By Bob Marshall

There are many reasons why The New York Times is arguably considered the finest news organization in the nation, but few of those were on display last week when the paper’s editorial board decided to weigh in on The Sportsmen’s Act of 2012, an important conservation initiative that would help fish, wildlife, and all Americans.

First the board opposed the bill for a list of erroneous reasons--then, when informed of the mistakes, it botched the corrections, leaving serious misconceptions floating about the bill as well as the sportsmen’s conservation movement.

I realize that surveys show most sportsmen say they’re politically conservative, and that they believe most liberals don’t understand them. I also know most conservatives love to hate the NYT the way most progressives and liberals love to despise The Wall Street Journal. But the story that unfolds here should be seen not just as an opportunity to confirm your worst suspicions, but also as a lesson on why sportsmen who care about the future of fish and wildlife habitat--and human health--should broaden their reading (and writing) horizons.

By Hal Herring

The summer I got my first driver’s license, I spent a lot of days fishing alone on Alabama’s Paint Rock River. I’d leave our house before dawn and drive east and north up the Paint Rock Valley, park at one of the old fords and wade-fish upstream, catching rock bass, shellcrackers, largemouths, once in a while a smallmouth, which was as exotic to me as a sailfish. Midmorning, heat rising fast, cicadas yelling in every tree, I’d go downstream to where the river was bigger, tie up a bottom rig and cast nightcrawlers or catalpa worms (we called them “tobby worms”) for channel cats, river drum, redhorse, whatever came by.

That river was pure adventure to me, clean, born of subterranean streams and highland creeks that lay unseen in the emerald jungle of hardwoods that covered the low mountains on either side of the valley. It took me awhile to work my way north to the Paint Rock’s headwaters in the Walls of Jericho, that dramatic and isolated canyon system, with its caves and ether-clear water and perfect plunge pools for swimming, the bizarrely-colored darters and sculpins flitting among the smooth rocks of the creek bed.

Not long after I began to explore the Walls, the road in was closed. Mud bogging and hillclimbing in the big 4WD pickups with the then-popular Co-Op Grip-Spur tires (yes, my friends and I were a part of that problem) had made the old trail impassable and littered with beer cans and even a busted truck or two. For the next 15 years or so, the Walls were inaccessible, and the mountain land that surrounded the canyons changed hands among paper and timber companies more than once. It was one of the natural wonders of the South, the forested headwaters of one of the most biologically rich rivers left on the planet, and very few people even knew it existed.