Sometimes you read something that - to be perfectly honest - leaves you feeling hopeless and doomed. Something so depressing it makes you want to throw up your hands, shout "to hell with it all!" and head straight to the nearest bar. Something like this, from the LA Times.
 
The latest figures from Nielsen have children's TV usage at an eight-year high. Children's health advocates warn of adverse effects.
 
More than an entire day -- that's how long children sit in front of the television in an average week, according to new findings released Monday by Nielsen.

"They're using all the technology available in their households," said Patricia McDonough, Nielsen's senior vice president of insights, analysis and policy. "They're using the DVD, they're on the Internet. They're not giving up any media -- they're just picking up more."
 
While this has obvious implications for the future of hunting and fishing, it also goes beyond that and straight to the core of our fundamental appreciation for nature itself. No one is born a hunter, an angler or a hiker. We all start life as a blank slate and what gets etched on that slate in our early childhood shapes who we will eventually become. You, I and everyone else who enjoys the outdoors, be they a hunter, an angler, a hiker, a birder or whatever, didn't get that way by mainlining 32 hours of high-definition methadone: we got that way by crawling around in the dirt catching bugs, climbing trees, building forts in the back yard and stomping around in creeks. You know, being kids. That childlike wonder, the curiosity, imagination and self-guided exploration of your surroundings. That's the base from which everything else rises. Lose that - as we most assuredly are - and you've lost an entire generation of children. And for what? So they can grow up to be the same mindless, self-absorbed zombie consumers their parents obviously are?
 
Seriously, anyone who lets their small child watch 32 hours of television, video games and Internet a week should be smacked in the head with a rolled-up copy of Richard Louv's "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder."
 
American parents, WTF are you thinking? Put down your go*****ed cellphone, get your fat a***s off Facebook, turn off the TV and pay some attention to your kids. Take them outside, let them get dirty. Let them think and explore for themselves without the help of corporate-sponsored storyline.
 
Good gawd, didn't this used to be called common sense?

Including:

West Yellowstone, Mont.
Missoula, Mont.
Roscoe, N.Y.
State College, Pa.
Grayling, Mich.
Calgary, Alberta
Glenwood Springs, Colo.
Mountain Home, Ark.
Redding, Calif.
Asheville, N.C.

Here's the full story.

In my first couple years with F&S, I edited a handful of articles by Bill Tapply. I didn’t know him as the literary force he was. The English professor and author of more than 40 books, including two dozen mystery novels, never let on to any of that in our few phone conversations. His writing was clean and tight—not much to discuss there. So we talked grouse hunting and flyfishing. I didn’t think anything of it. Having no clue of his stature, I saw no reason why he shouldn’t speak to a perfectly green editor as a friend and an equal. And what I’ll remember best about Bill is that despite his stature, he saw no reason not to, either.

Bill Tapply, long-time contributing editor with F&S, died Tuesday evening of luekemia. Those of us who worked with him will remember Bill as a pro’s pro, and I suspect anyone who knew him even a little will remember a kind and generous soul. We offer our condolences to the Tapply family.

For more, read the obituary posted by our friends at midcurrent.com. --DH

From the Billings Gazette:

Rainbow trout are rebounding in the Madison River, the world-class fishing stream where Montana's first known outbreak of whirling disease occurred about 15 years ago, devastating the rainbow fishery.

In the 1990s, whirling disease slashed the rainbow trout population by 90 percent compared to levels measured in the 1960s and '70s.

Now, after a succession of rebound years, rainbows under 10 inches have "pretty well recovered to pre-whirling levels" and the population of those larger is about 60 percent of what it was before the disease, said Dick Vincent, whirling-disease coordinator for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks until his retirement last winter.