Fight for Your Right

It seems that just about every dusty rear windshield on every car and every truck in Alaska has a sticker showing their absolute distaste for the Pebble Mine project, which many believe would destroy some of the world’s largest salmon runs. The mine proposal appeared to be dead, although the Governor is making a last-ditch attempt to revive it, and the largest reason that it failed is because trout and salmon anglers came out in droves.

Not just anglers in Bristol Bay, who would be directly affected.

Not just anglers in Alaska, who would be occasionally or indirectly affected.

Anglers all over the globe knew that the death sentence for a premier fishery and likely just the first domino to fall.

Bass anglers may get worked up about which tour is better, about the merits of forward-facing sonar, or about whether the Alabama Rig should be allowed in tournaments. We might even foam at the mouth a bit over rising boat ramp fees. But as we exist now, you’ll never see us take on a unified front like the trout folks did. As one industry insider once told me, “You can’t even get two bass anglers to agree that a fart smells bad.”

Yes, I’m aware of some of the early efforts of Ray Scott to successfully play the political game, but it saddens me that those days seem to be over. I’ve brought it up with people who should know better, educated folks who often know powerful people, and I typically get one of two responses:

• We don’t have the economic or political horsepower that the trout guys do; or
• The game is rigged against us.

Both of those are a crock. You have the right to think whatever you want about the political process and its players, but you cannot put your head in the sand that it exists, and that you have to play to win. Randy Blaukat’s views may be polarizing among many fishermen, but you don’t necessarily need to agree with the substance of them t know that he’s right about the process – and the process requires awareness, involvement, advocacy, and most of all cohesion. It may require giving up a Saturday on the water, or an evening of watching Bill Dance reruns, or perhaps it’ll just require stroking the occasional check.

Alaska is a faraway place to most Americans. It is the third least-populated state, with fewer people than at least four cities in Texas alone, and yet one project that threatened one region in that state commanded the attention of the entire trout world. I may still be unable to double haul, and my understanding of salmon behavior needs a little work, but last week in the Last Frontier I relearned that we as bass anglers can do better.