One of the great frustrations of fly fishing has been our collective hope that the rest of the planet would view our small hobby as something larger, perhaps embracing it as a way of life, or reason for a conservationist Jihad …
… how through us society would stop tossing empty water bottles into the creek, how we would adopt sustainable fisheries by letting a few small ones go, and would restore the reverence for Mother Nature, rather than letting industry blacken both the bitch’s eyes instead.
We were ignored with little fanfare, so we played the invasive species card; with us merry band of outdoorsmen alternately infecting or defending all comers from Green Slime – and the spectacle of your city streets coated in slug tracks while your women were hunted by multi-armed creatures with eight eyeballs …
Still they yawned at our quaint, yet “fringe” message, given their offspring were tatted as to be indistinguishable from the Alien Menace, and their womenfolk were already hunted by nearly everything able to carry a beer … cold or otherwise …
But to restore us to prominence is the news that we’ve regained the Holy War label, now that its been revealed that the World Trade Center was merely a diversionary raid by Al Qaeda – and Bin Laden was after bigger payback, infecting the nation’s food supply …
… or infecting McDonald’s, which is pretty much the same thing.
Dozens of foreign insects and plant diseases slipped undetected into the United States in the years after 9/11, when authorities were so focused on preventing another attack that they overlooked a pest explosion that threatened the quality of the nation’s food supply.
At the time, hundreds of agricultural scientists responsible for stopping invasive species at the border were reassigned to anti-terrorism duties in the newly formed Homeland Security Department – a move that scientists say cost billions of dollars in crop damage and eradication efforts from California vineyards to Florida citrus groves.
In another couple of months this will be blamed on the Democrats or the Republicans, but we’ll know what really happened …
Was I CalTrout or Trout Unlimited I’d have a dozen lawyers filling out grant requests for defending the borders in the absence of all those Ph.D’s allocated to something else …