By Hal Herring

There is nothing like a good anti-federal-government advertising campaign to rally support for, well, almost anything. In this time of Internal Revenue Service scandals and accusations that the Environmental Protection Agency has charged so-called “conservative” groups for Freedom of Information Act requests that they handed over to environmental groups for free, the time was ripe for a smart advertising professional to tap in to the zeitgeist and try, yet again, to sell a highly skeptical American public on the Pebble Project—a huge gold and copper mine proposed by two foreign mining corporations to be built on public lands in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

On June 4, Northern Dynasty Minerals, Limited, a Vancouver, Canada-based corporation that owns 50 percent of the Pebble Project, ran an ad in the Washington Post and on various political websites that demands an end to what it calls EPA’s “black box bias” against the mine. The ad also claims that the EPA is manipulating public opinion and denying science in response to the results of the EPA’s 14 month-long comprehensive Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA). The EPA's assessment shows that the Pebble Project does indeed threaten the greatest salmon fishery on earth (a $500 million industry annually) and the estimated 14,000 jobs that depend upon it, and will industrialize one of America’s wildest and most pristine expanses of public land, which would forever changing the culture and economy of the 7,500 people, mostly Native Americans, who now call it home.

By Hal Herring

An algae bloom caused by nitrate pollution on Iowa's Big Creek Lake, located northwest of Des Moines, in summer of 2012.

The next time you find yourself jugfishing along the Mississippi River, or lying in your hammock on your old house boat in southern Louisiana where the freshwater hits the salt, pump up the old Coleman lantern and throw open your tattered old copy of D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths, and read the story of Cassandra. You do remember, don’t you? The beautiful prophet whose ears were licked clean by snakes, so that she could hear the future? No matter how accurate her predictions (including the destruction of Troy by way of the super-warriors hidden inside the gift of the Trojan horse) nobody ever listened to her. Ever.

By Hal Herring

As we gnash our teeth and rail at the mismanagement of our world, we need to take a few long moments to unclench our jaws and celebrate our successes. One in particular, which is going unmentioned in the debates over new gun laws and especially in the national discussion of hunting, is the Pittman-Robertson Act and the cash that is flowing from it like a high tide of honey into our federal and state wildlife coffers.
 
I am still shocked when I go into the Scheels in Great Falls and find the shelves empty of ammunition, and the gun cabinet with nothing in it but brackets, but it is a comfort to know that we have a booming economy in guns and ammo, and that, because of the Pittman-Robertson Act, we have a record-shattering amount of money available to support wildlife, habitat, and the shooting and archery sports. The rush on guns and ammo produced $522,552,011 in Pittman-Robertson money in fiscal year 2013 alone. At a time of record federal deficits, slashed budgets and ideologically inspired attacks on conservation, the Act has never seemed so important, or so visionary.

By Hal Herring

Bob Marshall recently described on this blog how the biofuels mandate from the Bush administration has had an unpleasant result: the explosive conversion of native grasslands (our gamebird and waterfowl habitat) to corn crops, with their high uses of water and the fertilizers that run off and pollute watersheds for hundreds of miles downstream. As Marshall pointed out, what we are doing to our native grasslands is almost exactly what the Malaysians, Brazilians and Indonesians are doing to their native forests.
 
The biofuels mandate is a perfect example of unintended consequences. But there’s another engine driving this destruction of our wetlands and wildlife, too. This engine dates back to the 1996 Farm Bill, when Congress de-coupled what is known as “conservation compliance” - basic protections for wetlands and highly erodible lands- via our government supported crop insurance programs.  At that time, it did not seem too important. Farmers in the U.S. relied more on direct subsidy payments - which came with an extensive set of mandates for conservation compliance - than they did the federally supported crop insurance plans.