I submitted the attached Letter to the Editor to Science in response to Pikitch’s perspective but they declined to publish it. So I thought I would circulate it by email. Feel free to pass it on to any email lists you think might be interested. Ray Hilborn What gets measured gets managed   In a [...]

Hon. Keith Ashfield, Minister Fisheries and Oceans Canada 200 Kent Street 13th Floor, Station 13E228 Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0E6 Canada RE: Economic Development at All Cost? Dear Minister Ashfield: I am writing this letter on behalf of over 300 Canadian fisheries professionals who are members of the Canadian Aquatic Resources Section (CARS) of the American [...]

Reader concerned about DNR Fisheries Division decline         By Anonymous The McDonough County Voice Posted Mar 22, 2012 @ 03:30 PM; www.mcdonoughnews.com To the Editor: This is the first installment of news concerning the Illinois DNR’s Fisheries Division that I heard at the 50th Annual State Chapter of the American Fisheries Society [...]

American Farmland Trust Urges Congress to Consider Environmental and Conservation Impacts of New Farm Bill; Calls for Conservation Compliance for Crop Insurance Eligibility   WASHINGTON, D.C., March 16, 2012 — American Farmland Trust (AFT) yesterday urged Congress to consider the environmental impacts of farm safety-net reform and reiterated key AFT policy positions in support of [...]

March 12, 2012   Mr. Ken Salazar, Secretary U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street, NW Washington, DC 20240   Subject:  Position Regarding the Proposed Klamath River Dam Removal   Dear Mr. Salazar   The American Fisheries Society (AFS), founded in 1870, is the oldest and largest professional society representing over 9,000 fisheries scientists [...]

Mike Conlin: “ILLINOIS FISHERIES IN THE AGE OF POLITICAL INEPTITUDE” By Dale Bowman on February 24, 2012 1:06 PM| blogs.suntimes.com Mike Conlin presented a no-holds-barred look at the state of Illinois fisheries on Wednesday during the Illinois Chapter American Fisheries Society 50th Anniversary Meeting, February 21-23, 2012 at Starved Rock State Park Lodge in Utica. [...]

Report: Canada’s fisheries poorly managed By SeafoodSource staff ; www.seafoodsource.com 03 February, 2012 – A panel assembled by the Royal Society of Canada has published a report assessing the state of Canada’s marine biodiversity, and it’s calling for sweeping changes in the management of Canada’s oceans. Since beginning its work in June 2010, the panel [...]

A Mining Law Whose Time Has Passed By ROBERT M. HUGHES and CAROL ANN WOODY Published: January 11, 2012 NyTimes   IN 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a mining law to spur the development of the West by giving hard-rock mining precedence over other uses of federal land. But the law has long since [...]

Thursday, January 12, 2012 | Tygerpen: Strange fish I have known by trudi york gardner ; www.jweekly.com   My 26-year-old son Jordan, who’s in culinary school, patrols my kitchen ever since he took a class in food safety. He’s particularly wary of food handling when it comes to fish. Once he informed me that tapeworms [...]

Language Corner— November 28, 2011 02:12 PM Friendly Fire Insulting without meaning to By Merrill Perlman; www.cjr.org   As language and society evolve, words that were once considered merely slang sometimes take on an offensive odor. In the past twenty years, for example, many municipalities have renamed localities with “squaw” in their names after the [...]

Commentary: One scientist’s sound advice What should scientists do? They should do their scientific work and tell us what they find. But they should not try to tell us what to do. That, in a nutshell, is the message of one of the preeminent scientists in the mid-valley, Bob Lackey (AFS member, ’64) of the [...]

Congratulations to Zachary Penney ( AFS member, ’09) for winning the American Fisheries Society Student Writing Contest. See page 9 for the paper Zachery wrote. You’ll see why he won this award. Zachery is a PHD student at the University of Idaho studying iteroparity of Idaho steelhead (Extracted from Volume 30, Issue 2 of the [...]

A RESOLUTION BY THE DAKOTA CHAPTER of the AMERICAN FISHERIES SOCIETY Concerning New Bridge Construction in Burleigh and Morton Counties, North Dakota WHEREAS, Bismarck, Mandan, Burleigh County and Morton County officials are proposing construction of new bridges across the Missouri River; and WHEREAS, the proposal involves new bridges in areas that already have existing bridges; [...]

  Dear AFS Members: AFS staff and the Electronic Services Advisory Board are working with an outside IT firm to analyze the AFS website and associated electronic services in order to develop improvements that better meet member needs. As part of this, we are requesting that you share your opinions about select aspects of the [...]

GloucesterTimes.com, Gloucester, MA August 10, 2011 My View, Brian Rothschild: Time to overhaul U.S. fisheries oversight My View Brian Rothschild — Fishery management in the northeast is broken and dysfunctional. There is no master plan to improve communications, revise data collection, conduct cooperative research, and achieve optimum yield. The Magnuson-Stevens Act, the legislation framed by [...]

News for Immediate Release Aug. 11, 2011     Sportsmen Oppose Bill That Would Open Public-Lands Backcountry to Development Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act would remove safeguards from millions of acres of prime big-game and fish habitat   WASHINGTON – Sportsmen-focused groups and businesses are urging Congress to reject wrongheaded legislation that would open [...]

An Interview with Ray Hilborn: Overfishing, Stock Assessment, Environmental Impact of Fisheries Thursday, August 4, 2011 Set your sights on attending this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. With its focus on “New Frontiers in Fisheries Management and Ecology: Leading the Way in a Changing World,” the event [...]

Keeping the Fisheries Toolbox Full   14 July, 2011   Dear Member of Congress:     We, the undersigned natural and social scientists, urge you to help protect fish, fishermen and fishing communities by keeping all feasible management options available to allow local fishermen and managers to choose what is best for them and their [...]

American Fisheries Society * American Fly Fishing Trade Association * American Sportfishing Association * Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies * Archery Trade Association * B.A.S.S LLC * Berkley Conservation Institute, Pure Fishing * Boone and Crockett Club * Catch-A-Dream Foundation * Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation * Conservation Force * Dallas Safari Club * Delta Waterfowl [...]

  May 16, 2011 National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee c/o Dr. Cynthia Decker Designated Federal Official NOAA SSMC1 Room 11230 1315 East-West Highway Silver Spring, Maryland 20910 To the National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee: We are writing to urge the Committee to include and elevate ocean acidification as a priority issue [...]

March 10th, 2011 by Dominick DellaSala blog.islandpress.com Restoring Pacific Salmon Makes Dollars and Sense Pacific salmon are the iconic temperate rainforest species connecting ocean, freshwater, and terrestrial systems, and joining people to the great outdoors. They are a keystone species, on the menu of American bald eagles and grizzly bears of the Great Bear Rainforest, [...]

  Good morning all. The Oregon AFS Chapter’s opinion piece made it to the Oregonian this morning on The Stump and received top billing, next to Representatives Doc Hastings’ and Peter DeFazio’s salmon plan piece (they reiterate the claim that the “best available science” was used). Links, below. Best Fishes, Jeremiah Our piece: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/03/saving_columbia_river_salmon_g.html Reps. [...]

  Saving Columbia River salmon: Going where the ‘best available science’ leads us Published: Friday, March 11, 2011, 7:00 AM By Guest Columnist By Demian Ebert In a recent commentary in The Oregonian, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stated that salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin is now being guided [...]

‘Reefs at Risk: Global Threats Require Global Action’ (Opening Keynote Address) As delivered on Feb. 23 by Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator as part of a Press Launch of the World Resources Institute “Reefs at Risk Revisited” at the National Press Club, Washington, DC February 23, [...]

News for Immediate Release Feb. 8, 2011 TRCP Presents 2011 Policy Agenda   Sportsmen offer ‘conservation roadmap’ for navigating challenges facing fish and wildlife funding and management in the year to come WASHINGTON – The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership today announced the release of its 2011 Conservation Policy Agenda, presenting conservation issues of importance to [...]