Posts Tagged → conservation
Federal assault on land conservation continues…no surprise
Gathering enormous momentum over the past four years is an all-out assault on land conservation by the federal government. Led by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), charitable donations of land and land development value across America have been subject to incredible scrutiny and disdainful investigators who repeatedly assert that the donations of real property literally have zero value.
Private citizens defending their generous charitable contributions often spend tens of thousands of dollars. When they win in court, the IRS agents just walk away and start again with someone else.
The investigations and audits by the IRS have spawned hundreds of lawsuits by charitable donors who feel rooked, first by having donated real property value said to be worth nothing, and then by having their own government turn against their generosity.
The donors are Americans of every walk of life, from urban elites with rural second properties, to poor dirt farmers trying to preserve the home farm and their way of life. Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, and every little local land trust in between Bangor, Maine, and Santa Barbara, California is subject to this onslaught and Gestapo tactics.
It is difficult to accept that protecting America’s inspiring landscape through private donations to registered charities is such a problem that the IRS must expend hundreds of millions of dollars on it every year. And yet the agency’s juggernaut rolls on. We aren’t talking about junk cars worth $300 in parts being claimed for $3,000. Rather, the donations run from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars, carefully appraised by certified real estate appraisers.
Tax courts have repeatedly taken dim views of the investigations’ impetus and the IRS’s conclusions, often rebuking the government’s cases from the basic claims all the way through its reasoning, evidence, and methodology. It hasn’t stopped the IRS.
Why, one might ask, is this happening, even gathering steam, during the reign of such a perfect presidential administration? You know, the one which gets constant kudos, plaudits, and free passes from the usual array of environmental advocacy groups that during the Bush administration didn’t miss a second of the constant drum beat against their (alleged, supposed, manufactured, and yes, often real) faults and failures…Not that those environmental advocacy groups could ever, ever be accused of being partisan….
Here is one theory: Barack Obama hates private wealth, he hates private property, and he hates the idea that wealthy people can donate real estate value and be big heroes for it. Land conservation is very much the realm of wealthy blue bloods, big Republican foundations, land-rich-cash-poor ranchers and farmers who haven’t voted for a Democrat in oh, a few decades, and plenty of gun owners and outdoorsmen. In other words, land conservationists are mostly comprised of the very people Obama calls “enemies.”
Land conservation is underwritten and mostly run from stem to stern by the people most symbolic of America’s traditional modes of success: Land and natural resources. These are the people most at odds with Obama’s views of economics, wealth, and supposed historic injustices. So we can expect this assault on land conservation to continue. And we can expect the nakedly partisan advocacy groups who pretend to be neutral on natural resource conservation to continue to give this administration a 100% pass.
Take a kid fishing
Trout season is upon us, and if you want future generations to appreciate natural resources, then teach them early on how natural resources function. For example, take a kid fishing and teach him or her about how trout and the bugs they eat need clean water.
Conservation isn’t always serious stuff. It can be fun!
The local kids-only trout fishing hot spot is on Clark’s Creek, run by DCAC: http://dauphincountyanglers.com/
Keystone Pipeline Needs Conservation
President Obama has nixed the Keystone Pipeline.
Environmental advocates applaud as the project dies, even as America continues to depend on foreign oil from people who hate us. It doesn’t make much sense.
What’s needed is a good dose of old fashioned conservation. You know, mitigate the pipeline’s impacts by protecting the land around it, thereby turning it into a permanent wildlife corridor and greenway.
Maybe even a transcontinental trail can run along it.
If I had anything to say about it, these kinds of solutions would be on the table, and the project would be moving forward.
Fish, Shmish, You Call That Fishing?
February 14, 2011
Dr. Louis Daniel, Director
North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries
3441 Arendell Street
Morehead City, NC 28557
Dear Dr. Daniel,
By now you know well that many people are justifiably upset by the wasteful netting practices of the North Carolina commercial bass fishermen, and you can count me among them. The videos and photos are proof that North Carolina is not managing its share of our commonly held striped bass stocks in a professional way. This is bad fishing and bad species management. It is not sustainable, and it damages the sustainable tourism and recreational fisheries up and down the entire coast. Those coastal tourism and recreational fisheries are worth far more annually than the short-term catches by the commercial industry.
To make the situation worse, many people are disturbed by the image of a NC MFC board member (Mikey Daniels) voting to extend his own commercial season. This is bad government, plain and simple. It is hard to understand how in this day and age we have an industry regulating itself, as your commercial fishing industry does. Your current arrangement creates an obvious conflict of interest between the regulators and the beneficiaries of regulation, and it should end.
Additionally, striped bass depend to a great extent on bunker (menhaden), and after viewing the recent ASMFC graph on that species, it is clear that Omega Protein is unsustainably harvesting more than that species can withstand, as well. That too impacts the striped bass population.
I respectfully request that:
a) North Carolina change the way its striped bass are commercially harvested, going from net to hand-held hook and line and requiring gentle catch and release practices for fish under 28 inches, with a set number of fish over 28 inches and no culling allowed;
b) North Carolina reduce the commercial harvest amounts for both striped bass and bunker;
c) North Carolina change its fisheries management, and put self-interested parties like Mikey Daniels on an advisory board, with only impartial scientists making the final decision about seasons and limits, based on what is scientifically sustainable.
Thank you for considering my comments. I can be reached at (717) 232-8335, if someone from your staff would like to speak to me further.
Sincerely,
Josh First
cc: John Arway; Curt Schroder; ASMFC;
Gene Kray; CCA
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February 24, 2011
Hon. Joe Martens, Acting Commissioner
New York State DEC
625 Broadway
Albany, NY 12233-1011
Dear Commissioner Martens,
This letter’s purpose is to express my strong opposition to recent proposals that would allow any trawl fishery at all for striped bass in New York, and also to express my concern about the declining populations of striped bass and menhaden, upon which so many other fish depend, including striped bass.
Several reasons account for my opposition to netting striped bass: 1) The size of the bass population is declining, 2) the menhaden (bunker) population is staggeringly low due to Omega Protein’s rapacious over-fishing, 3) recent striped bass breeding success has been low, meaning that fewer young fish are “in the pipeline” for both recreational and commercial fishing, and 4) commercial netting results in culling and a tremendous waste of striped bass and “bycatch.” These are all conditions similar to the 1980s, when the striped bass population crashed. Additionally, by all appearances striped bass are not being managed sustainably by any state, and North Carolina’s enormous bass-kills in early 2011 support concerns that present commercial quotas are impacting far more fish than previously believed.
Given these conditions, this should be a time when responsible resource managers take a step back, and consider ways to increase the bass population. Ways to stabilize or increase the population include increasing recreational and commercial size limits (presently 28 inches) even just an inch or two, eliminating or dramatically decreasing commercial harvest amounts and seasons, and switching commercial harvesting to a hand-held hook and line operation only, with no culling allowed. Implementing all or some of these methods will benefit a species that generates much more economic development as a recreational fish than it does as an over-harvested commercial fish.
Treated responsibly, striped bass generate sustainable, renewable economic development year after year. Treated irresponsibly, with only short-term commercial quotas getting serious consideration, the bass will be exterminated, and many coastal communities will see their otherwise-stable tourist revenues diminish substantially. And the commercial fishermen, who have behaved in egregiously greedy and wasteful ways, will also be out of luck. They, too, need your help; they need to be saved from themselves.
Please stop the unsustainable commercial race for the last dregs of a dwindling migratory species, and help keep it as a recreational and economic mainstay along our coast. Incidentally, I fish extensively around New York City as well as New Jersey, and I have similarly urged Pennsylvania’s representatives to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to eliminate or greatly reduce commercial harvests of striped bass, or at the very least eliminate all netting and try different ways of allowing a hand-held hook and line commercial fishery, which when combined with lower daily limits could then convert recreational fishermen into a more sustainable commercial function. Thank you for considering my comments.
Yours Truly,
Josh First