph and I said to my dad, I'm gonna save the salmon dad and my father who's a very colorful man from Newark, New Jersey responded but I'm not gonna actually tell you what he said. So anyway, I ended up following through on that. We finished out the football season but then I went to Idaho, I volunteered for the Forest Service and then got on as a seasonal employee and we were doing these paired watershed studies. So we would look at a watershed that had been heavily damaged, heavily rotted, heavily mined in the past and one that was relatively pristine and we were just comparing how those systems worked and didn't work and how quickly sediment was flushing out of the impaired watershed and we were working on the South Fork of the Salmon River Drainage. This is a drainage that historically 50% of all of the steelhead in the Columbia River Basin used to spawn in the Salmon River Drainage. And we were at this place called Poverty Flats and it was a big wide expanse, probably as wide as this auditorium and we were there counting reds. Unfortunately, there were no reds there but we were gathering up our equipment and getting ready to go back to our camp at the end of the day and out in the middle of this big flat, this big Chinook salmon just leapt out of the water, straight up in the air, body completely out and fell back to the water. We all sort of did that double take and looked at one another like, did you see that? And that salmon did that same thing five times in a row and every time that fish jumped, all of us in unison said, yeah, we all yelled, yeah. And it was as though its body were an exclamation point to the word live. So my story is not unique. I am fairly confident that those of you who are here are here for a reason and you all probably have a very similar story that helps explain why you are so passionate about these fish and about protecting the places that these fish live. And so it's in the spirit of that story that I wanna confess and I think Ben Pierce may have already ratted me out on this, but saving the world one trout at a time was a bit of a placeholder title for me. What I really wanted to call this talk was what New Jersey can teach Montana? But my colleagues in the office suggested that wouldn't go over well. So I think a more accurate title for this talk would be how Montana is saving the rest of the country one trout at a time. Three issues demonstrate Montana's status as a national leader in conservation and a pathfinder for helping us, the rest of us to take better care of the lands and waters that sustain us all. First is the legacy of wild fish management in the state. Second, the practice of something that we call collaborative stewardship. And third is the transformation in Montana's water law and policy. And I wanna speak about each of those three areas briefly. The idea that quality habitat is key to great fisheries was a founding principle of trout unlimited. So TU was founded 55 years ago on the banks of the Assable River in Michigan by a group of anglers who had grown frustrated by the fact that the state was masking habitat degradation by pumping out ever more cookie cutter hatchery trout into the rivers and streams of Montana, in this case, the Assable. And it was a very typical response to natural resource degradation. We typically try to apply a technological fix to a natural resource problem. And when I was thinking about my remarks this morning, it reminded me of an essay by Wendell Berry called Solving for Pattern in a wonderful book called The Gift of Good Land. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it to you. I just wanna share this quote with you. Berry writes, another kind of solution is that which immediately worsens the problem it is intended to solve, causing a hellish symbiosis in which problem and solution reciprocally enlarge one another in a sequence that so far as its own logic is concerned is limitless. As when the problem of soil compaction is solved by a bigger tractor, which further compacts the soil, which makes a need for a still bigger tractor and so on and on. There is an identical symbiosis between coal-fired power plants and air conditioners. It is characteristic of such solutions that no one prospers by them, but the suppliers of fuel and equipment. These two kinds of solutions are obviously bad. They always serve one good at the expense of another or of several others. The whole problem must be solved, not just some handily identifiable and simplifiable aspect of it. Bigger tractors do not solve the problem of soil compaction any more than air conditioners solve the problem of air pollution. So clearly Berry was talking about agricultural practices, but it's very similar in fisheries management. The problem historically had been degraded habitat and declining fisheries. And so the solution, the technological fix, rather than go back and repair the habitat, fix the underlying problem, we were masking it with hatchery fish to keep anglers happy, a very likely source of complaint if the habitat wasn't repaired. Well happily, Trout Unlimited was founded. And even more happily, five years later, four or five years later, a few conservation legends, one of whom is at least one of whom is in the audience today. Bud Lilly, Dan Bailey and Bud Morris created the first Montana chapter of Trout Unlimited. The state of Montana was actually the first state to apply our motto, take care of the fish and the fishing will take care of itself as the basis for its entire approach to fisheries management. And I'm not suggesting that they did that because of us. But what's remarkable, and I'm gonna tell that story in just a moment, is that no, this was done more than 40 years ago and no other state in the country has even partially followed the lead of Montana. And it's a remarkable and signature achievement that you should all be extraordinarily proud of. So, going way back to 1966, a man by the name of Dick Vincent who was a young Montana State University fisheries biologist, was hired by the state to develop techniques to inventory large rivers. And in the context of doing his research, Dick noticed that where stocking was heavy, wild trout populations were depressed. And Dick's boss, Ron Marko and the state proposed a new approach to emphasizing wild fish management on the Madison and elsewhere. This was an incredibly controversial proposal. Business owners weren't happy, trout anglers weren't happy, some local thugs even tampered with the trailer that Dick was using and it nearly led to a fatality when a woman driving a car, I was almost killed when the boat came free from the trailer. But to a few anglers and to this new organization, Trout Unlimited in Montana, they formed a core of advocates that helped convince the public and the Fish and Game Commission that stocking on top of wild trout populations was neither economical nor was it ecological. And that set in motion a broad policy change in the state and a moving away from emphasizing hatchery production to focusing on habitat quality. And today, Montana is the international destination, hell we're having trout up a loser here. It's the international destination for trout fishing and there is a reason for that and you should be very proud of that reason. But wild fish still need people who will care for them and that's where Collaborative Stewardship comes in. So Collaborative Stewardship is simply defined as it's a very simple idea that that conservation which is most local and involves the most people is most durable. If you give wild and native fish half a chance, they will come back. Montana has demonstrated that and that's why the Montana story of restoration is so hopeful for the rest of the country. And that's important to keep in mind because one of the great dangers for those of us who work in the business of conservation is creeping cynicism or negativity. You can, in a very real sense, you can make an argument that what we do on a daily basis is oversee loss, right? Loss of water quality, loss of forest health, loss of air quality, loss of endangered species. It even affects some of our great leaders in the conservation movement. People like Aldo Leopold, in a wonderful essay that he wrote in 1948 called An Ecological Conscience, Leopold wrote that one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is quite invisible to the layman and an ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and doesn't wanna be told otherwise. But the fact is that conservation is the most forward-looking affirmative idea that the United States ever gave the rest of the world. And collaborative stewardship is the on-the-ground manifestation of that sense of optimism and hope. And it yields results on the ground. So consider the case of the Blackfoot. One of my, since I was at the library today, I will say that one of my favorite opening and closing lines in all of fishing literature is from Norman Maclean's wonderful book or River Runs Through It. And of course those lines are, in my family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing and the closing line is I am haunted by waters. Well, in the span of time that Norman Maclean wrote that book about the Blackfoot and Brad Pitt taught us how to shadow cast and the movie was made, the Blackfoot had undergone a tremendous amount of degradation from historic mining practices, historic logging and historic roating practices. It got to the point that native and wild fish were deeply, deeply imperiled. And what happened is the local community got together and created something called the Blackfoot Challenge. It was comprised of county commissioners, state and federal agencies, ranchers and the local chapter there, the TU Big Blackfoot chapter. And they spent years working to help repair the Blackfoot system. Years and years working on riparian restoration and upland restoration, road obliteration and the results have been nothing short of remarkable. In areas where they went and helped and they recreated the riparian canopy, the stream side canopy to help shade the stream and provide cover for fish, we've seen temperature decreases of 15 degrees and trout need cold, clean water. It's gotten to the point now where West Slope cutthroat, the native trout there are actually supplanting, they're pushing out the wild species, which is a good thing. And one of the most remarkable statistics from that project is that bull trout reds, bull trout are a threatened species, have increased, and reds are the nests that trout make, I probably don't need to say that for you all. But bull trout reds have increased by 800% from pre-restoration levels in some areas. It's a remarkable success story. Collaborative stewardship allows you to tackle the big hairy thorny red light issues that have historically lacked resolution. And the TU staff have heard me say many times that I often look at TU as the patron saint of forgotten environmental causes. And one of the signature of those are abandoned mines in the Western United States. The West has a tremendous legacy of mining. We settled the West largely on the back of mining. But what we forgot to do was to create a mechanism to clean up in the aftermath of that mining. Historic mining practices were extremely harmful to the environment. And it wasn't, no one was acting out of malice, it was just what we knew at the time. We didn't know any better. But we live with that legacy today and there is no one there to clean those mines up. And the effect is fairly profound. The EPA has estimated that 40% of all headwater streams in the West are negatively affected by abandoned mines. And these headwater streams are exactly where all of our native fish are holed up right now. It's imperative that we get those suckers cleaned up. And about 15 years ago, TU began a very ambitious project to clean up abandoned mines around the West. And we've been helped by a ton of partners in the state and federal agencies, mining companies in some cases, and even curious partners, seemingly curious partners such as Tiffany and Company, who have invested several million dollars in helping to clean up abandoned mines around the West. But one of my favorite stories is on a little tributary of Nine Mile Creek called Twin Creek, which is a tributary of the Clark Fork. And this is an area that 80 to 100 years ago, they basically had completely separated this creek from the main stem. They had just diverted it for purposes of mining and it had never been put back. And so TU went up there with Missoula County and the Lolo National Forest and the state, and we recontort about five, we found out where the historic channel was, which wasn't easy to do after 80 years, but we found out where the historic channel was, we recontorted, put the sinuosity back into it, put the structure back in and the habitat that trout need to survive. And then they lifted, I assume it was some sort of cofferdam, but they opened the gate to let the water back into the historic channel. And you know what happened? The moment they opened the gate, trout started moving up the channel. They hadn't been there in 80 years and the moment they opened the gate, trout began moving up the channel. If you give these fish half a chance, they will respond. A final thing that collaborative stewardship teaches us is that conservation isn't really about land and it's not really about water and this is a daring thing for me to say in this room. It's not really even about fish. It's about people and it's about the relationship that people have with one another. And historically, conservation or environmental protection has been looked at as the zero sum game of winners and losers. And consequently, we'll go through periods where we feel like we're winning and then we'll go through other periods where we're losing. And collaborative stewardship is a bulwark against that kind of thinking. And a great example of that here in Montana was an initiative that my friend, Senator John Tester started called the Forest Jobs Recreation Act. In there, Montana TU and Tom Reed actually of TU National working with other partner organizations began this dialogue with the timber industry in the state. And they reached an agreement where we were gonna be able to protect for the first time I think since before the Reagan administration. About 600,000 acres of protected lands including a lot of wilderness. Really important, the most important areas for fish. And the timber industry was gonna be able to work in a predictable and stable way on a series of landscapes that needed hazardous fuels treatments. It was a total win-win solution. And unfortunately, the politics in Washington DC wouldn't allow that bill to go anywhere and it still hasn't shamefully to my way of thinking gone anywhere. But even if that bill doesn't ever move and I do hope it will. The fact is that those relationships that we developed with those folks from the forest products industry they will last a long time. Those are friendships now that are built upon hours of meeting across tables and probably more than a few beers and probably more than a few meals at one another's homes. And those relationships will last and they will work for us in the future even if we don't see the Forest Jobs Recreation Act made into legislation. So I wanna talk a little bit about water policy now. It is a truism that wild and native fish need water every second of every day. And building flexibility into historically rigid state water laws is a great way to help fish contend with what will likely be a long period of prolonged drought in the West. Since the mid 1800s like much of the West Montana's water law was governed by something called the prior appropriations doctrine. And essentially what this meant was if you were a you held a senior water right and you didn't put that right to productive use on the landscape meaning for agricultural purposes you would lose that water which is often the most valuable part of your property you would lose that water to the next downstream junior water right holder. It was a profound disincentive for leaving water in stream for fish. Then in 1975 the state legislature passed the Montana Water Use Act and it basically authorized the Fish and Game Department to petition for in-stream flow rights. Around that same time Trout Unlimited chapters emerged in Bozeman and Butte and became very active in advocating for in-stream flow and doing things like habitat protection and restoration. And then in 1998 or around there we had the good fortune to hire Stan Bradshaw and Laura Zeemer two immense legal talents who created a broad space for fisheries in Montana's water law and Pat Biorth continues that excellent work with them today. They helped to make permanent changes to the Montana Water Code such that Montana today has the most fish friendly water laws in the entire Western United States. There is an in-stream flow leasing program that has been made permanent and that we have used many, many times which I will describe in just a moment. But think about that for a moment. Montana went in a period of 20 or 30 years from having some of the most rigid inflexible water law in the West to today having the most progressive water law progressive if you're a trout anyway in the entire Western United States. And today we have more than two dozen water leases where we're basically keeping in-stream flow we're restoring stream flow during dry summer months and fall months including one on the Sun River and this is a partnership I just wanna talk briefly about but it's a partnership between Trout Unlimited, the Bureau of Reclamation, Coca-Cola which always kind of catches my eye and the Fort Shaw Irrigation District and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and early monitoring is suggesting that fish populations have tripled as a result of that water being left in stream. And I'm happy to tell you all that the Sun River Partnership was recently nominated for the North American River Prize one of only four rivers in the country that were nominated but it's an incredibly prestigious award given by the International River Foundation. In Montana, we are demonstrating the importance of connecting surface and groundwater relative to development. We are showing other Western states how putting, creating flexibility in water law and allowing landowners to basically exercise their property rights more fully is good for the landowners and good for fish too. And it's working and I'll tell you how I know it's working. A few years ago, so we're trying to pass very similar statutory changes in Utah and Colorado all around the West. We have programs very similar to the one we have here in Montana and it's been a harder slog. And so a few years ago, we came up with the bright idea of bringing some county commissioners and some ranchers up to Montana to meet with their counterparts from Utah. That didn't come out right. We brought folks from Utah to Montana to meet with their counterparts. And they had a series of conversations. They did some field tours. They heard the ranchers and the irrigators and the county commissioners here in Montana explain that, no, this is a good deal. Yeah, yeah, we know those freaks of trout unlimited are concerned about the fish, but this is good for us too. You should look into this. And you know what happened? They went back down to Utah and they passed an in-stream flow bill that allows water leasing for native trout, for the protection of native trout. It's working. What you're doing here in Montana is working in it, setting an example around the rest of the West. So I just have a few more thoughts I wanna share with you. A few years ago, I came across a little book that was written by a Jewish rabbi and an Episcopalian minister. It was called Fly Fishing the Sacred Art. And in that book, the Reverend Mike Addis talks about the dangers of falling into a rut. And I wanna share a little bit of this with you. He says, we can stay in our comfort zone, choosing flies that we know and ways of thinking that we are comfortable with. But when we have the courage to open ourselves up to newness, we are often rewarded with days when time is suspended and life is rediscovered. Days when time is suspended and life is rediscovered is probably the single best description of why I love to fish. But it is so much more than that too. It also describes that pleasant ache in the legs in the lower back after you've spent a day planting willows, helping to shade a trout stream and create habitat for fish. It explains that catching a throat that you get from teaching a kid about fishing and conservation or working with a wounded veteran and helping him to heal through time on the water. And it soothes the sore feet from rarely worn loafers when you're walking around on Capitol Hill or through your state legislature. Montana has seen the pendulum swing from a period of prolonged environmental degradation to one of recovery and restoration. And today we face even greater, even more existential challenges than before with climate change and prolonged drought and more intense and frequent wildfires and fisheries closures because of low flows and high temperatures. In the face of all of that, this passion that we share for trout and salmon and for trout fishing, it can seem small. It can seem like a little bit of an idle thing, a luxury that we really can't afford. So I wanna ask you to strike that out of your head because it is not. Go back to your own poverty flats moment, that place in Idaho where those salmon leapt out of the river five times in succession. Go back to your own conservation creation story, if you will. And remember that first time that you connected in a visceral light in the finger, finger in the light socket way with trout and salmon. St. Augustine once asked for what is faith unless it is to believe what you do not see. Now the fact is I have no earthly idea how that lone Chinook salmon made it back 800 miles, climbing 8,000 feet in elevation to get to poverty flats. But I know that in so doing she changed my life. And I do know that the more we advocate for the protection of wild places, the more we affirm our faith. And I do know that the more we keep our rivers wet and help to reconnect them, the more we gift to generations that we know and are confident will follow us. And I do know that the more we restore the health of our watersheds, the more we suspend time and rediscover life. So thank you all very much for letting me be here and I wanna make an agreement with you all right now. I will trade willingly a day of carp fishing on the Potomac for a day on the water with any of you here in Montana. Thank you. So I think we have some time for some questions. You know, I would tell you that, but I don't understand why I had to ride in the trunk with a blindfold on, but it was a bad deal, you know, and those guys worked for me. I would tell you that and then I'd get in trouble with my guys and they wouldn't take me back, you know, I'm sorry. Yes. Yeah, by Alvers Anderson, Hoverson. Well, you know, stocking's not gonna go away. I think our hope is that we'll see more of a willingness to take creative approaches like Montana did that are based on science and logic, right? I mean, the thing that's so unbelievable about that whole Montana story, and this is a story that needs to be celebrated. We need to, you know, I know the library is doing some, the Trout and Salmon had libraries doing some wonderful work doing oral histories and I made a pitch today that they do oral histories with those players from 30, 40 years ago who made this thing happen. The thing that's most remarkable about that policy is that adjacent states haven't taken notice and done the same thing. I mean, it's not as though Montana's trout fishing suffered from that, but to get more to your point and less to my platform, hatcheries will always persist and I think what we're becoming more and more aware of though is that there are negative interactions that those fish can have with native stocks and when that happens, when you have stocks that are in a precarious situation where they can interbreed with and lose their genetic fitness or get out-competed for habitat, that we need to take quick and decisive action and we've done that in places. It's not something we do without a lot of thought because it can be incredibly controversial but if we're gonna retain this incredibly rich legacy of native fish that we have in the West, there will be times when we have to get rid of the wild fish that I was catching today on the XYZ River but the XYZ River is a classic example of a river that no one's ever gonna propose going in there and rote-noning it and using Piscocides to put back a native assemblage of species. So, you know, I never fished it. It's funny you ask that, I never fished it. I have this distinct memory of hooking what I think was a Dolly Varden in the tail and running down river and falling but I actually believe that was a separate trip. I believe that I stayed one night and I read this book on salmon and wrote this stupid letter of resignation. It was funny, I went in and I gave the boss two weeks and I said, hey, you know, in fact, I think I gave him a month and he said, you know, you can just leave. I did give back there later on to fish it was awesome. You know, I fished it right from, it was right at the mouth, the fish were really, really bright and fresh. It was great. And at that point, I knew not to be scared of the zombie fish that were in the shallows. So, there's probably two really big ones. I mean, I could, there's three I'll touch really quickly. No, four. No, I'm kidding, I'll stop at three. So, a really big deal that you all should care about and you need to be talking to your members of Congress about. In 1991, in 1996, there were two very politically charged Supreme Court decisions that essentially removed protections for, remove the protections of the Clean Water Act for all intermittent and ephemeral streams. So, these are streams that flow seasonally. They're not wet all the entire year, but they're wet seasonally. And they're incredibly important for spawning and rearing habitat for trout. For the first 30 years of the Clean Water Act, those are protected under the Clean Water Act. So, if we've got a property in West Virginia that's on a, it's got an intermittent stream on it. If I wanted to build a bridge over that stream, I'd have to get a permit to do that. And that's a good thing, because that intermittent stream flows down to a larger stream, the Little Cacapin, which flows into the Potomac River, which is the drinking water supply for Washington, D.C. And what the Supreme Court said was that the then Bush administration had to demonstrate a significant nexus between these seasonal streams, these headwater streams, and navigable waterways, navigable water bodies. And the Bush administration essentially punted on it. And for the first four years of the Obama administration, they didn't do very much either. But they then began a rule making, which is what the government does to answer Supreme Court decisions like this. That makes clear what the nexus is. I mean, we all know what the nexus is between intermittent streams and perennial streams. It's intuitive, it's obvious. I remember when Laura Zeemer called all excited about a Supreme Court case we won, where she had got the Supreme Court to agree that there's a connection between surface water and groundwater. And I was like, news flash, right? It was a huge win, Laura. I'm just being facetious. But they're now on the verge of releasing this rule making. And Congress is, in fact, the relevant committee in the House just passed a bill two days ago that would preclude the Obama administration from moving forward with the rule making. And that will eventually be voted on by the Full House and probably pass. I think we'll do better in the Senate, but we may need to rely on a veto. But it's really important that members of Congress, here from people who fish, that we're not gonna take this lightly. This isn't a, you don't get a pass on this vote. So if you haven't yet, you can go to our website, you can, there's action alerts that you can do it the easy way, or you can call them. I mean, one of the great things about states like Montana is, you probably all have a personal relationship with Steve Danes and John Tester. Well, use it. So that's one, and then there's another effort by Congress to strip the EPA's ability to do what we want them to do in Bristol Bay. And as you all probably know, that's been a big tenure fight. We're trying to basically protect what is the world's most prolific salmon fishery. Half of all of the world's wild sockeye salmon come from one river in Alaska. Get that. Half of them come from the Quee Jack. And then the Nishagak, the other system that they wanna build this mine in, this would represent the largest open pit mine in the world. Every year is one of the largest producers of Chinook in the world. And EPA has been proceeding down this path of doing what we think is the right thing in limiting industrial scale mining in the area. And there's several bills before Congress that would prevent them from exercising. It would take away that authority. And very obviously we wanna stop them from doing that too. And again, that's another one that I'd encourage you to contact your members of Congress on. I wanted to mention a third simply because those sound very defensive and reactive. We are affirmatively pushing a bill that would make the management of renewable resources on public land. It would treat them as we treat leasable minerals. So what I mean by that is right now, if you wanted to build a wind farm or a solar farm on public lands, you would have to get a special use permit or a rights of way, they call it. These are the same permits and other mechanisms that you would use to cut a bunch of Christmas trees. So it's because solar and wind isn't a priority on public lands. And what we want them to do is treat solar and wind as they treat coal and gas and oil and create a revenue stream from the production of the energy that would be plowed back into a fund, a restoration fund that we could use for mitigation and restoration. And essentially what we're trying to do is get ahead of the curve on renewable energy development. It's not a big priority right now on public lands. It probably will be in 20 or 30 years. And in the same way that Congress neglected to consider the aftermath of expanding in the West and throwing a lot of mines all over the place, we want to basically guard against that this time with solar energy. And that's a very bipartisan bill. Both of your senators have been very good on that. And I'm optimistic that that's a bill that we can actually get through. The question was if I could go back to the beginning of my career, would I go into environmental policy or something that wasn't policy? So I actually hired as a fisheries biologist by the Bureau of Land Management for the best six days of my life until the hiring department contacted Jack Williams who actually works for us now and who hired me and said, do you realize that this kid hasn't taken a science course since sophomore year in high school? So when I graduated, I actually tried, I did remedial work at George Washington University to try to catch up on the fact that I hadn't taken any science or math. And I wanted to get a Fish and Wildlife Master's Degree at Virginia Tech. And I occasionally regret that I decided not to do that. But not that much. You know, he knows math is hard, science is tough. I'm glad there are people who do it. We've got 14 PhD scientists on staff. Those guys are incredible. But some of us are, we're the fast talking white guys. And we need the hard scientists but we're not all cut out to be that. So I'm pretty happy with the path I chose. But if you're following that path, I commend you. I'm sorry, I didn't hear the last part. Increased angling. Absolutely. In certain places hatcheries are a great management tool to accommodate increases in use. In particular in these systems that have been historically fishless or profoundly altered and are unlikely to support native fish. It's an absolutely appropriate use. I think what we'd like to see is in areas where you have high quality, cold flowing water, really good habitat, good natural reproduction of wild and native fish. Listen to what, just follow the Montana experiment. It's not like this is new, right? I mean, they started this thing before I was born and I'm old. You know, I mean, this is a lesson that other fishery management agencies should take to heart but clearly there's a lot of inertia and it wasn't easy to get done here in the state of Montana either. Yeah, that's a, I mean, it's a great question. So there's a lot more money in the private sector than there is in conservation. And you know, it's kind of like that Willie Sutton thing. Willie, why'd you rob those banks? That's where the money was. And there's a little bit of that here. It's a little different with some of these companies. You know, I don't know Coca-Cola that well but clearly they have an interest in clean water. And Tiffany has probably one of the most well respected brands in the world and they had seen what had happened with some things like conflict diamonds if you remember those fights. And you know, I think they wanted to protect their brand a little bit but they also wanted to give something back. And so the way we describe our own sort of view of working with private companies is that we are equal opportunity conservationists to you. And if you come to the table acting in good faith and there's no quid pro quo, there's no here's a bunch of hush money so you won't oppose us on this mine over here. But you wanna support a project that will help to improve wild and native fish. We're gonna take your money. And this is an area that, you know, it's begun to grow for us and I hope it will continue to grow. We have a, it's a little harder for us than some because we're one of the few organizations that does both advocacy on one side. You know, we go to the state legislature, we go to Capitol Hill, we litigate sometimes and that makes people nervous and uncomfortable in the corporate world. But then we also have this on the ground restoration stuff that a lot of the private sector folks really like. And so sometimes we have to, you know, walk that line. But I think our bottom line is so long as it's eyes wide open and there's no quid pro quo deals, we're willing to work with anyone in the private sector. I mean almost anyone. Catch and release, just said them. Catch and release is a huge part of who we are and who we have been as an organization for many, many years. And it's incredibly important. And in fact, we're sort of taking catch and release now to a new level with this whole keep them wet campaign. In fact, the picture outside there and the auditorium used to be the picture that I had in Trout Magazine until our editor and our senior scientist said, dude, that fish isn't dripping and he's well above the water line. You'll notice in the last Trout Magazine, I think we had one of our columns that had a fish slightly out of water. And there's still some advertisements. We're working on the ad guys. But catch and release is hugely important and I think what we've learned over time is the quicker we get them back in the water, the healthier they are. And the fewer the grip and grins, the better the fish are gonna be. But catch and release is as revolutionary in many ways as Montana's wild fish policy has been. And I didn't mention pebble mine either. It doesn't mean I don't care about it. But thank you for the question. I mean, so our mission is to protect and conserve wild and native trout and the habitats they depend on. And so it will always remain of paramount importance. I think we're becoming a little bit more aware though of the science and in places where we see these declining native populations. So consider for example, heel a trout in the Southwest. Until three years ago, there were 13 little relic sub basins, tiny little 10 CFS systems that had all of the heel a trout that remained in the world in them. And nine of them, nine of those habitats were extirpated by fires in the last two years. And so the idea that we would advocate stocking rainbows or other fish that could intergress with them or interbreed or out compete them is one that we're not going there. So basically what we try to do is almost just do a basic evaluation in a place where wild fish and native fish can coexist. Great. In places where you've got declining populations of really embattled native fish and we can take a specific action to help recover those fish, even at the expense of wild fish, we're gonna take a hard look at that. But we're not looking to get rid of wild fish everywhere. They're still vital to the mission of Trout Unlimited and that's never gonna change. We're just trying to be a little bit more sophisticated and a little bit more science-based on when we intervene to try to keep these native fish intact. You know, I think the states would do a much better job of managing the public domain lands. I'm totally kidding. I'm totally kidding. That's on film, isn't it? That may come back to haunt me. You know, if states wanted to, if there were an argument that states should manage public lands, all of the western states would have to get in line behind Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey and all of the other states that gave up their claims on the public domain lands as a condition of entry into the union. So this whole notion that the states wanna take back the lands is ludicrous. I mean, it would come back to us back east, first of all. Could you imagine a bunch of guys from New Jersey out here managing the public lands? I think public lands are the richest asset that this country has. It is the greatest birthright that we enjoy as a nation. And every 20 years, there's a sagebrush rebellion or a county supremacy movement or another effort to take these lands out of public hands. And we have to vigorously defend against that and guard against it. It is the richest, most important, most lasting legacy that we can give future generations. It is the one distinguishing feature between us in places like Europe. No other country can match the public lands that we all own as a condition of being citizens. It's such a crazy, cool thing. And when you look at where all the fish and wildlife remain anymore, they're on the public lands. And there's no reason for that. And so it's a major priority for TU to beat back those boneheaded ideas to transfer public lands to the states or to sell them. And again, if say, for example, you had a member of Congress that voted on a bill that countenanced the idea that you could sell public lands to the states or otherwise dispose of them, I'm not joking. You need to call him and set him straight because it's an affront. It's an affront to who we are as citizens. So we feel pretty strongly about that. I think it's getting late. And I think there may be a reception after this. And I don't wanna keep a bunch of people from Montana from the bar. So unless there's any more questions, thank you all very much for being here and please talk to the rest of the TU staff as well.