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By Ted Williams
Welcome to the Conservation Page and thanks for logging on. Please leave your comments in the boxes provided. The e-mail address is not for public viewing. We’d prefer that you use your real name but will understand if job sensitivity prevents this. To bring up a comment box and a clickable link you must click on a title.
Assisted by my colleagues, friends, and allies in state and federal resource management, fish and wildlife law enforcement, the media, the scientific community, the sporting community, and the environmental community I hope to educate, encourage, entertain, and generally provide information to assist in restoring our planet’s biodiversity. This is called a “conservation” page; but as a nation and society we are beyond “conservation”—i.e., maintaining the status quo. We are entering the post-industrial restoration phase; and that is something entirely different, something exciting. In any comment boxes please contribute items you think might be useful for these purposes. Remember that I cannot legally post text sans author’s and/or publication’s permission. It will go without saying that any text you see posted here has been written by me or okayed for my use.
Part of the process I hope to initiate is free exchange of ideas through open dialogue, so please post your comments in the appropriate boxes. While I welcome dissent—even sharp dissent—it must be somewhat civil, somewhat intelligent, and only moderately profane. Those who have participated in the Fly Rod & Reel bulletin board will recall that we shut down the conservation page there “due to incivility and general stupidity.” There were only a few offenders, but they succeeded in dragging down the tone and tenor of all discussions to the point that the page eventually degenerated into a therapy session for internet trolls, radical conservatives, anti-environmentalists, and marginalized property-rights zealots otherwise ignored by mainstream society. I will not allow that to happen here, so please bear in mind that I reserve the right to lightly edit posts (for clarity or propriety only) or reject them entirely.
As conservation editor of Fly Rod & Reel magazine, I am, or course, particularly interested in information pertaining to fish and their management/restoration. But fish cannot be ecologically separated from wildlife nor can people work for one without working for the other; so information on the management/restoration of wildlife will also be a big part of this page. Finally—and this is a point that seemed to be lost on the old conservation page and a point that often eludes correspondents in the letters section of our magazine—conservation and politics are intertwined. The former cannot happen without the later. For sportsmen and environmentalists to prevail they must become political activists.
Yours for a better earth,
Ted Williams
Posted at 01:05 PM | Permalink
