One morning inÌęFebruary, 15-year-old Maxine McCormick leaned her fly rod against her shoulder and watched her coach, Chris Korich, warm up.

Wind chopped the surface of the shallow casting pond. Korich, a 60-year-old 12-time casting world champion, gently whipped theÌęfly rod in his hand. He knelt in a box paintedÌęon the concrete shore, aimed at a Hula-Hoop target floating on the surface 35 feet away, and flicked his arm.Ìę

A perfect loop of bright green line unrolled across the water, but just as it reached the target, a gust of wind blew the yellow fly at its end a few inches off course. Korich flicked another roll cast and missed. He missed again.

He shook his head at himself and the wind, took aÌędeep breath, and finallyÌędropped his fly inside the target.Ìę

“I’d shorten my tippet if I were you,” he said to Maxine, reeling in his line. “It’ll help you with this wind.” He walked back to the clubhouse at California’s Long Beach Casting Club.Ìę

Maxine knelt, aimed, and splashed her fly on target with one, two, three roll casts in a row. She stood, dropped her rod off at the clubhouse, and spent the remaining minutes before the Southwestern Regional Casting Tournament standingÌęon the club’s front porch, staring at a tiny green hummingbird whizzingÌęaround the bushes.

Several of the world’s best casters were at the Long Beach club for the tournament, but the only one causing any buzz was Maxine. During an earlier warm-up session, members of the Swedish casting team recorded her on their phones, and a few old men wreathed in cigar smoke called her the future of the sport. In 2016, when she was 12, Maxine won gold at the Flycasting World ChampionshipsÌęin Estonia. That same year, she outscored Steve Rajeff, modern casting’s LeBron James, during a tournament in Kentucky. At the next world championships, in 2018, she repeated her gold. This trio of feats made her arguably the best female fly-caster in the world, all before she got her driver’s license. The New York Times called her “.”Ìę

And she had been. But Maxine was in tenth grade now. She worried about schoolwork, college applications, her friends. She likedÌęsnowboarding. Her family had moved from San Francisco to Oregon two years earlier, away from her coach and casting club. And except for a few hours spent shaking the dust off in the days before the Long Beach competition, she hadn’t practiced her cast in four months.Ìę

At competitions like this one, put on by the , a few dozen casters compete in various scored games, most of which are centered around hitting a smattering of circular 54-inch targets with 30-inch bull’s-eyes floating between 15 and 50 feet away. Every competitor starts with 100 points; two points are subtracted for missing the target with the fly entirely, one for missing the bull’s-eye.Ìę

Maxine’s round didn’t go great. Five times in a row she missed the same roll-cast target she’d hit in practice, to scoreÌęan unusually low 95 points, behind Korich and her dad, Glenn, who is also a competitive caster. After her last cast, she shot up from her kneeling stance, her face reddening, and spoke tensely for a moment with her dad before stalking off. “She’s pissed,” Glenn said.

She seemed more perplexed than pissed when I caught up with her a few minutes later to ask how the round had gone. “Not good,” she said, scuffing her shoes in the grass. “I haven’t missed a roll cast like that in a long time.”Ìę

Still, she said, she wasn’t going to start practicing regularly. She was looking forward to a summer fishing camp and her family’s annual trip to the McCloud River, in Northern California, later in the year. Otherwise, she was taking time off from casting.Ìę

Her phone buzzed. “It’s hard to practice when your friends are sending you Snapchat stories about all the fun they’re having,” she said. She ran off to rescue drowning worms at the casting pond’s edge with her eight-year-old brother, Tobi.

The next morning, Maxine scored a 99 in the dry-fly accuracy competition, then won the event by beating Korich in a tiebreaker castoff, 99 to 97—missing perfection, twice, by inches.Ìę

The cast is as fundamentally important to fly-fishing as the swing is to golf or the brushstroke is to painting. In many circles, the cast defines the angler as much as catching fish does. Catching fish requires luck. Casting well requires skill.

A fly is made to imitate an insect or a minnow, usually out of animal hair, feathers, and thread. It is extremely light. To move it any distance at all, you actually need to throw the plastic-coated fly line. A fly rod works kind of like a pole vaulter’s pole: moved quickly, then stopped and forced to flex and then unflex, the rod flings the fly line, which unrolls as a loop, dropping the fly elegantly on the water.Ìę

Putting this all together in one motion looks complicated, and it is, even for people who cast all the time. Any number of simple errors, like misplacing your thumb on the rod’s cork grip or letting your wrist get loose, affect the line’s trajectory as it whipsaws back and forth through the air. One hiccup and your line is snared in a tree. Another and you’ve snarled a tiny “wind knot,” which ruins the leader attached to your fly and forces you to tie on a new one. Meanwhile, fish are rising around you, eating for the first time all day. If you make another error on your next cast, you’ll spook them. AnglersÌęget the yips. They start going to casting ponds and practicing. They start wishing they had a perfect cast, like Maxine’s.

Good casters create “tight” loops by rolling and unrolling their fly line from the tip of their rod with extreme efficiency, accuracy, and power. These loops are beautiful—momentum rippling through fluorescent line. Maxine’s loops are so tight that they almost fold into themselves. Other casters compare them to a knife: they slice the air rather than unfurlÌęthrough it.Ìę

Maxine’s cast is informed by decades of knowledge. In the early 20th century, fly-casting—as opposed to, say, just fly-fishing on a river—boomed, and local clubs built ponds around the country. Madison Square Garden hosted competitions. Legends were born. Bernard “Lefty” Kreh fished with Ernest Hemingway and wrote a column about fly-fishing for the Baltimore Sun. Joan Wulff, the First Lady of Fly-Fishing,Ìęcould cast 161 feet with one hand, still the women’s world record. Kreh, Wulff, and others founded their own schools of thought on the casting motionÌęand published libraries’ worth of instructional books and videos.

Today, the sport of fly-casting is far from mainstream—just a fraction of all anglersÌęparticipate. But devotees live on in small pockets across the country. Chris Korich’s casting method is an efficiency-focused version of the classic West Coast style that birthed many of the great casters. You can try it now: Pretend you’re holding a coffee cup in front of you at your waist. That’s the handle of your fly rod. Now throw the coffee, hard, back over your shoulder, ending with the handle of the cup by your ear. Bring it back down again, hard. You’ve made a fly-cast—poorly.Ìę

Maxine’s version, Korich says, is the most efficient cast he’s ever seen. She applies just the right amount of powerÌęand not a watt more. This makes it look like she’s launching 100-plus feet of line through the air while not doing much work at all. She can subtly adjust this motion to aim the fly and land it on a square inch 50 feet across a pond, and when she wants to, she can give up that precision and double down on her power to cast an unthinkable amount of line. Having a smaller frame and less muscle than most anglers doesn’t hinder her. Ranel Kommits of Estonia holds the world record for the longest cast using a one-handed fly rod and regular fly line: 187 feet. Maxine has cast 161 feet, tying Wulff’s record. That’s like chucking a feather more than half the length of a football field.

Casting competitions are only held a few times a year. Maxine also attends several sporting, fishing, and fly-tying expos around the country, performing casting demos. She’s paid well for her time at these events—usually around $1,000 for three 30-minute demos across a weekend. Korich accompanies herÌęand gives a spiel to the audience while she snipes targets.

Korich was a teen casting champion himself and remains a fierce competitor. He’s poured his attention into Maxine, in the hopes of inspiring other young people to join the sport. He teaches Maxine, as he does all kids, for free.Ìę

Korich once showed Maxine videos of the Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton, then gave her a Team USA jacket that looked just like Retton’s. He’s an uncle figure. But 15-year-olds have different relationships with their uncles than ten-year-olds do. She loves him, but spending weekends with her coach and not her friends drives her nuts.Ìę

“What do we call our technique, Maxine?” he’ll say during casting demos.

“EŽÚŽÚŸ±łŠŸ±±đČÔłŠČâ.”

“That’s right—e-fish-iency.ÌęThat middle syllable is the important one, isn’t it Maxine?”

You can’t hear her groan, but you can feel it.

He calls her Michael Jordan with a fly rod—then Annie Oakley with a fly rod. She outscores the men. If he sometimes sounds like a carnival barker, well, that’s the life of a hype man.Ìę

He’s aware that she’s drifting away from the sport. “I believe in her, no matter what,” he says. “I also believe that if you love something, you come back to it.”

Crowds do not pick up on this gentle coach-student friction. They break into spontaneous applause when she hurls her line with a two-handed fly rod the size of a claymore sword. Grown adults who’ve been practicing casting for decades mutter,Ìę“Jesus.” Even people who don’t cast themselves yell out, “Holy shit!”

OnceÌęa well-regarded bamboo-rod maker begged Maxine to cast one of his rods. He watched as she flexed the rod forward, then back, soaring line through the air. “Wish I could cast like that,” he said.

“What she does,” whispered a man nearby to no one in particular, “is just so beautiful.”

After her casting demonstrations, Maxine returns to her booth with her dad and Korich and awaits the well-wishers and autograph seekers who line up to see her. Women are the fastest-growing demographic in fly-fishing, and at general sporting expos, the crowd is a mix of men and women, young and old.Ìę

But at the Northwest FlyÌęTyerÌęand Fly Fishing Expo in Albany, Oregon, it is not. People over 40 make up more than half of all anglers, and men still make up two-thirds of them. Millennials and Gen Zers are rare. In Oregon, the older men are a mass of technical jackets and denture-white smiles. They have seen Maxine cast. They are astonished. They are on a mission to look her in the eye and let her know that they are just so proud of her.

Maxine is a pro at dealing with all this. When someone makes a joke about the Hoover administration, she politely giggles, says thank you, and signs their hat.Ìę

“It’s hard when it’s all old people,” she eventually admits. “With any other more conventional sport, you can do it with friends, which motivates you to do it, because you can chat and keep each other company. In this sport, there are no other kids my age to keep it exciting. So I get bored.”

Later, at another casting event, I watch a girl who is 12 or 13 approach Maxine, smiling hugely.Ìę

“You really inspire me,” she says.

Maxine smiles back and nods and says thank you.Ìę

The girl leaves. I ask Maxine what it feels like to be told something like that. She thinks for a minute. “It’s weird,” she says. “Because, I mean
 it’s a big deal. But to me, it’s not that big of a deal.”Ìę

To most people in her life, Maxine is not a world champion. She is a teenager in jeans and sneakers withÌęblond hair. She’s a good big sister to Tobi. She spends long car rides staring at her phone and laughing hysterically at
 something. She takes a certain delight in horrifying her parents with tales of kids who she almost hung out with once who have since moved away and been arrested.Ìę

Glenn was signed by the Oakland A’s as a shortstop in 1987, but an injury ended his career. Now he works as a gym teacher. Maxine’s mom, Simone, is a German-born lawyer who litigates data privacy and employment cases. Maxine grew up in San Francisco, where she was the ringleader of a group of younger kids who lived on her block. When Glenn ran an outdoor day-trip summer camp, Maxine led kids around, tree climbing and adventuring in that aimless, Huck Finn sort of way. “She was always fearless,” Simone says.

In 2012, nine-year-old Maxine did not hesitate to try casting when she visited the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club with Glenn, who thought casting better would make him a better fisherman. A few weeks later, when Maxine and her dad returned, both Korich and Steve Rajeff, arguably the two best competition fly-casters in the world, happened to be at the club. They started giving Maxine pointers. After several minutes of Korich’s help, she was able to roll-cast to targets 30 feet away, a skill I did not master in my first five years of fly-fishing. Glenn started taking multiple lessons a week from Korich. Maxine liked casting with her dad, so she came to practice, too.Ìę

Korich taught her a simple motion that worked better for her small frame. He modified the smallest rods he could find to fit her perfectly. Together they created a training regimen to maximize her potential. She worked hard at it because she wanted to cast well. She liked to win. Within three years, she was a world champion.

Then Maxine became a teenager, and the rest of her life filled in. She picked up snowboarding and started running high school track. She focused on her schoolwork. She realized she wanted to be a veterinarian or a doctor.Ìę

The next world championships are in the fall of 2020, in Sweden. The world championships aren’t something you just show up for, her parents say. Usually hands-off, they insist that if she wants to compete, she’ll need to follow a strict practice regimen for several months to prepare. Maxine doesn’t let on much about her intentions.Ìę

There are few opportunities in the sport for someone like Maxine. She was once asked to go on Good Morning America, but it didn’t pan out. KorichÌęis trying to get her signed as a Patagonia brand ambassador, but that hasn’t happened yet. Maxine could make a little money winning the occasional championship or tournament shoot-out—but not anywhere close to enough to earn a living. Guiding or working in a fly shop are full-time passion jobsÌęand don’t seem in the cards. Teaching private casting lessons is a decentÌęway to make some money, but she hasn’t tried it yet.

“Tłó±đ winning of casting championships and all those sorts of things is great,” saidÌęWulff, who won her first competitionÌęat 12 and has run her casting school for 40 years.Ìę“But it’s not a lifetime career. Maxine should cast as much as she can. But I think she should go to college and be a veterinarian.”

In April, the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club teemed with energy. Fifty kids and their parents gathered at an event to eat hot dogs, tie flies, and learn to cast.Ìę

Maxine was there, helping Korich give a presentation, gratis. The pair had just returned from a competition in Utah, where Maxine won $3,000. A half dozen adults shepherded the kids to the casting pool’s edge and gave firm instructions on the slow lift-then-snap motion of a roll cast. “Raise your elbow, higher!” a mom shouted from the bank.Ìę

Maxine gravitated to the youngest caster, a five-year-old boy having some trouble. He flicked the rod forward awkwardly. The line went nowhere. He frowned.Ìę

“Flick it forward again. But keep the rod high in front this time,” Maxine coaxed. She guided his hands as he tried it. Better. A smile.

“Good job! You want to try again?” He did, and sent the roll cast looping straight to the target. After every attempt, Maxine asked if he wanted to try again. He did.

After a few minutes, the boy said something. Maxine bent over to talk to him, then gave him a high five and walked away. He put the fly rod down and stood happily, watching the others cast, until an adult came over and made him pick it up again.

“What did that boy say to you?” I asked Maxine later, as the kids filtered to the fly-tying station.Ìę

“He said his arm was tired, and he didn’t want to cast anymore,” she said. “I told him it was fine to take a break.”

At the top of the steep gorge, the McCloud River rumbling somewhere below, Glenn, Maxine, Tobi, and I assembled our rods and slipped on fishing vests. Maxine looked at the only other car inÌęthe pull-off area, where a few almost drinking-age boys were stepping into their waders.

“Those are counselors at Fish Camp,” Maxine murmured. It was late June, and she was heading to the summer camp in a few days, where sheÌęwould be a counselor-in-training. The boys headed our way.Ìę

“Hey Maxine,” a tall one said. “You ready to teach casting this year?” She nodded, color rising to her cheeks, and continued fiddling with her vest. The boys talked fishing with Glenn for a few minutes, then headed out, yelling, “See you at camp, Maxine!” over their shoulders.Ìę

“That was so embarrassing,” Maxine said, smiling.

Down in the gorge, twilight nestled in. Little yellow sallies were rising off the river, unsteady on new wings, while fuzzy stone flies the size of nickels dipped low to lay their eggs among the riffles. Shadows of hungry trout rose, sipped down a bite of dinner, and disappeared, forming a slow, steady chorus of small splashes and plops. I sat down and watched Maxine flip perfect roll casts across the river, then stared at her fly, along with her, waiting for a trout to rise.

While she fished, Maxine talked about camping on the river every year with her family, and how the McCloud was her favorite water in the world. She hadn’t cast since we last saw each other several months before, but she’d decided she would compete in the world championships in 2020.Ìę

“Just to defend my title,” she said. “When high school’s over, I think I’m going to be done with fly-casting competitions.”

A fish snapped up her fly. She yipped and missed the hook set, tightening her line after the trout had let go. “Did you see that?” she said excitedly. “I always set too late.” For ten minutes she cast to the same hungry fish, which tried to eat her fly over and over again. She couldn’t hook it.

For months, I’d stared at Maxine’s perfect cast. Now I watched as she missed take after take. Each time, she gave an excited, anxious bounce and exhaled a cheery “Ugh!”Ìę

I thought about the old men at the fly-casting expos calling Maxine the future of the sport, the new Joan Wulff, the Mozart of Fly Casting. About the pressure of it all.Ìę

Glenn stepped up beside me and watched his daughter fail and giggle. “She doesn’t like to be told how to do anything,” he said. “She’s figuring it out herself.”Ìę

Maxine cast and cast and cast. At last light, she sent a beautiful loop to the exact square inch where a fish had appeared a minute before. The same dark shadow rose and inhaled her fly.Ìę

She set the hook. The canyon rang with a joyous yelp.

Glenn netted the fish. “A brown trout!” Maxine yelled. She lifted its dappled body free of the water, removed the fly from its mouth, and admired its golden flash. Then, moving quickly, she raised the fish to her lips, kissed it on its head, and let it go.

The post The World Champ of Fly-Casting Just Wants to Be a Teen appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On Sunday, while Southern California’s wildland firefighters dug line on the 10,000-acre Maria Fire and residents returned to their homes following mandatory evacuations, President Trump exercised his thumbs.Ìę

Gavin Newsom, the new Democratic governor of California, was quick to respond. “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation,” Newsome . Later, his office released a longer : “We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes.”

Fire season in Southern California is just beginning. The crucible of heat, dryness, and extreme winds that sparked hundreds of fires over the course of weeks is likely to continue through December. According to the latest National Interagency Coordination Center’s , the causes are above-normal temperatures; decreased rainfall; strong winds whipped up by a “highly amplified” stationary pressure ridge; and higher sea surface temperatures over the Pacific Ocean. Warm the planet and California will burn.

The roots of California’s ongoing strugglesÌęwith wildfire are enormously complex, even when they’re not politicized in a 140-word tweetstorm. People spend their lives studying these issues in order to understand them, and to explain them accurately to average Americans. I asked forestry scientists, environmental engineers, and emergency management experts to help fact check the President’s tweets. (The Department of the Interior could not be reached for comment.)

“The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management”Ìę

Purely , California has fared better against wildfires during Newsom’s first year in office than it has for the past several years. In 2019, the California Department of Forestry and Fire ProtectionÌęhas responded to 6,190 fires that have burned 198,392 acres across the state. By this time last year, 5,355 fires had burned 632,701 acres, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. The five-year average from January 1 to November 3 has been 5,382 fires burning 373,576 acres.

, three people have been killed by wildfires, and 22 have been injured. In 2018, perhaps the worst fire year on record, 93 people died; at least 80 people were injured. Still, the worst mayÌębe yet to come in 2019.

In March 2019, , months before wildfire season started. In October, that fund and improve “wildfire prevention, mitigation, and response,” and pledged $21 billion to help update utilities that have sparked some of the state’s largest fires. He even for its role in helping fight the largest wildfires in the state.

Still, Newsom is just part of the bigger picture. “Most of the forests in California are owned by the federal government,” said , a professor of forest ecology at the University of Washington. “Tłó±đ state controls a relatively small amount of land. The governor has nothing to do with how those federal lands are managed.”

Indeed, 57 percent of California’s 33 million acres is managed by the federal government. , the total acreage burned in the state was almost perfectly split: 124,280 acres burned were federal, 126,069 were state.Ìę

“I told him from the first day we met that he must 'clean' his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers.”Ìę

Trump’s talking about his widely panned after the 2018 Paradise fire to “take care of the floors of the forest” and to start “raking and cleaning and doing things” in order to prevent more fires.

“Trump got it partly right,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter with a P.h.D. in environmental sociology and the founder ofÌę, a fire policy advocacy group. “Much of the problem stems from past fire exclusion”—not letting natural fires burn—“and excess dead and down fuel.” Allowing fires to burn naturally, the idea goes, will eliminate excess fuel and keep fires from burning larger and hotter.

However, in Germany and several other nations that tried this extensive “cleaning” technique in the past, the massive amounts of work to literally cart away dead limbs throughout a forest wasn’t sustainable. Beside the enormous effort and cost, the Germans “realized they were just carting away all the nutrients the forest needed,” Ingalsbee said.

Peterson noted that federal budgets are so small for the American version of this type of thing—removing surface fuels via controlled burns and thinning dense forests via logging so that fires can’t reach their crown—that only 10 to 15 percent of lands that need it get it. “It’s the elephant in the room. We know what we need to do, and that it works. But we just don’t have the money.”

Both Ingalsbee and Peterson also noted that many of California’s worst fires have burned in brushy grassland, not forests.

“As for the environmentalists,” said Ingalsbee, “I’d hardly say that we’re his bosses. In fact, we have a real hard time getting any of our demands implemented.”

“Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help.”Ìę

In 2017, California fighting wildfires; 2018 cost even more. The federal government refunds up to 75 percent of firefighting funds for the largest fires. ( about a year ago that he would pull funding to California’s wildfire problem if they didn’t “remedy” their “poor” forest management.) This year, the Trump administration has made federal funds available to help fight several of California’s biggest fires. Trump appears to also be talking about Federal Emergency Management Aid disaster recovery funding; early in 2019, in grants to help Californians affected by wildfire.Ìę

Last year, Congress passed a spending bill authorizing upwards of $2 billion in suppression funds to be used fighting wildfires, and which allows the Forest Service to tap into FEMA funds to fight fires. This sounds like progress. But maybe not. “It’s a huge waste of money in my opinion,” said Ingalsbee. “Better to spend that money on preventing burning, or helping people recover from burning. Hurling firefighters into the maw of these climate-driven wildfires is just burning cash. At some point the well will run dry.”

“No more.”Ìę

Though Trump has made it before, this is a serious threat. The ecosystem of emergency preparedness, response, and recovery for fires in California—like in many other states—is organized around federal funding. Local, county, and state governments rely on federal funding to save the day when things get especially bad. It’s unclear whether Trump can legally turn the money faucet off. But if he does, losing federal funding would be devastating.

“In order to punish Gavin Newsom and Democratic policies, Trump is punishing the whole state,” said Ingalsbee. “That’s 90 million citizens. And this is not just a California thing. It’s a national mobilization. The impacts will ripple out across the West, across the rest of the nation.”

“You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states.”Ìę

“That’s not true at all,” said Ingalsbee. “It’s true that California fires cause tremendous social costs. Homes burned, civilians killed. But we’re seeing very large fires all across the West.”

By October 1, had burned in Alaska in 2019, dwarfing California’s wildfire acreage.Ìę

Last year, California had by far the most acres burned, according to the , with 1.8 million acres burned. But other states also endured massive fires. In Idaho, 600,000 acres burned; nearly 500,000 burned in Colorado; 410,000 burned in Alaska.

California is unique among those states because of its Mediterranean climate—it’s extremely dry in the summer, and especially fire prone. “That has nothing to do with how its lands are managed,” Peterson said. “Tłó±đ fires are totally dependent on extreme weather events that occur.”

“Also, open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North. Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean. Should be done immediately. California desperately needs water, and you can have it now!”

“Tłó±đse fires are not caused or exacerbated by the operation of the large water systems,” said , a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. “And firefighters have not had a shortage of water.”

“Rivers have absolutely nothing to do with wildfires,” confirmed Peterson. “Wildfires have to do with three factors: sufficient flammable fuels, hot dry weather, and an ignition source.“

“Here’s what everyone needs to know: wherever people live in fire-prone areas, they need to learn how to live with fire. There’s no easy fix here. We have to make communities more fire safe, and have evacuation plans, and we need to have structures that are resistant to fire. This is not something the government is going to save people from.”

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As a kid, I learned to fly-fishÌęat a small limestone creek in central Pennsylvania. Its clear waters teemed with rainbow and brown trout, and no wonder—a few hundred yards away from its banks was a concrete fish hatchery, where the state bred and raised hundreds of thousands of those species to maturity every year, then released them. As I got more into fly-fishing, I volunteered to help stock this stream and others nearby, following behind a tanker truck aslosh with fish, then carrying bucketfuls of trout down to the water before releasing them with a gentle tip. A week or so later, I’d join hundreds of other anglers in catching most of those fishÌęand carryingÌęhome full stringers of hatchery-raised fish for the grill.

A few years after I went to college, I learned that the hatchery had been closed downÌębecause it overflowed into the creek during heavy rains. The creek also had to be closed to fishing—the hatchery’s overflow polluted the waterÌęwith nitrogen, creating a deadly algae bloom. I was sad, but it was OK—I had a new spot to fish, Spring Creek, near my classesÌęat Penn State. It also had a trout hatchery on its banks.

My experience with fishing and hatcheries is shared by many anglers in the United States, including Josh “Bones” Murphy, who produced and directed Patagonia’s latest film, , out on October 30. Murphy studied wildlife and fisheries biology at the University of Vermont, earned a master’s degree in fisheries, and went on to manage the on-campus hatchery at California’s Humboldt State UniversityÌębefore shifting his attention to filmmaking. He got the directing job after Patagonia founderÌęYvon ChouinardÌępitched him the idea of a movie about the backwardness of hatcheries. “He said, ‘We are doing a film about the arrogance of man,’” Murphy recently told me. “It was a perfect Yvon-ism.”

Suddenly, the human processes Murphy had taken for granted as normal—the concrete holding pools full of fry and the artificial insemination of millions of eggs—seemed unnatural, or worse. “It all seemed normal when I was working at the hatchery,” Murphy said. “Once I started researching for the movie, I was dumbstruck. How did I play a part in this and not recognize the scale and scope? We were putting fish in so that we could take fish out—not to make healthy rivers.”Ìę

This is the central thesis of Artifishal, which flips the ideology that both Murphy and I were taught on its head: the United States’Ìęhatchery programs and their millions of fishy offspring are not saving salmon, but unwilding them. Paired with the hard facts about salmon populations on the West Coast—in California, more than 45 percentÌęof salmonid species are endangered—it’s a powerful argument that hatcheries do not serve nature or fish, but rather humans, and have been an outright disaster for wild salmon and the environment.

The film seems built on Murphy’s own conversion. It’s told through a blend of perspectives and watery vignettes: a fisheries manager explains why hatcheries are vital, and we watch as adult salmon are killed by hand and millions of tiny new fish are created by industrial-level artificial insemination, the sperm and eggs blown out of them with an air hose. A writer recounts the early, uninformed history of fish hatcheries in the United States; a biologist explains the “wondrous” natural life cycle of salmonÌęand how hatchery fish extirpate wild salmon. A Native American explains why his tribe needs hatcheries; other Native Americans explain how hatcheries have made their traditional fish catch untenable. Another biologist unwinds evolutionary forces and fish geneticsÌęand explains how hatcheries circumvent nature’s genius.Ìę

“At first I thought it would be an easy story to tell, and that people would have very well-developedÌępros and cons, and there would be good guys and bad guys,” Murphy told me. “I thought there would be so much black-and-white. It ended up becoming really gray.”

From there, Artifishal ramps up into hatcheries’ broad-reaching effects. The film provides convincing evidence that hatcheries are built solely to support industrial and recreational fisheries, and that they are used as political pawns of the government agencies that oversee them. We learn about how struggling salmon populations endanger killer whales and Native American tribes. The “” makes a cameo. Eventually, the film makes its way to a logical endpoint: the massive environmental impacts of salmon farmingÌęand hatcheries’ use as cover for dams, pollution, and overfishing.

The backwardness and absurdity of man’s intervention is a common thread, with pungent imagery: salmon are whacked with metal rods, frozen en masse into fish cubes that are then shattered, and disemboweled for their eggs, all in the name of industrializing what nature already does on its own.

It’s worth remembering that nature’s processes can be just as brutal. ButÌęlike Patagonia’s other films, ArtifishalÌęhas an agenda: spreading Chouinard’s scrappy environmentalism. Many people agree with him, myself included. But at times, the film oversimplifies. Notably, it glosses over the different types of fish hatcheries that exist—some of which, like captive breeding programs to save dwindling species, are less problematic than others. In an email, Patrick Samuel, a program manager at the fishing conservation organization CalTrout, explained that’s the reasonÌęhis organization did not officially endorse the film, though it didÌęhostÌęscreenings. “Hatcheries cannot replace fish that are adapted to their local conditions,” Samuel wrote. “That said, keep in mind that there are different kinds of hatcheries built expressly and designed for different purposes, so painting them all with a broad brush is inaccurate and unfair.”

Murphy’s counterpoint is that “conservation” hatcheries and captive breeding programs are a bandage on a gaping wound—a free pass to keep fishingÌęand damming riversÌęwhere species are struggling. And he’s right.Ìę

Ultimately, ArtifishalÌęsets out a powerful argument against the misuse of fish hatcheries in the United States. It’s also the perfect film for our apocalyptic times. As the Amazon burns and the polar ice caps melt, ArtifishalÌętakes on a problem with a relatively simple fixÌęand dishes out equal parts education and hope.

My fish hatchery story has a happy ending: itÌęwas abandoned, and local groups eventually turned the stream into a haven for native brook trout. (Though it’s worth noting that those brook trout were likely raised in—you guessed it—a hatchery.)ÌęThe film ends somewhat happily, too, by showing activists’ efforts to remove dams on the Klamath River and allow native fish populations to return and spawn, unhindered by hatcheries. Saving salmon stocks isn’t that hard, Murphy seems to say. All humans need to do is get the hell out of the way and let Mother Nature work.

The post ‘Artifishal’ Is the Movie for Our Unwilding Times appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

A few hours after I bought a 1995 Ford E-350 Econoline van for $2,000 in the fall of 2017, the ABS light lit up on the dashboard. That night, I had a dream:ÌęMy fiancĂ©e, Rachel, and I were driving downhill on a steep, windingÌęroad when the brakes went out. As we were plunging to our deaths over a cliff, I stared into herÌęeyes and thought, I failed you.

That was my first vanlife-stress dream. They kept up through the winter and spring as we prepped the vehicleÌęforÌęa summerlong road trip that would see us touring the country in a counterclockwise loop, starting and ending at Rachel’s parents’ÌęhouseÌęoutside Philadelphia.

The ultimate road trip had been our goal since we’dÌęmet during our senior year of college, in 2012. We wanted to explore the country in an authentic way, meet its diverse people, see both its ugly places and its beautiful ones. Our idea was inspired by #vanlife, theÌęfaux-bohemian, four-wheeled lifestyle movement. Why tour the country in a regular old car, camping in national parks and rooming in hotels off highway exits, when we could buy a cheap van and make it our mobile home?

How to Live Out of a Van the Right Way, Or So I Thought

There was an important caveat. We decided to reject the cushiness of #vanlifeÌęand skip the saccharine Instagram posts. This was partly out of necessity—we didn’t have the budget for a $10,000 vintage van and a $10,000 overhaul. But we also fearedÌęthe Instagramization of our lives, seeing the mountains through the lens of our camera phones. I rolled my eyes (though secretly a little jealous)Ìęat the shirtless #vanlife guys whose long captions detailed the importance of learning how to fix a timing belt with a shoelace. Rachel damn sure wasn’t going to sit naked on the roof of the van for a photo shoot every few sunrises. Social media of anyÌękindÌęwas officially banned.

We decided, instead, to take the path of the van bums: the transients, the weirdos, the indie bands with no money.

Even entering the vanlife world at this basic levelÌęwas a challenge. We scraped together enough money to buy a van we named Little Honey, a rusty hulk that dribbled gasoline the first time I filled her up, exhibiting all the grace of an old lady peeing her pants.ÌęI paid a mechanic in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to make sure she wasn’t quite a death trap. He wiped his grease-covered hands with a dirty rag and said, “You driving across the country in this?” We worked nights and weekends to pay for repairsÌęand exchanged rigid career paths for flexible ones.ÌęI left my job as an editor to become a freelance writer;ÌęRachel workedÌęin postproductionÌęwhile acting, writing, and directing her own films on the side.

Eventually, we left our expensive Brooklyn apartment behind and moved in with ourÌęparentsÌęin Pennsylvania, who helped usÌęprepare Little Honey for the trip. My dad and I built a simple wooden bed in the back of the van, then chopped off the legs of an Ikea kitchen cart and ratchet-tied it to the frame. We had a cooler for a fridge and an old marine batteryÌęwith an inverter. A friend’s mom made us curtains. We saved enough money to live for a few months without working every day. We’d be eating a lot of white rice and frozen vegetables. Life would be simpleÌęand toughÌęand good.

I wrote about our proposed trip for a friend’s zineÌęand declared that we would be like William Least Heat-Moon and John Steinbeck, writers on the road, seeking ourselves and America and the Great Truths—seeking, as Steinbeck put it, “bumdum.” But I didn’t finish either man’s bookÌębefore the trip, nor during it. I still haven’t. Maybe because I didn’t like some of what I was reading:Ìęthe loneliness, the long-drive blues, the scenes of rural emptiness, the despair and squalor of the country’s poor,Ìęthe empty spaces that made up most of the adventureÌęand left plenty of room for breakdowns of many kinds.

The Realities of Van Life

It was the trip of a lifetime, spread across a 13,000-mile swath of America. We opened the van’s back doors and watched the sun rise atop Cadillac Mountain in Maine’sÌęAcadia National Park while snuggled under the covers in our bed. We played poker in Deadwood, South Dakota, near where Wild Bill was dealt his aces and eights, and we later gambled against one another in the middle of Kaibab National Forest, in Arizona, using Oreos as chips. We swam in Leigh Lake at the foot of the Tetons, drove Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, skimmed through the windingÌęcanyon roads of Utah, and scanned the skies for aliens outside Roswell, New Mexico. We drove ten-hour days to fit it all in, listened to thousands of our favorite songs, and had mind-bending conversations about things I’d always wanted to talk about. I was in love—with Rachel, with theÌęvan, with ourÌętrip. I fell fast asleep every night on our thin mattress, exhausted from our adventures, the summer breeze wisping through cracked windows to cool my ankles.

But the nightmares followedÌęwherever we went.

From the beginning, my anxietiesÌęstemmed from the van itself. On a steamy day in July, we left triumphantly from Philly, striking out from the same old ugly, crowded highways, quickly moving north on I-87, up into the green mountainsides of the Catskills of New York. But I couldn’t enjoy the views. My eyes were glued on the temperature gauge, whichÌęread “ColdÌę N-O-R-M-A-LÌę Hot”Ìęin an arc. In the fall and winter, when I’d been driving Little Honey, the needle gotÌęstuck, as if lodged between the leg of the R and theÌęM. Now, in the 92-degree heat, it meandered upÌęthrough the M and, to my horror, occasionally cut into the A. Every millimeter it rose made new parts of my body clench. What if the temperature spiked and the van diedÌęthe first week of the trip, or the first day?

It didn’t. But Little Honey did threaten to break down almost constantly. I became so attuned to her every noise that the sounds another car made passing us on the highway would make my heart stop. What was that? A misfiring cylinder? Rachel, sensing my imminent freak-out, would grab my arm and point out the window—it was just an old rattletrap pickupÌępassing us.

Slowly, the signs built up—my nightmare was coming true. Cresting the Rockies in Wyoming, the check-engine light flicked on. Then off. Then on again, and it stayed on. A low whirring racket hummedÌęin the engine block. On the day we were supposed to drive into Yellowstone, the whir became so loud that I couldn’t ignore it. I pulled into an auto garage inside the park. “I don’t know what the hell that is,” a mechanic told me, peering into Little Honey’s guts. “But it sure as hell don’t sound good.” He told us to find a shop as far away from the park as we could,Ìęto avoid the costly labor and long wait times. We took our rattle and fled.

In Butte, Montana, a man who reminded me of my uncle—country confident, with grease on his hands and trustworthy eyes—called us excitedly and told us he’d figured it out. “It was the dang smog pump!” he yelled. An easy fix—and cheap. I almost hugged him.

We rode on, but my nerves were shot. I couldn’t seem to shake the little voice in my head that kicked in every day when I unchockedÌęthe wheels and turned the keys in the starter: If this van breaks down, you’re fucked. I’d always wanted to be handy like my dad and uncles and cousins—the kind of men with the skill to take something apart and put it back together again,Ìęrepaired. IÌęthought that owning the van would make me handy and mechanical by necessity, and in some ways, it had: I could change a tire, no sweat, keep the simple things lubricated and topped off, even tighten the oil pan with a socket wrench to try toÌęstop an incessant leak. But beyond that, I had failed. I still didn’t know how to diagnose a cracked head gasketÌęor how to fix anything serious. When something bad happened (and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would), we’d be at the mercy of some wicked small-town mechanic.

And so the nightmares continued.ÌęIn the Dakotas, I dreamed we ran out of gas. While we slept in Bryce Canyon, Utah, I dreamed that we had parked the van precariously atop a towering hoodoo. After we overheated in California, I dreamed that the van broke down in the middle of a desert and that we died of dehydration, our bodies mummified by the heat. In Arkansas, I dreamed that we ran out of money and couldn’t afford to get our belongings home. When Rachel also dreamed that the van plunged off a cliff—and then that we were parked atop the hoodoos, just like I had—I wondered if my stressful dreamworld was somehow contagious, my state of anxiety spreading like a virus.

If I was obsessing about a breakdown, I was also fixated on moneyÌęand the way it seemed to flow through our wallets like water through a sieve. Living out of a van can be surprisingly expensive, especially if you’re burning through gas on long drives every couple of days. I had underestimated our costs. Working would mean stopping, extending the trip, spending even more money. I kept thinking about the sayingÌę“so poor you can’t keep mosquitoes in underpants.” I only had three pairs. We didn’t need much to survive. But the list of things we could afford was shrinking fast. I was sinking into despair: over van noises, over dollar signs, over anything and everything.

Rachel was dealing with anxiety, too. A few months before the start of our trip, sharp, burning waves of pain began seeping downÌęthe left part of her face in a wickedÌęcycle: eye, cheek, jaw. A cavalcade of doctors gave hazy diagnosesÌęuntil we went to a crack neurologist at New York University. He saw the signs of something called SUNA, a rare headache disorder. Two anti-seizure medications finally eased the pain, but a quick Google search revealed that they could have scary side effects on one’s mental state. When I felt anxiety or black moods or lashed out, I could blame the van, money, or luck. Rachel had to wonder: Is it me? Is it the drugs? Is it both?

We rode the roller coaster together. Two days would feel like heaven,Ìęthe third, hell. Simple miscommunications over nothing exploded into bruising fights. Worst of all were the days when one or both of us felt crummy for no reason at all while we were supposed to be enjoying some massive natural wonder,Ìęgetting the gloomies while driving through pristine Montana countryside, feeling blue while soaking up rays on a beach in San Diego. This was entirely out of character. We teetered on the edge of paranoia. Things were supposed to be perfect. What was wrong with us?

And then, after soaking in the mineral baths at Hot Springs, Arkansas, two months and two weeks into the trip, out of money and exhausted and having decided that we would haul ass back to Philly, ending the tripÌęearly, the van broke downÌęoutside a town called Hazen. One second we were flying down I-40, the highway flat as a frying pan, and the next I felt a bumpÌęand the engine was dead. A stripped timing gear. The thing keeping all the chaos at bay inside the engine had ripped itself apart.

Five days later, our money was goneÌęand so was some of our family’sÌęand so were the grand visions of adventure and struggle and self-exploration. We spent the nights in Little Rock, holed up in a cheap hotel by the highway overpass, ordering Chinese takeout and watching reality TV, wallowing in the cushiness and instant gratification we’d so longed to escape on our trip. When the van was fixed, we got the hell out of town. We sang all the way home, and cried, and celebrated the joys of every weird gas-station stop and potato-chip lunch, and said aloud that we were ending this road trip under our own power, the right way.

But we had trouble with reentry. The flatness of Pennsylvania made me sick to my stomach. It was going to take us five months living with our parents to get back on our feet financially. Which was fine. I wanted to be home.

What I Really Think About Van Life

On the road, we often found ourselves pulling into Walmart parking lots for the night. Before the trip, I had romanticized thatÌęidea:ÌęWhat interesting folks would we meet in these lots? People roughing it just like we were? That didn’t happen. Nobody comes up to you in a Walmart parking lot to introduce themselves, share a beer, trade stories about the road. You don’t go up to them. People are exhausted. There are cars filled with plastic garbage bags of clothes and windows fogged up by the condensation of those sleeping inside.ÌęIf I ever felt desperate or lost, I’d look around and remind myself that we were lucky. One little imbalance in the chemicals washing around our brains,Ìęone crash of the stock market,Ìęone tragic death that severs the familial safety net, and we could be out here under entirely different circumstances, fighting for survival, living vanlife only because we couldn’t leave it.

We did make one parking-lot friend, in Ocean Beach, San Diego. She was in her sixties and wore a flowing white bathrobe, said she’d been living out of her camper in view of the Pacific Ocean for a while. Called herself transient by choice. She was part of a Ìęagainst the state of California for discriminating against the homeless. The cops sometimes came around to give people a hard time, she said, so keep an eye out. The public bathrooms were smelly, and the beach could get dicey at night. But mostlyÌęthings were just fine. There were outdoor showers andÌęthe sun was shining.

When we left, she gave us a long, motherly look. “Be careful,” she said. “It can be tough out there.”

She was right, of course. that transient living can wreak havoc on anyone. It’s not just that mentally unhealthy people become homeless or transient; it’s that it’s harder to maintain healthfulness when you don’t have stability—when trouble can come at any time, in many forms. Rachel and I had our families looking out for us, and we had each other, and stillÌęwe took a thrashing.

This is something that the chroniclersÌęof our generation’s van movement often forget, ignore, orÌęhide. The Instagram version implies that the only side effect of #vanlife isÌęcontentment. You want to live your dream of freedom and nomadism? Do itÌęin your van, touched only by sunshine and perfect vistas. No matter that those Instagram stars have turned their lives into businesses to gain financial stability, escaping the uncertainty that makes #vanlife both sexy and difficult in the first place. What their followers see on Instagram is raw happiness. Anxiety induced by transience doesn’t sell anything.

Whether I realized it or not,ÌęI’d thought of vanlife as a sort of test for my interest in adventure, the outdoors, freedom.ÌęThe thing I was doing was a hashtag, a lifestyle, a measuring stick. If I could just figure it out, get good at it, I knew I’d be happy.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Here’s what living out of a van was: a massive stretch of raw adventureÌęand also an earthquake, destabilizing my life, showing me I didn’t really know all that much about risk, privilege, happiness, failure, and my own mental state. Rachel and I were two tectonic plates, shearing and buckling and melding together under the pressure. When it was all over, I got to see what had crumbled—and what hadn’t. That was vanlife’s gift to me.

The post We Tried to Do Vanlife Right. It Broke Us Down. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

At the end of his 50-minute, flyover-filled Fourth of July speech on Thursday, President Donald Trump offered a thank you to the National Park Service. He owed them one. Some $2.5 million of the total cost of the unprecedented event, Tuesday, had been diverted directly from National Park funding. (The Department of the Interior has not responded to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű'sÌęrequestÌęfor more information.)

Specifically,ÌętheÌęPost reported that the money was diverted from park fees, which go straight from your wallet to the National Park Service. Parks get to keep around 80 percent of this money, which is estimated to amount to around $310 million in 2019, and tend to use it for maintenance projects, visitor services, and habitat restoration. that the siphoned funds were likely to be taken from the Washington Mall, or smaller parks around the country—though they also reported that “at one point, Interior officials raised the idea of taking money from sites located in liberal communities such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area.”Ìę

Trump swiping the National Parks’ lunch money for his party isÌęparticularly hard to swallowÌęgiven that his administration has already proposed severe cuts to the department's budget—by figures approaching a half a billion dollars in both their 2019 and 2020 proposals. (Neither proposed budget has been approved by Congress.) It’s even more troubling when you consider the backlog of nearly $12 billion in necessary maintenance, which includesÌę$3.5 billion needed for “critical” repairs to keep bathrooms, trails, and campgrounds running. The $2.5 million price tag of the July 4thÌęcelebration is compounded by theÌęloss of an estimated $6 million in NationalÌęPark entry fees during the government shutdown earlier this year.

“Tłó±đ cost of our great salute to America tomorrow will be very little compared to what it is worth,” Trump tweeted out Wednesday. Which raises the question: what is $2.5 million worth to our National Parks?

“Two and a half million might seem like nothing, but…you’re looking at very significant dollars that are not available for parks to maintain themselves,” said Theresa Pierno, the president and CEO of the National Parks ConservationÌęAssociation (NPCA), a nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that advocates on behalf of the National Parks. “Within the [National Parks] budget there are an enormous number of projects that $2.5 million could’ve taken care of.”

For context, here are a few projects from the National Parks’Ìęproposed 2020 budget that each cost around $2.5 million:

Law Enforcement Training ($830,000)Ìę

This new funding aims to mitigate a basic training backlog that keeps around 200 rangers sidelined annually as they wait for foundational law enforcement training. The July 4th budget diversion could fund this training three times over.

Funding Interpretive and Educational Projects ($1.3 Million)Ìę

Interpretive and educational programs consistently rank near the top of both park planning needs and user-generated feedback for National Parks. Funding is proposed to be cut by $500,000 from 2019 to 2020.

Paying Postage Costs ($2.8 Million)Ìę

It’s not as badass as an Air ForceÌęflyover. But it keeps the National Parks running.Ìę

The Volunteers in Parks Program ($2.9 Million)Ìę

The annual volunteer force at National Parks provides over seven million hours of work, valued at over $170 million, on a budget that costs the NPS just $400,000 more than a July 4th party.

The “Active Forest Management” Budget ($4 Million)Ìę

Four million dollars is earmarked for this program in 2020, which the NPS says is “necessary to reduce the wildfire risk to NPS infrastructure and assets, increasing the safety of firefighters and the public, and minimizing the impacts to park operations, visitor experiences and gateway communities.” that 2020 could be an especially bad fire year.Ìę

Upgrading and Maintaining the Electrical and Telecommunications Grid in Olympic National Park ($690,000), Renovating 26 Campgrounds in Yosemite ($800,000), and Rehabilitating the Visitor’s Center at the John F. Kennedy National Historic Site ($853,000)

With a couple hundred thousand dollars to spare. “Tłó±đse are projects that repair park facilities that will last for decades,” said John Gardner, senior director of budget and appropriations at the NPCA. “Instead it’s being used for one night of pageantry.”

Then there are the programs that the 2020 budget proposes cutting entirely—some of which the $2.5 million diversion could fund or partially fund. This includes four major cultural grant programs: the Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation grants ($1.6 million), Japanese American Confinement Site grants ($2.9 million), American Battlefield Protection Program Assistance grants ($1.2 million), and American Indian and Native Hawaiian Art and Culture grants ($500,000).Ìę

Trump’s celebration may yet cost the Department of the Interior more money still. The NPCA, along with Democracy Now, is into the use of National Parks funds, which they say is illegal according to the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act. Tom Udall, the Senator from New Mexico who is also the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the interior, environment, and related agencies,Ìę Tuesday after failing to receive a response from the Department of the Interior about a request for more information on the July 4th spending.

“All reports indicate that the president is planning to turn a national day of unity into a day of vanity—trying to use the military for political purposes and doling out perks to his political backers—at the taxpayers’ expense,” Udall wrote. “We need answers.”

The post Our National Parks Could Do a Lot with $2.5 Million appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In 2005, Gordon Hempton placed a small stone on a log in the Hoh Rainforest of Washington’s Olympic National Park, one of the quietest places in the world. He dubbed his miniature cairn One Square Inch of Silence.ÌęIf he could keep the rock free of human noise pollution, Hempton reasoned, many surrounding square miles would be free of it, too.

Hempton, now 66, lives in the small town of Joyce, less than 15 miles from the park. He’s been recording endangered natural soundscapes around the world for more than 37 years. A documentary he made about his work, , won an Emmy Award in 1992. “Tłó±đ earth is a solar-powered jukebox,” he likes to say.

For years, One Square Inch of Silence worked: Hempton monitored the spotÌęand alerted noisemakers—mainly commercial airlines—of their trespasses via recordings and letters.ÌęHe wrote a book about it, , and used it to spread awareness about the beauty of natural sound. Then, last year, the U.S. Navy ramped up training flights from its nearby Whidbey Island base to a large area over the western part of the park. Growlers,Ìęas the Boeing EA-18G radar-jamming jets are called, began flying more than six missions a day, producing a rumbling on the ground sometimes topping 70 decibels, about as loud as your garbage disposal.

One Square Inch of Silence became, frequently, loud. Hempton filed a complaint during the Navy’s public-comment period, which he says was censored and never saw the light of day.ÌęRecently, Hempton admitted the project had failedÌęand started looking for ways to move forward.

“I realized I was asking the international community to care about one place,” Hempton says. “It wasn’t enough to talk about one place. We needed to talk about all places.”

For the past year, Hempton has been working on a new project, (QPI), which aims to certify and protect earth’s natural soundscapes. If it works, it will be one of the most comprehensive, cohesive actions ever aimed at curbing noise pollution.

The problem Hempton hopes to take on is gargantuan. To understand it, try a little experiment: when you reach the period at the end of this sentence, stop reading for a moment, close your eyes, and listen.

What did you hear? The churn of the refrigerator? The racing hiss of passing traffic? Even if you’re sitting outside, chances are you heard the low hum of a plane passing overheadÌęor an 18-wheeler’s air horn shrieking down a not-so-distant highway.

If you heard only the sounds ofÌębirds and the wind in the trees, you’re one of a lucky few. But it’s likely that quiet won’t last.

Just as humans have spread colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and trash around the planet, we’ve also blanketed it in our damn racket. Ìęsince the 1980s, and the number of cars worldwide, already over a billion, is the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Ìęof the American population is regularly exposed to highway and air-traffic noise. And it’s not just in populated areas. A Ìęfound that human-caused noise had doubled background decibel levels in many of the most protected wildlife habitats worldwide. (In some endangered habitats, it increased background decibels tenfold.) Human noise is constantÌęand practically everywhere.

Recent studies have shown that stress levels and lower blood pressure and heart rate; Ìęshowed that silence helped mice regenerate brain cells in their hippocampus. On the flip side, man-made noise has been proven harmfulÌęboth (causing high blood pressure, heart disease, and low birth weight)Ìęand especiallyÌęnatural ecosystems. When into pristine Idaho wilderness by simulating the din of traffic through loudspeakers, the noise alone drove a third of the local songbird population away. Some of the birds that stayed lost significant portions of their body mass, likely because they couldn’t hear to communicate or hunt.

“Tłó±đre is an epidemic of extinction of quiet places on the planet,” says Hempton. Haleakala Crater in Hawaii, formerly one of the world’s quietest spots, is overrun withÌę; in , several naturalists in search of quiet in remote regions of New Hampshire’s White Mountains were foiled by motorcycles, buses, and wailing babies. Hempton estimates that there are now fewerÌęthan ten places in the U.S. where natural noise can be heard uninterrupted by noise pollution for longer than 15-minute intervals.

The solution, he believes, is not meeting the noisemakers head-on. In 2017, Hempton and the captain of the Whidbey Island air station, Geoff Moore, went for a hike together in the Hoh Rainforest, but nothing changed. The big noisemakers, like overhead flight paths and power plants, are mostly unstoppable once they’ve been established. Instead, QPI is looking to locate the rare, relatively untouched natural soundscapes around the worldÌęand protect them before it’s too late.

The first question has to answer seems simple: How quiet is quiet? Hempton and his team have already identified over 260 exceptionally quiet places around the world. Next, with the permission of local communities and governments, they hope to send out teams to certify those areas as quiet parks.

The teams will test each potential site for three consecutive days, measuring natural-noise decibels and intrusions; while no area is pristine, these readings will help them set the organization’s official standards for certification. According to Hempton, any “alarming or shocking” signature, like gunshots, sirens, or military aircraft, would immediately disqualify it from certification. Loud noises, if they’re natural, are fine.

On top of these wilderness quiet parks,Ìęthey’ll also certify urban quiet parks,Ìęquiet neighborhoods,Ìęquiet hotels,Ìęand quiet marine parks,Ìęusing more flexible noise standards. “We call the the urban parks quieter parks,” said Matt Mikkelson, an acoustic expert and a QPI associate adviser.

The parks could use the certification as they wish. QPI’s model has taken inspiration from the , which has, over the last 31 years, changed public perception on light pollution, helped enact policy on national and local levels, and as International Dark Sky Places. People visit these areasÌęsolely to see the Milky Way. So, QPI figures, why wouldn’t they visit a quiet park solely to hear the birds and the wind?

They’ll soon find out. In April, QPI announced its first official wilderness quiet park, a large swath of land in Ecuador that includesÌęthe Zabalo River watershed. The land for the park, about 200,000 acres,Ìęis owned by the indigenous CofĂĄn tribe. When Hempton visited the area to record its sounds for certification, he recognized it as “a sonic eden,” the most pristine soundscape he’d ever heard.

“In a word, it’s a symphony,” Hempton says. The only sound intrusions he recorded were distant, barely audible commercial-jet flyovers every few hours.

Zabalo will be patient zero for QPI’s other main question: How much tourism money canÌęquiet places bring in?

Proving certified quiet places as moneymakers will be vital to convincingÌępowerful problematic entities—say, the U.S. Navy and its $68 million jets—to respect the cost of clamor. As the population continues to increase, Hempton says, “every square mile of the planet will be scrutinized for what its value is. And we believe quiet is gold.”

Tickets for the first quiet-park tourist group, which was led by Hempton and lastedÌę13 days in the park this June, went for $4,485 each, with half of the proceeds going to the CofĂĄnÌę(the other half went to a travel service; QPI and Hempton’s help wasÌęgratis).ÌęIn an e-mail, Randy Borman, president of the Centro CofĂĄn Zabalo, who worked with Hempton to create the park, wrote: “This type of trip is extremely important to the communityÌęas we work on developing our strategies for survival as a culture and a people, but also as we work to keep an intact and working environment which can in turn provide environmental services to the world at large.” Borman’s son, Josh,Ìęhelped Hempton lead the first tourist group. “We’re trying to conserve our lands,” he says. “We don’t want oil companies to come in, we don’t want planes or highways going over our land.”

If the math seems straightforward, it’s not. “[Monetization is] a clever idea,” said Nick Miller, a retired acoustic engineer on QPI’s standards committee. “But it’s tricky. You’ve got to be convincing that the quiet does make a difference in visitation.” Economists have figured the math for, say, the cost impact of noise in neighborhoods around airports. But those numbers are divisive—the FAA and homeowners canÌę about how much roaring necessitates financial compensation. And there’s no agreed-upon cost-benefit analysis of a jet-free forest.

A bigger problem may be even more nebulous. “How do you get everybody to care about a resource to which they may never have had access?” says John Barentine, director of public policy for the International Dark-Sky Association. “If you’re a city dweller, and you don’t see stars at night, there’s a tendency to shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world works.’ÌęIt would be the same for quiet parks.”

For now, QPI is in talks with park organizers in Sweden, Taiwan, New York City, and Portland, Oregon, where they hope to create urban quiet parks and build a grassroots movement. QPI just certified its first quiet community, Green Mountain Farm in North Carolina. And Hempton continues his stare downÌęwith the Navy in Olympic National Park. Even though the fighter-jet noise instantly disqualifies it from certification, he insists that Olympic will eventually become a quiet park. He hopes the Zabalo model can help prove to the Navy how much of the $300 million Olympic brings to the region has to do with its quiet. “Tłó±đ reason the Navy uses that space rather than Idaho is because they want to save fuel,” he said. “It’s an economic choice. But Olympic contributes hundreds of millions of dollars to the regional economy, and the Navy doesn’t realize how they’re causing a negative economic impact.”

Activists are still fighting hard: in May, the National Parks Conservation Association (which has thrown its support behind QPI) announced it was suing the Navy for repeatedly failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests regarding the impact of its jet-training activities over Olympic. (The Navy declined to comment on the suit.)

Some days, Hempton finds the time to drive to the park and hike down the Hoh River TrailÌęto the spot where a stone on a log still marks the one square inch he designated 14 years ago. During jet-free intervals, he listens to tree frogs croak and water droplets plop on the mossy forest floor. “For those who think of the environment and worry that the planet is coming to an end,” he says, “quiet is the total antidote. You come out with renewed hope.”

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A few weeks ago, Kimberly C. Lee tied on a rubber worm and sent a long cast sailing into the lake in her backyard. A pink sunset glittered on the water, and a heron swept by overhead. Lee reeled in the worm. For a moment, all was quiet.

An elderly man driving an electric golf cart puttered up the path behind her and braked. “Caught anything?” he asked.

“Yeah—a largemouth bass,” Lee said.

“Really?” he said, eyes wide in amazement.

Before she could continue, the man drove away in his cart. “Why so surprised?” Lee muttered to herself. “You’re the one who works here.”

Still, Lee, president of the Manhattan chapter of the Brooklyn Fishing Club, could excuse the intrusion. Her backyard is technically a shared one—New York City’s Central Park—and the cart driver was an oblivious Park employee. She’s used to the wonder in onlookers’ eyes. There’s something shocking about pulling a fish from a body of water when it’s flanked by concrete canyons and hordes of tourists.

Lee wasn’t the only angler at the 11-acre lake at the park’s northern end, known as Harlem Meer. A few yards away, a middle-aged man in sandals cast a fly rod and hauled out bluegill after bluegill. Down the shoreline, a group of four young men in Supreme hats and fresh sneakers flipped jigs into a narrow channel and debated moving on to their next spot. As the air cooled and the park cleared, a ratio shifted: For every person reading or taking a twilight walk around the Meer, there was another one holding a fishing rod, hoping to catch an urban bass.

Urban angling has been around in America as long as there have been cities, but unlike the broader categories of fly-fishing, bass fishing, and saltwater angling, it has no recognition as a unique pursuit, no guidebook or seminal novel. Rather, it’s treated as the redheaded stepchild of fishing, an activity seemingly taken up only by those poor souls crammed into cities, chosen out of necessity. Recently, I bought the book by the excellent fly-fisherman and writer Nick Lyons because I heard that it focused on fishing in New York. I was disappointed to read that the stories were all about escaping New York to fish elsewhere. Lyons’s bright rivers were all “wild, untamed—like that Montana eagle riding a thermal on extended wings.” Of New York City itself, Lyons wanted one thing: out. “I do not want the qualities of my soul unlocked only by this tense, cold, gray, noisy, grabby place—full of energy and neurosis and art and antiart and getting and spending,” he wrote.

Even the Gray Lady took a shot at anglers with an incredulous headline from 2005: “” In fact, the Big Apple has quietly become a prime model for the richness of urban fishing culture—really.

The bustle of New York City life seems to make people forget that four of its five boroughs are islands, which means there are plenty of shorelines. Shorelines packed with people, yes, but none of that negates the city’s fishiness: its jetty breaks, the way its tides sweep in hordes of baitfish, the shaded banks of its freshwater ponds and lakes.

“To be a really good angler, you have to learn fishing in all different types of situations and for all different types of species,” Steve Wong, a supervising educator with the Prospect Park Alliance, recently told me as he fished a secret spot on Prospect Park Lake in Brooklyn. Wong isn’t part of any particular fishing group, like the Brooklyn Fishing Club, but he’s deeply enmeshed in the fishing culture of the city. He grew up fishing the piers and beaches of Los Angeles. Then he moved to Seoul, South Korea, where he joined a cadre of older Korean men who fish offshore islands from tiny portaboats. Wong next moved to New York, seven years ago. He found, unexpectedly, that it had some of the best fishing yet.

“In NYC, you have access to all those different types of fishing. You have great trout fishing a train ride away” in the streams and rivers of the Catskills, including Roscoe, New York, nicknamed Trout Town, USA. “Great ice fishing. For saltwater, you have the striper fishery of the Hudson Bay, and even more species—fluke, bluefish—out on Long Island. And the city can be a bass fishing destination.” Wong accented this last point by hauling in two decent-sized largemouth bass in three casts.

The data back up that big fish story. “We have some really good waters in terms of fish catch rate,” said Melissa Cohen, manager of New York’s five boroughs with the . Specifically, 2017 creel surveys, conducted by talking to hundreds of New York City anglers, showed that catch rates for largemouth bass larger than 12 inches in Harlem Meer in Central Park were higher than 88 percent of all other surveyed lakes in the state. In Prospect Park Lake, the catch rates for largemouth bass larger than 15 inches were higher than 96 percent of all other surveyed lakes in the state. That makes them two of the most open-secret honey holes in the United States.

It might seem inevitable that a mainstream fishing club would spring up in a town of 9 million where the fishing is so good. But for a long time, those clubs were mostly exclusive, like the well-heeled, male-dominated , or extremely specific, like the . Then, in 2013, Victor Lucia, a 25-year-old from New Jersey living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, began researching urban fishing myths and legends in New York City during a grad school class and was surprised to find there had never been a prominent fishing club in the borough. So he started his own. He also had selfish motivations: Lucia wanted somebody to fish with, and urban fishing in New York at the time was a lonely pursuit.

“I thought, how many of these 9 million people who live here are interested in fishing? Probably a lot,” Lucia told me. “But how many know about the fishing options? Not a lot.”

Five years later, the has more than 300 members, chapters in all five boroughs, and an engaged and active membership. Lucia built this membership using social media; the club’s has more than 23,000 followers. The club’s merchandise sales are up too. Their most recent sweatshirt features a logo of the Notorious B.I.G., cane in one hand, striped bass in the other.Ìę

The club has monthly meetings in each of its borough chapters and provides a variety of fishing opportunities, facilitating charter boats to saltwater fish at reasonable costs and providing members-only trips to fishing destinations in the New York state area. It also provides members with discounts at local fishing businesses. Mostly, the club serves as a mixer for anglers, who by banding together have become much more than the sum of their parts.

“Tłó±đre are a lot of people who take the skills they already have from fishing wherever they came from and apply that to this new environment,” Lucia said.

At a recent meeting, a diverse group wearing Brooklyn Fishing Club gear traded stories and knocked back a few beers. A Guyanese-American named Chris mingled with a white lawyer named Eric and talked about the quest to catch his first striped bass, until they were interrupted by James, who is African-American—and whom Chris happened to work with. Neither knew the other man was in the club, or that he was an angler. Small world, this Big Apple fishing scene.

“Someone will cut my throat for this,” James said. “But at that spot in Coney Island where you’re fishing, there’s a great little fluke hole
”

The anglers in the Brooklyn Fishing Club, and throughout many parts of New York City, belie stereotypes. Nearly 40 percent of anglers in the United States are above the age of 40; the club is dominated by a younger crowd in their twenties and thirties. Seventy-eight percent of anglers on average throughout the United States are white; the club is made up of close to 50 percent people of color, and a creel study in Harlem Meer found that 50 percent of regular anglers there were African-American, 23 percent were Caucasian, and 20 percent were Latino. If there’s a place where fishing correlates to the growing diversity of America, this is it. (Still underrepresented: women.)

Lucia uses Instagram and Facebook to build his community by constantly posting images taken by club members holding fish. Those photos are candy to other people who fish, join the club, take photos of their own, and share them with Lucia to repost on the club’s Instagram account in a voyeuristic cycle of catches, releases, and likes. Since the late aughts, social media—in particular, YouTube channels like and —have been instrumental in hooking Generation Z on angling and imbuing the sport with the “skater look—branded gear and skinny jeans,” said Steve Wong, the Prospect Park Alliance educator. In a city where you can hop from subway to walking path to lakeside, most New York anglers forego traditional fishing gear for their standard stylish fare, skinny jeans included. “Fishing used to be all about salty old dudes,” Wong said. “It’s changed. It wasn’t cool before. It is now.”

But not everyone loves the New York fishing trend. When I asked an employee in a prominent Manhattan fly shop about the Brooklyn Fishing Club, he made a face and mentioned its members’ tendency to post good fishing holes on Facebook, a phenomenon called “burning” that can cause anglers to swarm a spot. (Lucia and veteran club members warn new members not to burn spots and monitor the club’s social media pages to keep it from happening.) Some relationships in the fishing community are tenuous; Lucia recounted sparring with fishing store owners who had promised deals for members but reneged. “Tłó±đy said, ‘We’ve been around much longer than the club,’” Lucia said. “And I said, ‘Well I can promise you, the club will be around much longer than you if you don’t respect me.’” And there are plenty of young anglers who, like Wong, would rather go it alone than team up.

But New York City’s fishing boom is not alone. “Almost every city I’ve been to has an urban or street fishing movement going on,” said professional angler Mike Iaconelli, whose National Geographic television show, Fish My City, explores fishing in New York City, Miami, New Orleans, and Austin. Viewers discover what Lucia, Wong, and others in New York City already know: Urban fishing’s new grassroots movement is powerful and seems genuinely concerned with the future.

As an offshoot of his efforts with the Brooklyn Fishing Club, Lucia runs a program called the Maritime Youth Alliance to take underserved city kids fishing every summer. “People are always taking kids out of the city to teach them how to fish,” he said. “Take them fishing here! Show them how to fish the shipping lanes underneath the Verrazano Bridge.”

As the sun set back at Harlem Meer, Lee ended up sharing her rods with two young Hispanic kids and showed them how to cast.Ìę

“Thanks for letting us fish. It was fun,” the kids said, and then ran off toward their next adventure.

“It’s cheesy, but they’re going to remember that,” Lee said. Then she sent a cast into the Manhattan twilight.

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Job: Publisher and editor in chief of
Home Base: Dover, Tennessee
Age: 50
Education: Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin

Jen Ripple didn’t know what fly-fishing was when she stepped into a fly shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ten years ago. She was working for the University of Michigan and, with little else to do during the particularly cold winter, had signed up for a fly-tying seminar on a whim. “I liked tying flies, so when the ice was off the river, I started fishing,” Ripple says. Soon she was spending hours each week on the banks of Lake Huron. “After that, I just fell further and further into the black hole that is fly-fishing.”

Ripple was a mother of four in a sport that labels participants fly-fishermen, but that didn’t bother her. After moving to Chicago, she joined another fly-tying group, which was led by the editor of a new Midwestern fishing magazine called A Tight Loop. He hired her to write a column giving a woman’s perspective on the sport. “It was mostly double entendre stuff,” Ripple says. “One article I wrote was titled ‘Sex Hatch,’ and another one was ‘Eight Inches.’”

Feeling stunted, she started looking for fly-fishing magazines aimed at women. There weren’t any. So, in 2013, without any other media experience, she started her own: DUN magazine, named for the just-hatched stage in the life cycle of a mayfly, one of the most famous flies in fly-fishing. In that first year, Ripple built four , each upwards of 200 pages packed full of how-tos, expressive photography, and personal essays. Every story was written by a woman.

The online issues were met with so much enthusiasm that she decided to make a print issue in the spring of 2017. “I was talking with a friend of mine, a very respected man in the industry,” Ripple says. “He said, ‘Jen, that’s great. You’re gonna have one magazine, and it’s gonna be wonderful. But you’ll only ever have one magazine, because there aren’t enough women that fish.’ It didn’t even bother me, because I knew he was wrong.” The fourth issue, produced by what is now a nine-person staff, hits newsstands this fall.

On the Best Advice She’s Received: “It came from a National Geographic photographer, . He said, ‘It doesn’t matter what they’re saying as long as they’re saying something.’ I never imagined that the negative criticism out there about DUN was directed at me. I was just happy people were talking about the magazine.”

On Her Perfect Day: “I would wake up in Punta Gorda, Belize, in this place called the Belcampo Lodge (recently renamed ). It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. I’d walk down to the beautiful little restaurant, get a cup of coffee, smell the saltwater and hear the birds, and look out over the water and see fish right there. Then it’s into the skiff, racing across the water. You stand in the front of a flats boat with a fly rod in your hand for what seems like hours until the next bonefish or tarpon or permit comes along. You cast to them. And if you miss them, it doesn’t really matter. There’s just something about being out on the saltwater. I grew up on a lake in Wisconsin, and my Grandma always said when you live on a lake, you have water in your veins.”

On Her Favorite Piece of Gear: “Tłó±đ . It’s a duffel bag that turns into a backpack. I wear it when I fish, and I travel with it. It has a drysuit zipper and is completely waterproof. It saved my life when I was fishing in North Carolina. I was carrying my gear and had my Panga on my back. I slipped down an embankment and fell into a 15-foot ravine, at the bottom of which was the river. My waders immediately filled with water. I’m a really good swimmer, so I usually don’t get nervous in the water, but I knew I was in trouble. Then, all of a sudden, I realized the Panga on my back was floating. I turned it around and held it to my front and kicked to the shore. That was scary.”

On Her Best Fly-Fishing Tip: “I remind myself that fly-fishing isn’t neurosurgery. It’s supposed to be fun. So I never get too worked up about it.”

On the First Female Fly-Fishing Writer: “I love by Dame Juliana Berners. Dame Juliana was a nun of noble birth and wrote the book in 1496. I always thought she wrote it because she was a nun who was bored, had money, and liked to fish. Then I did the research and found out that’s not true. She likely wrote the book because in 1496, an activity had to be sanctioned by the church in order for you to do it. A priest had to have a document to bless in order to sanction it, and this treatise is that document that allowed her to fish.”

On the History of Women in the Sport: “When I first got into fly-fishing, I thought women were new to the sport. Then I found out we’ve been here since 1496, and that the way we tie our streamer flies is attributed to a woman, and that the ‘bait and switch’ method we use to catch billfish on the fly came from a woman. A woman was when Teddy Roosevelt fished there in 1878. The story of women in fly-fishing is huge. It gives me and the women in the sport now a foundation.”

On the Challenges of Being a Female Editor and Publisher: “In the beginning stages, I realized it was just a good old boys’ club. Let’s just say that the ad guy responsible for a big manufacturer isn’t going to take a deal away from his friend who takes him fishing in the Bahamas, even if I prove to him that I could get him more business. That’s his friend. I might not like it, but it makes sense.”

On Attitudes Toward Women in Fly-Fishing: “Tłó±đre is, unfortunately, that vocal minority of men out there who say, ‘I don’t care if women fish. I just don’t want them on my rivers.’ Or, in the fly shop, the guy who says, ‘Are you here to buy something for your husband?’ But that’s so small. And it’s not really the whole reality of the sport, I don’t think. I spoke at a Chicago fly-fishing convention yesterday and asked for all the women in the audience whose father, son, or uncle got them into fly-fishing to raise their hands. It was like 99 percent of them. Often male figures are the ones who got a woman involved in the sport.”

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On September 10, 2017, as Hurricane Irma drowned the Florida Keys with a five-foot storm surge and shredded houses with 130 mph winds, David Vaughan, a 65-year-old marine biologist, and Frank Slifka, a 67-year-old maintenance man, huddled inside the and hoped for the best. There were not many places to hide on the tiny spit of sand called Summerland Key, but the research center was one of them. The $7 million facility was built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane and resembles a cinder block on burly concrete stilts. From the second floor, Vaughan peered into the storm to check on his house and boat next door. All he could see was the wind itself, a roaring wall of gray.

When the storm’s eye passed directly overhead, the wind died and the storm surge sucked back out to sea. Vaughan could see that his house’s roof had begun to collapse. His boat had smashed into his Prius. He had 40 minutes to save what he could before the back wall of the hurricane hit and another storm surge rushed in.

He and Slifka rushed downstairs, turned their backs on everything Vaughan owned, and got to work in the laboratory’s ground floor, rescuing thousands of tiny plaster plugs capped by dark dots the size of a pencil tip—genetically hacked coral polyps that the storm threatened to wash away. Without them, Vaughan knew, the Florida Keys might not survive the next century.

When I drove into Summerland Key three months after the storm, debris still lined the main road, piled almost as high as the three-axle trucks rumbling in to retrieve and burn it. Just 20 miles east of bustling Key West, the island remained a ghost town. Boats and trailers sat marooned on front lawns, their carcasses spray painted with the redundant tag “trash.” Many residents hadn’t returned to clean up.

The Elizabeth Moore Center's parking lot, however, was packed with cars. The building had survived the storm. Inside its thick concrete walls, offices and dorm rooms thrummed with the paperwork doldrums of scientific life. Down in the open-air ground floor, the plastic holding tanks that had overturned in the storm once again brimmed with the corals Vaughan and Slifka had saved, plus thousands of others, submerged in bubbling seawater. Grad students slowly circulated among them, staring down into the troughs, gliding suction hoses along their bottoms.

When I wondered aloud about their job, one perked up and removed his headphones. “We’re removing detritus from the bottom,” he said.

“Snail shit,” said another.

Suctioning snail shit is where the rubber meets the road for the facility’s main mission: saving coral from extinction via a groundbreaking technique of genetic modification and cloning.

Corals are strange creatures, invertebrate organisms made up of individual tentacled polyps that, under a microscope, each look like a miniature Sarlacc pit. Inside each polyp are tiny marine plankton that photosynthesize food, giving the polyp enough energy to build a calcium carbonate reef structure around itself and its neighboring polyps.

They’re also fragile. Without grad students to suction up snail shit at this stage of their lives, the polyps would be strangled by too much algae. Without carefully monitored water temperatures, the polyps would overheat and expel all their algae and bleach, a much greater danger that leads to wide-spread die offs.

Vaughan, the executive director of the Elizabeth Moore Center, has a graying castaway’s beard and cloudy blue eyes. He commutes to work every day by paddling a canoe 50 yards across Summerland Key’s canal from the dock at the back of his house, which is still standing. “People say, ‘You’re the best low-carbon-footprint commuter,’” Vaughan said. “Tłó±đy don’t even know that I hold my breath going across, so I’m not emitting anything at all.”

Vaughan giggles—he does that—but he’s getting at something. Since the 1970s, the greenhouse effect from the atmosphere’s absorption of carbon dioxide has raised average ocean temperatures by almost two degrees Fahrenheit. In the next 100 years, that temperature could rise by between two and six degrees more. Worse, the sea has absorbed about half of humanity’s total CO2 output, which has chemically reacted with the main substrate of the ocean, calcium carbonate—a compound that all sea animals with exoskeletons, like crabs, shrimp, clams, and coral, depend on to live—to make oceans 30 percent more acidic than they were in the 19th century. That higher acidity makes it harder for coral to build its reef structure. If ocean acidity continues to increase into the next century, it could mean reefs will begin eroding faster than they are being built—or, literally, start melting away.

The combination of warming and acidification has been devastating to coral. Since the 1970s, scientists estimate 20 to 40 percent of the world’s coral has been killed off by bleaching events caused by high water temperatures. In certain areas, it’s been worse. In 2015, 22 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s largest living structures, died off in a mass bleaching event. A 2008 study estimated that only 2 percent of Florida’s native staghorn and elkhorn corals remain alive. And bleaching events worldwide are happening more often as earth’s average temperature climbs. Florida’s reefs have experienced bleaching events in 12 of the past 14 years.

The effects of this mass extinction are catastrophic. Never mind that reef tourism generates $5 billion annually in Florida and $36 billion worldwide. Across the globe, hundreds of millions of people depend on fish stocks that are supported by the coral reef ecosystem, without which they’ll starve.

What’s more, if reefs disappear, millions of people living in these low-lying coastal regions, including the Keys, could be displaced—or drowned—by megastorms like Irma, which theÌęNational Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) believesÌęwill only get stronger in coming years due to warming ocean surface temperatures. These communities depend on fringe and barrier reefs, where corals rise like a wall from the seafloor, beating back the strength of incoming waves like defensive linemen breaking up an oncoming blitz. A study during Hurricane Wilma in 2005 found that barrier reefs attenuated 99 percent of the height of the storm’s 42-foot waves before they hit the shoreline. But the reefs pay a price for their work. Before Irma smashed into the Keys, many of its fringe and barrier reefs had been covered in hard and soft corals. Now, said Robert Nowicki, a postdoc research fellow at the , the organization that runs the Elizabeth Moore Center, some of them had been “scoured almost to nothing, like the surface of the moon.” If there’s no new coral to replace the old, life as we know it along the world’s tropical coasts will almost certainly change.

“Twenty-five-to-30-foot waves were hitting our reef during Irma,” Vaughan told me. “If those waves had not been smashed on the reef, then they would have smashed on our island, right here. I think our tallest buildings are 33 feet. So where would anybody run to?”

In the past five years, all these disastrous consequences for reefs have pushed coral reef restoration to the forefront of marine science. The field is expensive and controversial, but today, it’s considered the tip of the spear in the fight to help coral survive into the next century.

Scientists like Ruth Gates, director of the , have recently made major strides in identifying and crossbreeding the genotypes, or genetic families, of each coral species that can survive the higher temperatures and acidification we can now expect in the coming years—temperatures and pHs that will kill and then dissolve many of the world’s less-hardy corals. The goal is to create a “super coral” that will survive an increasingly inhospitable ecosystem.

Vaughan and his team are part of this search for genetically superior corals. But their main contribution is what Vaughan calls his microfragmentation program, which both clones corals and hacks the mechanisms for their growth rates. “We can fix things that we thought impossible ten years ago,” Gates told me when I asked her about Vaughan’s work. “Really, his techniques are at the center of the question, ‘How do we build a reef?’”

Vaughan’s technique is absurdly simple:ÌęHe uses a saw to chop healthy hard coral pieces into much smaller fragments; these grow back extremely quickly atop small concrete plugs and are then replanted in the sea. In essence, he’s created a sea-life version of Mickey Mouse’s broomsticks in the . Smash them up, then watch them come roaring back with a vengeance.

The technique is a vital one for the field. Coral’s biggest problems might be warming seas and rising acid levels, but those are magnified by a sad fact of life for corals: They aren’t very good breeders. “We actually didn’t know how corals reproduced until the 1980s,” Vaughan said. That’s because, as if adhering to some dirty fairy tale, corals breed only a few days a year, en masse, for around 30 minutes, shortly after the full moon in August, when they simultaneously fill the sea with their white, snowy-looking gametes in a single, very unkinky orgy.

Because of this sex tactic, only one in a million potential baby corals is successfully fertilized and survives to become a juvenile. That means it takes some corals 25 or even 50 years to successfully reproduce. Given the rate of the ocean’s decline, that’s not going to produce the genetically superior corals nearly fast enough. “We’ve probably got 50 to 100 years to act with these resistant strains of coral,” Vaughan said. “If we still don’t change in 100 years, and it keeps getting hotter and hotter—there’s certainly a limit to everything.”

Vaughan stumbled on his procedure five years ago when he accidentally broke a piece of coral in his lab and left it in the bottom of the tank. When he returned two weeks later, it and the other fragments had regrown to their original size. He’s still not sure exactly why this happens, but his closest analogy is our skin cells, which regrow quickly to cover a fresh wound but otherwise lay dormant.

Using jewelry saws, Vaughan and his team started fracturing their lab-fertilized corals. Within three to six months, they could turn a single coral into 60 to 100 new organisms the same size as the original. The fractured corals continued to grow between ten and 40 times faster than coral in the wild, depending on their species.

Then Vaughan made a much more important discovery. Because the polyps were technically all part of a single organism before they were fragmented, they were clones—and they would willingly reconstitute back into a larger organism, skipping ahead into maturity. “Usually, when corals touch each other, they start fighting, and they can kill each other,” Vaughan said. “But when we put 100 of the fragmented pieces next to each other that had come from a single original piece, they didn’t fight. They recognized each other as themselves. And they would actually start to fuse together, like skin grafting.”

A piece of coral the size of a golf ball, fractured into 20 pieces replanted side by side, could produce a single large coral the size of a pizza just four to five years later. It worked in the wild, too. In four years, Vaughan could have a sexually mature coral the size of a football or a table—depending on how many individual pieces of coral he decided to combine—which would have taken a natural coral 25, 50, or even 100 years to grow.

These quick-growing fragmented corals could be planted near one another in the wild to cross-breed and create uber-corals resistant to high water temperature, ocean acidification, and disease. When paired with the work of genetics-focused scientists like Gates, it would be like replanting a rainforest that could continue to proliferate, with offspring that grew bark strong enough to break a logger’s chainsaw.

Vaughan set a goal to plant a million corals before he retired. He and his team grew their coral output exponentially, planted multiple offshore nurseries, began making their reef-growing techniques cost-efficient, and started working to score the major state grants needed to rebuild Florida’s reef industry.

Then the hurricane hit.

Working quickly, Vaughan and Slifka saved the vast majority of the coral plugs outside the Elizabeth Moore Center—some 5,000 out of nearly 7,000. Inside the lab, another 14,000 corals rode out the storm, along with a gene bank holding the most promising genotypes of all 28 coral breeds found in the Keys.

Out in the field, acres of wild corals were sandblasted by the storm’s waves. One of the lab’s field nurseries for lab-fractured elkhorn and staghorn corals—more fragile, branching corals that look like antlers and are endangered in Florida—was almost entirely wiped out. “It was pretty disheartening,” said Erich Bartels, a staff scientist. “That coral was the result of 500 hours of work per person, per year, for seven years.”

But another field nursery for the lab’s elkhorn and staghorn farther south fared much better, with only minimal losses. And the lab’s hardier boulder corals also had a higher survival rate. “All we can do is plant as many good corals as we can,”Ìęsaid Nowicki,Ìę“use the numbers game, and spread everything out so that a single storm can’t destroy everything we’ve done.”

Vaughan still says he won’t retire until he plants his million corals worldwide. Upscaling the process is beginning to pay off. The cost per coral has dropped from around $1,000 a piece to only $20 a piece, thanks to more efficient methods. The lab already has grants to plant between 25,000 and 50,000 corals in 2018, and by spreading his techniques to local coral restoration labs worldwide, Vaughan hopes to quickly catapult those numbers into the hundreds of thousands per year. He and his team are hoping to change the public’s attitude toward saving reefs, which, since the Great Barrier Reef’s die-off in 2015, has shifted toward hopelessness.

“One of the things that disheartens me the most is people saying, ‘Oh, we’re screwed. Planet’s over. There’s nothing we can do,’” Nowicki said. “Tłó±đre are things we can do. But you have to have the courage and the resources to go out and try.”

On my last day at the lab, I found Frank Slifka, the maintenance man who stayed behind to weather Irma with Vaughan. Slifka was working in the bowels of the facility, where the tidal surge had swept through during the storm, cleaning up and keeping track of diving equipment in metal wire cages.

“People ask why we stayed behind,” Slifka told me, shaking his head. “We weren’t trying to be brave or heroic or anything like that. We just decided that if we were really here to save the coral, then that’s simply what we needed to do.”

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The sport of American fly-fishing has two hours of screen time to thank for its resurgence at the turn of the 21st century: the film . The 1992 movie adaptation of of the same name, directed by Robert Redford and starring a young Brad Pitt, made fly-fishing not just cool, but wildly sexy to the general public. “It was the most enticing fly-fishing movie ever made,” Maclean’s son John told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in 2012. “In the first year after it came out, the fly-fishing industry grew by 60 percent, and the following year by another 60 percent.” In the years following the film’s release, streams and rivers famous for their fly-fishing became noticeably more crowded. It was so influential that fly-fishermen around the country took to calling it simply “the movie.”

But while a soaking-wet Brad Pitt could get twentysomethings to buy a starter fly rod, he couldn’t teach them how to cast it. And so, in only a slightly roundabout way, the real savior of modern fly-fishing is “Lefty” Bernard Kreh, whose books, videos, and articles on casting, tying knots, and catching fish were the first real introductions to the sport for many of those who stuck around long enough to actually give it a shot. Kreh, a Baltimore native who grew up during the Great Depression, is a compact 5’7”, with a wide smile that reveals a gap between his two front teeth. When he casts a fly rod, he has all the grace in the world—enough to overshadow even a young Pitt.

Kreh is the savior of the modern American fishing form in more than just a pop-culture-funneling way. It was Kreh who, along with one or two others, nurtured the sport when it arrived from the UK to AmericanÌęwaters in the 1940s and ’50s. But while other fishing pioneers stuck to British traditions, Kreh rejected them. He rebuilt the American cast from the ground up. Then he started sharing his knowledge on everything from knots to casting to fly presentation, on fish in both fresh and saltwater, with students of all ages, women and men. Kreh came to be seen as not just a founder of the American version of the sport, but also its singular teacher, taking as pupils presidents and movie stars as well as blue bloods and normal folks.

Thirty-three books and thousands of students later, Kreh is finally slowing down. At 92, his world-touring fishing days are nearly through. Congestive heart failure is taking its toll. There’s a certain lighthearted morbidity to him these days. “I’d rather be looked at than viewed,” Kreh told me with a chuckle. But he still has a twinkle in his eye. Kreh still has a lot to teach us about fishing and about life.

OUTSIDE: When you first started fly-fishing, in 1947, the sport was practically nonexistent in America. What sparked your interest?
Kreh: Joe Brooks [a major fly-fishing writer from World War II to 1972] called and said he was doing a little newspaper column for a paper down near Baltimore, and he wanted to go fishing with me in the Potomac. So we went. And Joe took this fly rod out. I had never seen one before. And I said, “Well, Mr. Brooks, if you don’t have a plug rod, I have an extra one.” And he said, “Well, do you mind if I use this?” And I said of course not. Well, he caught quite a few fish using it.

At lunchtime—and this is what flipped me over on it—we were sitting on the side of a big flat rock out in the middle of the Potomac. We were sitting there, and Joe walked up out over the top of that rock. I didn’t know it then, but I would soon learn, that in October, the flying ants fly across the Potomac to migrate, and billions of them fall into the river. And we walked up there, and he had this little black-and-white fly, which I now know is a black ghost. There were these rings all over the place in the water. He dropped the fly in a ring; he had a bass. He did this about six times in a row, and I said, “Mr. Brooks, I got to have me some of that.”

I’m trying hard to put the Lefty Kreh School of Fly-Fishing into words. How would you describe that?
When I went back home, in all of central Maryland I could not find a single fly-fisherman. Not one. I later found two in Baltimore. But there were no fly-fishermen. And there was no information about it—except, mostly, English literature, which was all out of date anyway. So I began to start thinking about how you do this stuff.

Joe’s casting method was basically the one they still teach today. And that method is you bring your rod up to about two o’clock, and you load it up and come forward and stop about eleven.

Well, I’m not very smart, but I have common sense. And I know that the longer I can swim that fly through that Potomac, the better the chances I got. I realized that fly-fishing was the only sport where you don’t use the whole body casting. I began pivoting and putting the rod back farther. Had no idea why it worked—all I knew was that it did work. And I developed that style. Well, not a style, actually just the proper way to use a rod. I started there.

I developed my four basic principles of casting, and of course they’re against all the regulations. [The four principles are: God will not let you cast a fly line until the end of that fly line is moving. The casting hand and rod must continue to accelerate and then be brought to an abrupt stop. The line follows the direction of the rod tip as it speeds up and stops. The longer the rod travels back and forward during the casting stroke, the less effort is required.] There’s one thing wrong with tradition: It gets in the way of progress. We’re still teaching casting the way we did a hundred years ago. And the technology’s changed, the fishing’s changed, everything’s changed, and we’re still teaching a big lumberjack and a 12-year-old kid to cast the same way.

The industry made several big mistakes early on, which is the main reason why we don’t have as many fly-fishermen today as we should. First of all, we made it too expensive. When a guy was working for $15 or $20 a month to support his family, we overpriced the market and made it impossible for him to afford it. That was a big mistake.

The other mistake was to tell people that it’s an art and all that kind of stuff. Now, I should know more about entomology. But I know that if there is a little brown bug on the water, and it’s about a size 16, I know that if I can put a drag-free cast out there, I got a damn good chance of catching a fish. It helps to know when the bugs are coming out. It helps to know. Now, a lot of trout fishermen speak Latin. But trout, they don’t care. They just eat what they can.

I heard you coached Jack Nicklaus on his cast.
Jack Nicklaus wanted me to fish with him. What you need to know is that Jack had been fishing in the Caribbean for years and had caught over a thousand bonefish. He said, “I heard you can help me with my casting.” He got out there with a five-weight rod, and we did the typical student-instructor thing—just cast it. And it was beautiful.

He said to me, “What do you think, Lefty?” I had been around some big people in the world, and a lot of those guys don’t want you to tell them anything. Jack was the opposite. I said, “Jack, what you’re doing is OK, but it’s extremely inefficient.” His answer was, “Great, how can I be more efficient?” I started talking about the stroke. And Jack said, “Hell I’ve been doing this wrong all my life.” He knew what a stroke was.

The stroke is the thing that’s causing 90 percent of the problem in fly-casting. People think if they have to make a long cast, they have to throw it. They’re not throwing it. It’s the bend in the rod that’s throwing it.

Can you explain the way a really great cast feels to someone who’s never fished before?
You do not cast a fly rod. You unroll it. It’s like a rug rolled up. You kick on a rolled-up rug, it’s gonna unroll.

You started fishing during the Great Depression. How was that different from fishing today?
We were so poor we couldn’t have kept mosquitos in underwear. We didn’t have any money. My mother told me, “If you can get enough money to pay for your lunch and your clothes, you can go to high school.” In those days, kids could work.

I was bushbobbing, where you hang these little lines down into the water on limbs at night. I’d bait the hooks with mussels, which were everywhere then. And I was poling a boat when I was ten years old. You could pole along at night and catch these catfish. I was taking the catfish and selling them at market to get the money to go to school. But I always did enjoy it, even then.

A big part of your job for the past few decades has been fly-fishing around the world with important and interesting people, teaching them and entertaining them. One of the reasons people like to fish with you so much is your sense of humor. What’s your key to telling a good joke? Do you ever tell a dirty joke?
I haven’t told a dirty joke for at least 35 years. The thing is, they don’t have to be dirty. The key to a real good joke is that the last one or two words is a trigger. A joke has to be a surprise. If you’ve heard a joke, it’s not a joke anymore. There is an art to doing it. But it’s mainly that I want to have fun with this person, and I want them to enjoy what I had. And they don’t have to be dirty.

For example, one that everybody seems to like is:

This man came home from work. And his wife hit him on the head with a frying pan, knocked him flat on the floor. He got up and said, “What’s that about”? She showed him a little piece of paper that had “Darlene” written on it. She said, “I found this in your shirt this morning.” He said, “Honey that’s a horse I been betting on. Here’s half of what I won.”

He came home the next day, his wife hit him again, harder. He got up and he said, “What the hell’s that all about?”

She said, “Your horse called.”

Have you ever been starstruck by anyone you’ve fished with—presidents, movie stars, journalists? How do you keep from being intimidated when you’re doing something as intimate as fishing with people like that?
First thing I do is call everybody by their first name. Everybody has a first name. You do it in a nice way. Famous people want to be treated that way. You should see them guys. Say it’s me and Michael Keaton and Tom Brokaw and Yvon Chouinard or something like that. All day long they’re real well-known people, and they unconsciously act the way people want them to. At 5:00, the camera people who are filming them go away. We all take a shower. And they have what I call a “crocktail hour,” where they get about half-crocked. Then, all the sudden, it’s like a mantle coming off, and there’s their real selves. They love to tease each other. You see that they’re real humans.

You’ve fished with some interesting people, including, I think, Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro.
I didn’t fish with ’em—but I did watch ’em fish. Me and a guy named Howard Gillelan from Outdoor Life were the first two sportswriters sent down to Cuba after the revolution. It was about a week and a half after it’d ended. We went down for the 14th annual Hemingway white marlin tournament.

On the first day, we were on Castro’s boat. We weren’t fishing. We were just observers. Well, it was a three-day tourney. For the second two days, they put us on Hemingway’s boat. I had never caught a billfish. Lots of saltwater species, but not that. When we got on the boat, Ernest told us that his little mate [Gregorio Fuentes, whom some have attributed as the inspiration for the character Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea] was the best billfisherman in the world. Well, I glommed onto that guy. I spent the entire day with that guy learning to debone mullet and all that kind of stuff. I was in my joy.

That night, me and Howard stayed at a thing called the Hotel Nacional, which was a giant hotel. But except for the crew that worked there, there was not a single person there, because the revolution was just over. Howard had quite a bit of education. And he just chewed me out like you wouldn’t believe. I said, “What are you talking about?”

He said, “You haven’t spent any time with Ernest Hemingway. Do you know who Ernest Hemingway is?”

I said “Yeah, he writes books.”

He said, “He does more than write books.”

He gave me a lecture. So I spent most of the next day with Hemingway. Which I really liked. During the day, we got real friendly. I was an exhibition shooter for Remington Arms, and he was big at that, too, and we did a lot of talking about that stuff. Anyway, I finally said to Ernest, “Ernest, I just got into this writing business. How do you tell what’s good writing?”

And he thought about it and finally said, “It can’t be edited.” Which is I think the best answer you could have.

One thing that’s noted about you by others is the sheer number of friends you’ve made across all the years. How do you relate to so many vastly different people?
I think I have such a number of friends, and really good friends, for one reason: I realized early in my life how much pleasure you get out of doing something for somebody and there’s no way they can reward you. You’re doing this because you want to do something that makes them feel good.

What makes you a good teacher? I think most would agree that’s what you’ve been above all else to the fly-fishing community.
There’s two ways to teach anything, whether it’s fly-casting or teaching at a grade school. You can display your knowledge, or you can share your knowledge. And there’s a world of difference.

When I would figure something out fly-fishing and saw somebody having the same problem I had been having, I would say, “Let me show you something somebody showed me.” And then it’s different than “Let me show you how to do that.” The first one makes the person you’re teaching think, “Well, he was as dumb as I was.” And the second one is “He’s trying to be a smartass and tell me he’s smarter than I am.” You’re sharing your knowledge and not displaying it.

What do you think your legacy will be for fly-fishing?
I don’t think anything about that. It was just something I enjoyed doing. And it was a great life. I don’t think anything about legacies and all that stuff. Hell, I’m just another fly-fisherman.

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