This is an article from my good friend Robert Montgomery over at activist angler he keeps me up to date on things that are happening with threats and environmental news with the great lakes region here . I can’t thank him enough for doing this. So with out further or-do here is his artcile.
“I’m from the government. I’m here to help.”
No doubt you’ve heard that oxymoronic one-liner before.
Aside from the military, government is more a problem causer than a problem solver.
That’s certainly the case with Asian carp and the damage that they are doing to the nation’s waterways, according to recent articles in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.
One of them begins this way:
Maybe a 40-pound silver carp upside the head would convince President Barack Obama of the urgent need to take decisive action against these invasive filter feeders.
And it continues:
“This is a crisis situation,” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine warned in an interview. “And yet the Obama administration seems to be oblivious to it.”
If the president’s got time to hand out dried fruit to trick-or-treaters, he’s got time to order the Army Corps of Engineers to get off its doughnuts and complete — in 18 months instead of five years — its study of a permanent separation between the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world and the Mississippi River.
But he won’t. Wouldn’t want to upset the big-money guys in Chicago.
Instead, Obama will continue to waste taxpayer money on an apologist, I mean, carp czar, futile fish kills, superfluous studies and stonewalling of Great Lakes governors, attorneys general, scientists and environmentalists — all of whom recognize that these gilled guerillas will lay waste to the $7 billion Great Lakes commercial fishing industry and the 800,000 jobs it supports.
Read Presidential leadership against against carp? Go fish here.
The other article says that Jerry Rasmussen, a former biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “blames the importation of the fish, as well as a political system that bends over backward to promote and protect commerce, yet fails to protect the environment.”
Rasmussen also says this:
“When the USFWS was criticized for the importation of Asian carp many years ago, it turned over the program to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“All federal and local officials wanted to do were help Southern fish farmers. They didn’t care about what would happen when these fish got loose. The ponds used by fish farmers are built on river bottoms and can’t be drained.
Today, Illinois officials keep dragging their feet, Rasmussen said, believing that it’s more important to keep barges moving through a canal than to seal off the Chicago waterways from the Great Lakes to keep out the Asian carp.
“The [federal] Asian carp czar (John Goss) listens to the interests of commerce,” Rasmussen said. “Goods being shipped down the Chicago Canal that could just as easily be moved by train and truck. Politicians don’t want to do anything.”
Read ‘Wonder fish’ turns into environmental piranha: The battle against Asian carp here.
