When the going gets tough in conservation battles, the tough should get going right at the top.

That's one of the strategies Trout Unlimited chief Chris Wood is employing in the group's continuing effort to keep Alaska's priceless Bristol Bay fishery from being corrupted by development. Wood penned this op-ed in The Huffington Post urging President Obama to help save that gem.

Among Woods' words of advice: It is not often that a fish can define your life's work. Rarer still can the most powerful man on earth, the President of the United States, determine the future of that fish. President Obama must decide before his re-election campaign is over whether nearly one-third of the wild salmon consumed in the United States can continue to provide an important source of delicious and healthy protein for millions of Americans (try, for example, grilled salmon with ancho honey porter glaze). Or, whether an ill-conceived, open pit mine in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska, is more important.

Sportsmen, take a bow.

Fish and wildlife finally had a good week on the conservation front because your hard work resulted in this news Friday afternoon:

The Obama administration has found a way to fund an extra million CRP acres targeted for wetlands and grasslands, and will reshuffle upwards of 70 percent (almost $30 million) of the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund (MBCF) so it goes to work on the prairie pothole region.

Those headlines were rare sweet relief for the conservation community, which has spent most of the last 14 months as the favorite piñata of so-called deficit hawks in congress as well as at the administration. In 2011, the House of Representatives attempted to eviscerate decades-long conservation programs that have proven to be money makers for the economy. And last month President Obama's 2013 budget showed no funding for the Wetlands Reserve or Grasslands Reserve  programs.

A recent news release reports that about 10 percent of the bluefin tuna spawning habitat in the northern Gulf was covered with BP's oil in the spring of 2010, an area estimated to have contained 12 percent of that season's larval bluefin tuna. The reason for the lower-than-feared numbers seems to be that most of the oil drifted to the eastern side of the region, while most of the spawning activity was taking place west of that flow.

The authors of the report, however, put the adjectives "less than" in front of both the 10-percent and 12-percent figures.

Many anglers and other conservationists feared the damage could have been much higher. But when you take a 12-percent whack out of the spawning class of a long-lived species, already fighting to maintain its viability against unrelenting international fishing pressure, that's not good news. It's kind of like celebrating that the carriers were not at Pearl Harbor. We're still talking about a heavy hit and significant damage on a vital resource that will take some time to replace.

The Conservation Hawks is a new group dedicated to harnessing the power of sportsmen to address climate change. Stop. Before you give in to anger, or to the “conservation fatigue” that can fall upon us like a giant wet carpet whenever climate change is mentioned, consider this: If you can convince Conservation Hawks chairman Todd Tanner that he’s wasting his time, that he does not have to worry about climate change, he will present to you his most prized possession: A Beretta Silver Pigeon 12 gauge over/under that was a gift from his wife, and has been a faithful companion on many a Montana bird hunt. I know the gun, and I’ve hunted and fished with Todd for years. He’s not kidding. You convince him, he’ll give you the gun. 

Over a decade ago, I was hired to write a chapter for a book called Return of the Wild: the Future of our Natural Lands (if you’ve never heard of it, you are not alone). My chapter of the book was called “Marketing the Image of the Wild,” and it was about game farming and about the (then) new boom in salmon aquaculture.

In short, the chapter was about the complications that arise when we try to manufacture and sell a replica of an animal or food that has its real value based in the fact that it lives a wild, free, and presumably healthy life in a natural environment. This was in the early years of the troubles with Chronic Wasting disease in the game farm industry, not long after the bovine tuberculosis epidemic on elk farms in Canada, and just before the shipment of the live, CWD infected domestic elk to South Korea crashed the Asian velvet antler trade. For a writer, interesting times indeed.

Over the past fifteen years, more and more of my bird and antelope hunting has been done on Bureau of Land Management public lands. Every year, I buy a pass to Glacier National Park, and our family hikes and rambles there are some of the finest experiences of my life so far. For me, and for millions of other American outdoorspeople, no public agency has as much potential or actual effect on hunting, fishing and just the plain freedom to roam and camp and shoot as does the US Department of Interior.

On February 7th at 1 pm EDT, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will be taking questions and discussing conservation and the economy in a live webchat that should be both interesting and informative. The sportsmen and women of the US need to have their voices heard on issues that range from wolves and energy development to the restoration of the Mississippi Delta- this is a chance to make that happen. Please don’t miss it. Click here to watch it on the Department of Interior site.

Here’s a quick list of agencies under the Department of the Interior, which should inspire participation--because every one of us has a stake in here somewhere:

-Bureau of Indian Affairs
-Bureau of Land Management
-Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
-Bureau of Reclamation
-Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement
-National Park Service
-Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation and Enforcement
-U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
-U.S. Geological Survey