The news has been making the rounds for a while, but it's worth repeating. Yesterday, a federal magistrate ruled that a Forest Service/BLM plan to allow exploratory drilling for natural gas in the Mason Tract along the South Branch of the Au Sable river did not include adequate provisions for protecting the environmental and recreational values of the area. He reccomended that the drilling not proceed, and that the agencies revise the drilling plan. The ruling still needs to be approved by a federal district court judge, but it's rare for these reccomendations to be overruled, and the judge who will consider the reccomendation has previously issued an injunction against drilling in the Mason Tract.
The Detroit News has a fuller account of the ruling, though I think the best version is at Rusty Gates's fishing report for this week.
Good news obviously, but there is an encouraging angle to this story beyond just the preservation of the Tract. In Rusty's story, he notes that among those celebrating the ruling was Marvin, my project partner with Sierra Club....Yes, huge news, but even greater news... he had fooled three fish rising... to eat his dry fly. He received his first fly rod as a gift from me last September. He's got the bug now.... a fisherman for life.
I watched Marvin receive that rod at last fall's Au Sable Cleanup. It's nice to see it getting use, but better to see hook-n-bullet conservation groups cooperating with what I call, for lack of a better term, the backpacker ones, those whose members are generally oriented toward lower-impact experiences in nature. I realize those divisions are not absolute--there is overlap between their membership lists--but too often these camps are divided by sensibilities when they should be natural allies. Fault for this division goes both ways, I think, but maybe this episode will open a few minds on each side, and foster more collaboration down the road.
There certainly are other examples of such collaboration: the Kennecot Eagle mine project, for instance, which I've written about. We need more. In the fight for wild and healthy lands, we need all the hands we can get, whether those hands cook only vegetables, or carry guns.
Tags:Tags: Conservation; Fly Fishing
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