Welcome to the latest installment of the Wednesday Wake-Up Call, a weekly roundup of the most pressing conservation issues important to anglers. Working with our friends at Trout Unlimited, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, The Everglades Foundation, Captains for Clean Water, Bullsugar.org, and Conservation Hawks (among others), we’ll make sure you’ve got the information you need to understand the issues and form solid opinions.
If you know of an important issue–whether it’s national or local–that anglers should be paying attention to, comment below, and we’ll check it out!
1. Public Comment Period on Draft Pebble EIS is Open for 90 Days
Photo by Pat Clayton, Fish Eye Guy Photography
As we posted last week, the clock is now ticking for people to submit comments on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Pebble Mine. We’ve got just 90 days to generate as many comments as possible urging our appointed and elected officials to stop this project. As our COO, Simon Perkins, argues in the video at the top of the page, this is the wrong mine in the wrong place.
Few of us are actually going to sit down and read the entire XXX-page document, but there are great post called “Initial Impressions of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement” on the Save Bristol Bay website. Here’s a list of topics covered:
- Failure to consider inevitable future expansion.
- Insufficient protections for the Bristol Bay salmon fishery and the $1.5+ billion industries it supports.
- A complete failure to plan for catastrophic tailings dam failures in a seismically active region. Pebble can’t answer major questions about how their project would work – and the Corps isn’t forcing them to.
- Destruction of salmon streams, wetlands, and other waters.
The folks at Save Bristol Bay have made it incredibly easy for you to submit your comment by creating a form you can fill in.
Click here to make your voice heard.
2. The Everglades are in Trouble, but the New Governor Pledges Help
Photos via The Everglades Foundation.
Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of the problems facing the Everglades–from poor water management to development to the sugar-cane industry–but a recent article in The Guardian, “Everglades in Crisis,” offers a good summary.
In happier news, an editorial in the Tampa Bay Times argues that “DeSantis sends strong message on environment”:
The new governor has laid out compelling priorities, put a dollar figure to them and set a spending bar that he hopes to meet by the end of his first four-year term. In that sense, DeSantis has signaled he intends to bring a new level of certainty to environmental funding. These commitments would help Florida leverage matching federal dollars and help put Everglades restoration on a more timely track.
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