This blog was named in homage to Trout Fishing in America, a humorous book by Richard Brautigan inspired in part by his childhood in poverty in Oregon where wild trout may have occasionally provided much needed sustenance as did minnows caught in a can in an Idaho lake.
I was saddened to find Dierkes' lake in Twin Falls Idaho dirtier and more chemical than three summers ago, and populated with dead fish. Then, in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, there were signs on the way to Fairy Falls warning visitors not to fish or swim in the water because it was treated with rotenone during the 2011 summer season in an attempt to kill off non-native trout and reintroduce the local cutthroat trout. The water in the falls pond, which I'm not sure even came from a treated source, was very dead, with browned algae and no sign of Crustacea.
I looked up rotenone on Wikipedia and also found this thoughtful and informative article on its use at Yellowstone http://www.explorebigsky.com/newspost/opinion-rotenone-a-trouts-deadliest-enemy
Rotenone kills all fish, insects and crustaceans. On land it is commonly used as a pesticide even on USDA organic crops because it occurs naturally in many tropical plants and was thought to be safe for humans as it is poorly absorbed by our digestive system. It decays within hours or days on exposure to sunlight. But in water, it can last for upto 6 months.
More thoughts on this later. It's my turn to drive now...
Rotenone was I suppose thought by environmentalists and organic farmers to be 'good' because it was originally used by native Americans, perhaps in the Amazon, to harvest fish from the river, and because it comes from a natural source - plants - albeit plants that grow far away from Yellowstone. The Yellowstone cutthroat trout was thought to be 'good' because it's native. The brown and rainbow trout, 'evil' colonialists introduced by white Europeans for fishing were pushing the poor cutthroat out of existence. But does this really justify killing everything, in a godlike fell swoop, to reintroduce the captive-bred natives ala Noah's arc? Was everything else, not only trout but other fish, insects, crustaceans, potentially all the animals that eat them, the fish 6 months downstream, truly evil? In another experiment of this kind elsewhere in the US 20% of species had not yet recovered 5 years later, and by this time I wonder what the chances are that they ever will? Around the same time the lakes and rivers of Yellowstone were poisoned with Rotenone an article came out linking it to the incidence of Parkinson's disease in farm workers.
What is this pure native state that we desire to return to? Absalom and I were discussing Hawaii, and whether it had any native frogs. He made the good point that anything that came there must have caught a ride on a piece of driftwood if it didn't come with humans. We (our species, including native Americans) have been interacting with nature here for thousands of years. On the radio we heard
I was saddened to find Dierkes' lake in Twin Falls Idaho dirtier and more chemical than three summers ago, and populated with dead fish. Then, in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, there were signs on the way to Fairy Falls warning visitors not to fish or swim in the water because it was treated with rotenone during the 2011 summer season in an attempt to kill off non-native trout and reintroduce the local cutthroat trout. The water in the falls pond, which I'm not sure even came from a treated source, was very dead, with browned algae and no sign of Crustacea.
I looked up rotenone on Wikipedia and also found this thoughtful and informative article on its use at Yellowstone http://www.explorebigsky.com/newspost/opinion-rotenone-a-trouts-deadliest-enemy
Rotenone kills all fish, insects and crustaceans. On land it is commonly used as a pesticide even on USDA organic crops because it occurs naturally in many tropical plants and was thought to be safe for humans as it is poorly absorbed by our digestive system. It decays within hours or days on exposure to sunlight. But in water, it can last for upto 6 months.
More thoughts on this later. It's my turn to drive now...
Rotenone was I suppose thought by environmentalists and organic farmers to be 'good' because it was originally used by native Americans, perhaps in the Amazon, to harvest fish from the river, and because it comes from a natural source - plants - albeit plants that grow far away from Yellowstone. The Yellowstone cutthroat trout was thought to be 'good' because it's native. The brown and rainbow trout, 'evil' colonialists introduced by white Europeans for fishing were pushing the poor cutthroat out of existence. But does this really justify killing everything, in a godlike fell swoop, to reintroduce the captive-bred natives ala Noah's arc? Was everything else, not only trout but other fish, insects, crustaceans, potentially all the animals that eat them, the fish 6 months downstream, truly evil? In another experiment of this kind elsewhere in the US 20% of species had not yet recovered 5 years later, and by this time I wonder what the chances are that they ever will? Around the same time the lakes and rivers of Yellowstone were poisoned with Rotenone an article came out linking it to the incidence of Parkinson's disease in farm workers.
What is this pure native state that we desire to return to? Absalom and I were discussing Hawaii, and whether it had any native frogs. He made the good point that anything that came there must have caught a ride on a piece of driftwood if it didn't come with humans. We (our species, including native Americans) have been interacting with nature here for thousands of years. On the radio we heard
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