Haul It Away

So, for my idea regarding a project, I decided to do something that's obviously very important to me.  You see, growing up in Michigan, I spent a lot of time outdoors.  My parents took my brother and I on 2 week long camping trips every summer all over the Upper Peninsula, and they were the coolest trips ever. My dad taught me how to fish when I was 4, and I've been addicted ever since.  I never played very many video games (save for NES) but instead was either catching snakes, frogs, and turtles outside, or going hunting or of course, fishing. My dad taught me to love the outdoors, and it's the greatest gift (I think) a father can bestow on a son, and I am eternally grateful for it.  He taught me to never leave traces of your passage, always picking up your trash and if you have room in your pockets and hands, the trash other people leave behind.  And that was almost 20 years ago now.

So that's why my project is focusing around River cleanups.  You see, rivers belong to everyone.  They are a rare resource in this world, and they are of no use to anyone if their banks and bottoms are coated in aluminum cans, shoes, tires, or even worse, old fishing hooks, lead weight and monafilament fishing line.  Those are the so-called "big 3" because they do not bio degrade and can be outright lethal to wildlife.  I consider myself to be a steward of the rivers, (as any self respecting trout bum would) so therefore it's only fair that I do my part to remove as much river-trash as possible and lead by example, hoping that other anglers see what I do and then, the seed is planted.  Everyone deserves the right to be able to spend the day on a river and not see a single strand of line, or a beer can.  It adds to that wilderness experience, something people nowadays don't get.  So if I can clean up a stretch of water and restore that feeling to the next person that comes to the river, it's worth it.  I plan on enacting this plan on every river I go to, be it the Pere Marquette for steelhead, or the Au Sable for trophy brown trout.  And you can bet there'll be pictures of what I collect and what it looks like afterwords.  I want to try and collect 3 miles of monofilament line.

see you on the river,
Brian

Steelhead Madness

Man, I love spring! Oberon, erratic temperatures, and best of all, fresh chrome! It's that time of year again, and I mean of course, time for the WMU Fishing Club's annual Collegiate Steelhead Tournament in Baldwin, held on April 9th on the mighty Pere Marquette River.

This year the tournament will be held at the Pine River Corridor, west of M-37.  I don't have the exact directions yet, but as soon as I get a set of them, I'll of course post em' on here.  It's FREE camping in a beautiful location, and teams from CMU, MSU, UM, FSU, GVSU, and GVCC are sending teams, and i'm sure a few more are bound to show up.  Plus, the executive chef from Eagle Eye Golf Resort in East Lansing, MI will be cooking dinner for us the night before the tournament.  He makes a steelhead chowder that's worth the trip alone. It will change your life forever.  Myself and several other club members are heading up early to prepare the area for camping, split firewood, and of course, chase the elusive steelhead. It's a great chance to meet new people, and learn a thing or two about how to catch a silver meteor in the water.

In addition to the tournament and camaraderie, the WMU Fishing Club strongly supports river cleanups.  Thats why we  have the "Trash Bash", basically a competition between teams to see who can pick up the most trash along the river.  It's surprisingly competitive, I've personally seen people race to pick up a single beer can floating in the river.  Plus, it's always good thing to give back and help clean up a resource we all use.  Nothing ruins a day on the river faster than seeing 30 beer cans floating in an eddy held together by monafilament fishing line.  Not only are they blights on the river bank, but are hazardous to wildlife.  We don't stick to just the "PM" either. Whenever club members venture to a river or lake, we always make sure to carry our and other people's trash away.  So if you're interested, let me know and I'll post more info when it becomes available.

tight lines,

Brian

Hope, Human, and Wild

I've never read anything by Bill McKibben before, so I was naturally curious to see what he was about.  I feared another depressing-from-the-start environmental book, something I'd have to struggle through, and I'd feel bad about how I'm ruining the earth after I'd finished.  I'm happy to say I was wrong.  


Bill acknowledges that we're heading in the wrong direction in terms of our environmental policy...fast too.  How the public in the US still turns a blind eye (for the most part) to global warming and the effects we are having on the planet, but he has seen examples all over the world that inspire hope in him, inspire the feeling that maybe, just maybe we as a species are starting to get the idea.  He really sounds like he's optimistic, albeit cautiously so.


I then chose to read the chapter about a town in Brazil named Curitiba.  I've never heard of the place, but what I read made me sit up and take notice.  I didn't know for example, that Curitiba leads the world in bus-efficiency,  how they have virtually eliminated cars in the city center making it pedestrian friendly.  They had even managed to stamp out urban sprawl, something cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles have failed miserably at.  Officials in Curitiba have managed to keep people near the city center.  They even have programs to reduce street-children by implementing programs to make them help the city, either by picking up a bag full of trash to exchange for a bag of rice, or planting a garden to help reduce the erosion of a hill near one of the few slums existing in the city.  All that just makes me wonder, if Curitiba can do that, why can't we do something like that in the cities here?  I'm sure Michigan cities like Flint, Detroit or Saginaw could use programs like that, increasing green space to make up for and replace the dilapidated houses.  It made me wish we had city leaders like that, that could implement new ideas and push progress forward, without having to wait for approval that has been fought and bickered over by politicians.  


I have to admit though, what goes on in Curitiba could happen here, but to actually get it to take effect would be a long, drawn out fight.  It's true, images of "public" and "private" are very different.  Heck, when I think of "public" some (not all) of the images that pop into my head are housing projects in Detroit, terribly noneffective schools, and the like.  Private sometimes incurs thoughts of sleek, shiny jets, giant mansions attended by a legion of staff.  It's that opinion that permeates the majority of people's thoughts here...It would be VERY difficult (and expensive) to implement the types of things like in Curitiba.  To change our buses in cities would cost millions of dollars, that  you have to try and convince taxpayers its a good idea, and having people that resist change in political office (that shall remain unnamed) is quite a hurdle.  I think that we CAN do those things, but it's going to have to take time, and buckets of patience.  


tight lines to all.

My First blogumn

Well-

So far, so good.  Never blogged before...pardon any latent sarcasm detected in my posts.