The Chinese people are getting fed up with a government that seems perfectly content to let them be poisoned in return for larger short-term profits. Take a look at this story from USA Today and try to imagine living under these conditions:
Swim for a half-hour in a river in east China's Cangnan county and win $48,000.

Sound like easy money? Take a look at the river.

Chinese angry about their toxic and trash-choked rivers have made online offers of cash rewards to the chiefs of their local government's environmental protection bureaus to take a swim in the waterways they are in charge of protecting.

We are experiencing a shift in our country, a growing weariness with the voices of anger and willful ignorance, especially in the realm of our natural resources. We’ve all endured it: the utterly predictable voices that growl “Wipe your butt with a spotted owl!” (or the equivalent angry platitude) whenever anybody brings up an environmental problem or a conservation challenge. The politicians who think they can win votes by proposing a mass sell-off of public lands, or who claim that protecting clean water and clean air is killing jobs, or, as happened here in Montana recently, target the restoration of a huntable population of wild bison as a plot to destroy agriculture.

Willful ignorance and the simplistic catch phrases (“drill, baby, drill!”) that it spawns are going out of fashion. But it is going out of fashion because there is a growing and nagging suspicion that our nation, caught in a web of global needs, accustomed to plenty but feeling a bit pinched, is making a lot of poor choices about natural resources, at a very critical time. A lot of people, with widely varying political views, are worried.

They’ve got the plan.

They’ve got federal reassurance.

Now all they need is the money.

That where sportsmen's conservation groups and their allies in the green world stood this week after the U.S. Dept. of Commerce released its much anticipated “Path Forward” for the RESTORE Act – the bill that will allow 80 percent of what is expected to be more than $20 billion in Clean Water Act fines from the Deepwater Horizon spill to be used for  restoration of Gulf ecosystems and economies. Normally CWA fines go straight to the federal larder.

Sportsmen have just a few days left to help stop the Bureau of Land Management from delivering yet another blow to mule deer, elk and sage grouse populations in western Colorado.
 
Monday marks the end of the public comment period on the BLM’s decision to select a new energy development plan for the 1.7 million-acre White River area near Meeker.
That area could see 15,500 new wells drilled under a management regime that would allow mule deer populations to be reduced by 30 percent below the long-term objectives set by Colorado’s Division of Wildlife.

At dawn on a January morning, the countryside around Stuttgart, Arkansas is an impressionist painting, brooding flooded hardwood bottoms fading without banks into slow gray rivers, harvested rice fields in colors of light butternut and yellow, turned black Mississippi Delta earth. Perfect clouds of snow geese, mallards, Canadas, teal, and wood ducks show dark and beautiful against the leaden winter sky. We--my son and daughter, wife, Lab pup, and I--saw it all not from a duck blind, but from Interstate 40, on the return to Montana from a 5000 mile-driving odyssey to visit family in Alabama, friends in Mississippi and Louisiana. We were towing a 14-foot aluminum boat, bought cheap from an old friend, so we traveled home slowly, not like on foot or horseback, but slowly enough to look at our country, to marvel at its wonders, to ponder its troubles.

Can the oceans’ wild fish stocks survive today’s world of commercial fishing?
 
For more than a decade, that question has been the driving concern of many marine conservationists, anglers, and the recreational fishing industry. The combination of new, highly efficient find-and-catch technologies, along with constant market pressures from the world’s exploding population, has overwhelmed the reproductive capacity of some species. Just as troubling, pursuit of market species often results in a huge by-catch -- the capture, death and discard of untargeted species, including not only threatened fish but also marine mammals. Because that equation that shows no signs of changing, it threatens the future of some fish species.