I read with alarm a consistent stream of disinformation about so-called ‘Native Fish Restoration Projects’ – media interviews and environmental impact statements about the latest misguided projects to dump poison into rivers, lakes, and wetlands in the U.S. – today in places today like Yellowstone National Park’s Soda Butte Creek.

It occurs to me that if anyone other than biologists were trying to eradicate every fish, amphibian, reptile, and insect from its natural habitats –  our community would be in an uproar.  Imagine for example that all this aquatic life was being killed by a massive oil spill…or eradicated by a developer. The official rhetoric is always carefully scripted to make the ‘treatments’ sound surgical – not at all like the wholesale clear-cutting of the aquatic biota that is resultant from Rotenone poisoning. The statements are consistently packaged with messaging about ‘the ills of the past’ and suggestions that somehow project ends will justify the project means.

Unfortunately many anglers, conservationists, non-profits, and scientists remain silent.  Meanwhile, this quiet march of habitat destruction continues, funded by big public budgets, all across my home state of Montana, in Yellowstone Park, and throughout much of the U.S.

This latest project in Yellowstone National Park and others across the country are all part of a new-found zeal to ‘restore’ native species. The poisoning/stocking strategy has even found a friend or two in the conservation community, those who proclaim, mostly against science, the almost magical ecological restoration qualities of this outmoded fishery management strategy. >Read An Open Letter to Mr. Ted Williams

Rotenone poured in to streams like Soda Butte simply kills everything in its path including in many cases the remnant populations of native fish intended for ‘restoration.’ Anyone doubting the significant collateral damage being caused by this brand of so-called “Native Fish Restoration” or the potential long-term impacts can read more at www.stopriverkilling.org or Watch a Short Documentary on YouTube

Our nation’s streams, rivers and wetlands  face many challenges today, but few so great as poorly conceived, extreme and antiquated management techniques.  In this we are clearly the most invasive species.