Federal budget includes boost for Delaware basin

Trout Unlimited’s efforts in the Delaware River Basin will get a boost as a result of the federal 2021 budget.  The Delaware River Basin Restoration Program (DRBRP) received $10 million in funding as part of the fiscal year 2021 Appropriations bill recently approved by Congress and signed by President Trump. The sum is a modest increase from the $9.7 million budgeted last fiscal year.  The…

How conservation can save our politics and save America

Wednesday afternoon, a day that America won’t soon forget, I was on a phone call just across the river in Trout Unlimited’s Arlington, Va., headquarters.    A group of us at TU were talking about recovering Snake River salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest when my phone began blaring with a message from the mayor of Washington, D.C. In response to the attacks on the Capitol, she was ordering a city-wide curfew in three hours.   TU staff and volunteers regularly go…

Plan to keep Asian carp from Great Lakes gets big boost

By Taylor Ridderbusch Today, both state governments and federal agencies announced two major milestones in the Brandon Road Lock and Dam project to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. First, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state of Illinois have reached a design agreement on the project, officially designating Illinois as…

Pigeons, persistence and hope

I recently read an essay where a priest on a mission to Guatemala discovered that artists from the village painted museum-quality artwork on the inside walls of a bell-tower—a place where only pigeons would see them. The story reminded me of Trout Unlimited’s work—behind the scenes, often unnoticed, complicated, hard, and, ultimately, beautiful.   What a year. We reckoned with racial injustice as a nation, and looked inward to the fact that we need to become…