Talk about a slam-dunk no-brainer.

Here’s a gift, worth millions in plain money, and more in measures money can’t match.

It’s for everyone. First for residents of the Northeast Kingdom, but also for all Vermonters, every American, even anyone in the world.

Not to mention the world itself.

Who could turn it down?

Maybe we could.

“We,” here, is technically the United States of America, or to be precise the Fish and Wildlife Service of its Interior Department, which now has 62 days to accept the gift of  more than 400 acres of land, including 1.4 miles of shoreline along Lake Memphremagog and 228 acres of wetlands.

Or it will turn into a pumpkin.

No, worse. Or it will be sold to whoever will pay the most for it, likely to be someone who will build immense and nearly identical McMansions.

Such are the terms of the will of Michael Dunn, who died on September 1, 2007, and who bequeathed his more than 800 acres on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border to governments, hoping to preserve the land’s “open state” and recreational potential.

But only if those governments agreed to accept the donations within three years of Dunn’s death. Otherwise, the land is to be sold to provide the maximum benefit to another passion of Dunn’s life – the Modern Museum of Art in New York. That doesn’t give Fish and Wildlife much time.

(The federal government of Canada actually rejected the offer, but Quebec Province accepted, so the Canadian portion is saved. For whatever reason, Dunn did not offer a similar option to the state on this side of the border).

It isn’t that Fish and Wildlife is against accepting the gift. At an afternoon tour of the site yesterday afternoon, and later at a public hearing in Newport, Agency officials left little doubt that they wanted to preserve the land and that “we are aware of the deadline,” in the words of Janet Kennedy, the Massachusetts-based regional supervisor of the Service’s Wildlife Refuge System.

So what’s the problem?

Actually, there are two problems, and though right now it looks as though the deadline will be met, both problems illustrate how difficult it often is to get anything done these days in America, and perhaps especially in Vermont.

The first problem is that there is actually some opposition to accepting Dunn’s bequest. Not from the town of Derby, which considers saving the land “a real asset,” Selectboard member Karen Jenne told the hearing. Not from the State Legislature, which overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging the feds to take the deal. And not from the owners of neighboring lakeside cottages, several of whom came to the hearing to urge acceptance.

But Sherb Lang is against it, and so is Hunters, Anglers, Trappers of Vermont (HAT), of which Lang is the president. Lang raised no specific objections to federal ownership of the Dunn land. In fact, he called it “a wonderful piece of property.” But he and his associates are angry at the State Fish and Wildlife Department over other issues, and they remain furious about the 12-year-old sale of what were once called the Champion Lands to the state and federal governments.

This is, in short, a policy position founded on resentment, not an unusual phenomenon in rural Vermont.

The other, more influential, dissenter at the hearing was Duncan Kilmartin, the Republican State Representative from Newport. Kilmartin contended that the plan under consideration by state and federal officials didn’t really honor Dunn’s will, which specified that the land should remain available for “hikes and campers.”

Instead, Kilmartin said, the draft Environmental Assessment (the official subject of the public hearing) gives priority to conserving resources and wildlife habitat rather than human uses such as hiking and camping.

It’s unlikely that Kimartin has a better grasp of what Dunn wanted than does Michael Hickcox, the long-time family friend of Dunn’s who flew to Europe to bring Dunn’s remains home and who flew to Vermont from his San Francisco home for last evening’s hearing.

The proposed plan for the land is “in terms of spirit, exactly what (Dunn) would want,” Hickox said.

Besides, the draft EA does specify that under federal ownership the land will be open to hunting, fishing, and camping. But the proposed new owner is the Fish and Wildlife Service, whose basic mission concerns…fish and wildlife and their habitats. The Service can’t very well take ownership of land primarily for another purpose. Still, people fish, hunt, and camp on its lands all over the country.

The other problem has to do with bureaucratic sclerosis, some of it created by environmental law, which, in this case at least, might end up making it harder to protect the environment.

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 creates a complex and elaborate system of processes that have to be followed before a federal agency can acquire property, even for free.

As Janet Kennedy explained it last night, the first step was a “preliminary project proposal,” which started the NEPA process, leading to the draft EA examining whether the proposal “would significantly affect the environment” and proposing alternatives (in this case just two: take it or leave it).

What is happening now is the legally required comment period, after which a final EA will be issued and the regional supervisor will or will not issue a Fonsi, which is not a character in an old sitcom but a Finding of No Significant Impact, after which the Acting Fish and Wildlife Director in Washington may grant “permission to expand the boundary” of the existing Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, which will include the Dunn land, non-contiguous though it may be.

Got all that?

There is also the possibility that the whole process didn’t start soon enough. The trustees of the Dunn estate seemed to have had trouble navigating the political shoals in Washington until they turned to the Vermont Land Trust for help.

“You would think that giving away this land would take a ten-minute meeting and a handshake,” said Mark Frederick of the Community Financial Services Group, which is handling the Dunn trust. “But some said it wasn’t their jurisdiction, others said the property was too small for them, or they didn’t have the funding.”

When the VLT came into the picture, Frederick said, so did Vermont’s Congressional delegation, and then the process began to move.

In time? Jonathan Wood, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources Secretary who conducted last night’s hearing with a booming voice and a soft touch, said he thought so. The state’s Fish and Game Department (part of Wood’s agency) will probably end up managing the new addition to the federal system, but it won’t cost much. The basic management plan is to leave it alone, and anyway the feds will pay for most of what has to be done.

See? A no-brainer slam-dunk.

Unless it isn’t.

USA Today came to Vermont last week to write about the Vermont Yankee squabble, and in Friday’s paper the reporter quoted Yankee spokesman Larry Smith describing the nuclear power plant’s opponents as “hippies from the ’60s who want to be against something, and it’s nuclear power.”

Not a very smart thing to say, at least not in the judgment of one Larry Smith, who said Tuesday, “not the smartest thing I ever said.”

Not what he meant, either, said Smith, who didn’t deny saying it. But he was referring, he said, only to some of those who oppose relicensing the plant for another 20 year run, “many of the same people who attended those (anti-nuclear) hearings” 40 years ago.

“The people who moved up here in the 60s, sort of counter-culture folks,” he said. “But it was not a general characterization. I would never characterize all our opponents that way.”

Good enough. But here’s the interesting thing. If he had meant it as a serious description of those against the relicensing (and we take him at his word that he did not), he would have had a point.

Not literally, of course. If the latest polls are accurate, most Vermonters don’t want the plant licensed to run past March of 2012, and surely most Vermonters do not fit the definition of “hippie”: “a person who opposes and rejects many of the conventional standards and customs of society” (American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition).

But broadening the definition a little (well, OK; a lot), the description fits. At least the leaders of the anti-Yankee forces tend to be political liberals, environmentalists who are suspicious of all large corporations, who might go out of their way to eat locally grown, organic food, who listen to public radio.

To a corporate executive at a nuclear power plant, these people would be not only wrong on the issue, but also…not my kind of people. Conversely, on the other side of the debate, those executives would be not only wrong on the issue, but…not our kind of people.

At some point this political tribalism becomes as significant, if not more so, than the differences over the issues, real though they are. On both sides, beating those other guys (not our kind of people) becomes the real goal.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Vermont. Take the dispute over drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The oil industry does not support drilling as fervently as do conservative commentators and operatives (the industry isn’t sure there’s that much oil there). The conservative commentariate has no economic vested interest. They just want to “stick it to the hippies,” or, more accurately, defeat environmentalists, who are not their kind of people (and who in turn delight in the conservative discomfort about continuing to lose this battle).

Something similar is going on in Vermont with regard to “permit reform,” which apparently isn’t going to happen again this year. But it’s a perennial. It will be back, promoted by the business community (especially the building contractors) and supported by most Republicans.

Their argument is that the hoops through which developers must jump before they are allowed to begin construction projects suppress economic growth in the state. Were it easier, quicker, and cheaper to get permits, they say, there would be more construction projects, hence more jobs and faster economic growth.

The argument is not provably false. But it is almost surely not true, raising the possibility that another motive is at work here, that what the “permit reform” advocates really want to do is “stick it to the hippies.”

Or to put it more responsibly, some Vermonters are still so bitter about losing the fight over the passage of Act 250, 40 years ago, and some other environmental laws since, that they want revenge. If not to repeal the law (a political impossibility) at least to weaken it.

This is not a sentiment confined to the right side of the ideological spectrum. Some feminists still (metaphorically speaking) froth at the mouth when reminded of the failure of the Equal Right Amendment 30 years ago.

But what is the foundation for concluding that Act 250 and the other environmental rules have not suppressed Vermont’s economy?

A good question with a simple answer: Vermont’s economy has not been suppressed.

By almost every measurement, the state’s economy has grown as fast as or faster than the economies of its neighboring states.  In the last 40 years, Vermont’s per capita income, once far behind the national median, has almost caught up with it.  The state now ranks 23^rd in personal income per capita.

The most recent statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that Vermont’s economy grew by 1.7 percent in 2008, faster than the country as a whole, faster than the New England region, faster than the rest of the Northeast, faster than the South or the Great Lakes, and just as fast as the Southwest.

And they got oil.

Furthermore, there are no data – none – indicating that Vermont’s permitting process prevents or even much delays development projects not likely to harm the environment.

According to a recent report by the Natural Resources Board, last year 82 percent of 380 Act 250 applications were approved without a hearing. Decisions on almost two thirds of all applications were issued within 60 days, and 81 percent were issued within 120 days.

Five, or 1.2 percent of the applications, were denied a permit.

But what about the applications that never get filed because the developer finds the process daunting or distasteful or expensive?

Well, one cannot prove a negative. But look at it this way: a smart developer seeing an opportunity to make a profit will file the application even if filing it is a pain in the neck.

Unless, of course, the developer is not sure the project will meet the guidelines. In that case, the law is working exactly as intended, stopping the environmentally damaging projects while allowing the vast majority of proposals to proceed.

This doesn’t mean that a developer has never given up on a project because of the permitting process. No doubt a few have. But it makes no difference. The site the developer was considering is still there.  Another developer will come along with another project.

None of this means that the permitting system can’t be improved. Anything can be improved, especially government bureaucracies, which often move at all deliberate dawdling. Nor is it intended to absolve  the other side of this discussion–the environmentalists–of their own tribal hostilities.

But next time someone says Vermont will go broke unless it does something about its environmental permitting system, remember that some folks have been saying this for the last 40 years, during which Vermont has gotten richer. Whoever spreads that message probably is less interested in prosperity than in sticking it to the hippies.

Hatchery work

Fishing season begins tomorrow. Thanks to the warm weather, fish-stocking season began a couple of weeks ago.

Before it ends, said Tom Wiggin, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department’s Fish Culture Operations Manager, the department’s trucks will have dumped 350,000 hatchery-raised brown, rainbow, and brook trout into inland lakes and rivers and 284,000 trout and adult landlocked Atlantic salmon into Lake Champlain. Another 160,000 landlocked salmon fry and 150,000 walleye fingerlings will also be put into the lake, according to the Department’s web site.

Those fish won’t last long. Well before trout fishing season ends in October, the fish will have been caught by human, bird, beast, or another fish. Theirs is intended to be a short life.

Whether it is also a happy one can not be determined.

But there is little doubt that their existence makes some people happy.  The life and the death of these planted fish pleases fishermen (and, increasingly these days, also fisherwomen) because the more fish in the water, the greater the chance of catching a fish.

Especially hatchery-raised fish, which are easier to catch.

That’s the purpose of putting them in the water: so that anglers can take them out. Hence their sobriquet: put-and-take fish.

Fish stocking began in the 19^th Century and takes place all over America, where billions of dollars have been spent raising, transporting, and dumping millions of fish into lakes and streams. It’s as American as apple strudel (it was developed in Germany) and widely popular. The stocking schedule, Wiggin said, is the most popular option on the Department’s web site.

But it might be bad science, bad wildlife management and harmful to the environment.

Such, at least, is the judgment of an increasing number of fisheries biologists.

“The data that are available seem to support the concept that stocking hatchery trout in streams with native brook trout populations is not a scientifically sound idea.  I could find no published or stated evidence to the contrary,” concluded Larry Harris of Trout Unlimited in West Virginia after reviewing the scholarly evidence in 2005.

(Full disclosure: The News Guy, who loves to fish, and even wrote a book about it, is a TU member).

Among the fisheries biologists Harris cited was Ray White, who wrote, “Hatchery fish perform poorly in nature, and hatchery programs and their fish harm wild fish.”

That assessment now represents almost a consensus among fisheries biologists. Fish are still stocked from coast to coast less for scientific than for political reasons. Anglers, especially those in rod and gun clubs, like having all those hatchery-raised (and therefore usually less skittish) fish to hook. Those anglers have political clout, and they think they deserve to get what they want.

In a sense they do, They pay for the hatcheries and the stocking. In almost every state, including Vermont, Fish and Wildlife Departments (by varying names) get almost no general revenue money. Only those who pay for hunting or fishing licenses and the excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment finance the departments, even though these days those departments perform services for the general public.

Hatcheries and stocking long ago altered the natural world, for the better in some ways. Without them, there would be no rainbow trout – native only to the Pacific Coast – in the Rocky Mountains, where anglers flock to catch them, or for that matter in Vermont. Only brook trout are native to the Northeast.

But the brookies – and the Northeast – have paid a price for bringing in the bigger rainbow and brown trout. Along with the habitat degradation that development wrought, these invasive species have decimated the native brook trout population, now found in only about half of Vermont’s streams and rivers.

Years ago, biologists figured out that planting browns in a stream would abolish the brook trout population, and introducing rainbows would diminish it. The bigger trout don’t eat the brookies as much as chase them from the best spots in the stream for finding food and avoiding predators.

What has changed in the last several years is that biologists now believe that even putting the same species in a river – stocking hatchery-raised brook trout over a wild brook trout population – is a mistake.

“Basically we’re finding out  that there’s a lot of local adaptation, with the fish in each watershed having its own unique genetic structure,” said Jack Williams Trout Unlimited’s senior scientist. “A brook trout in one river system in West Virginia may be different from a brook trout in Vermont. A lot of the fish that are stocked are not really from that local drainage system., so they’re different from local fish that have the best adaptation to the local system.”

As a result, stocking can weaken the wild fish population. Hatchery-raised fish are often bigger, stronger, and more aggressive. But they are less hardy and more likely to be diseased.

So why does Vermont continue to plant “manufactured” fish where wild fish breed?

With a few exceptions, it does not. Choosing their words carefully, Vermont’s Fish and Wildlife scientists and technicians will not come out and say that stocking is undesirable. That would anger some of their most loyal (and outspoken) constituents. But they do make clear that the state’s stocking policy is, as Tom Wiggin said, “very selective.”

“Where you have a good natural population, we don’t stock,” he said. “We stock waters that do not have good populations. These aren’t the quality waters.”

But that’s not all. Increasingly, the state is stocking these streams with “triploids,” trout hatched from eggs treated by heat or pressure so that the fish cannot reproduce. This guarantees, Wiggin said, that the planted fish won’t introduce a new genetic marker into the river.

“it won’t interfere,” he said. “These fish are put and take.”

Put bluntly, then, anglers who fish the stocked rivers are fishing rivers where the habitat has already been so degraded that it will not support a wild fish population. And the fish they catch are…well, they’re fish, technically, but they’re also manufactured products, sterile and somewhat docile. With a few exceptions, a hooked hatchery fish flops rather than fights. An angler can get a better tussle from an eight-inch native brookie than from a foot-long plant. (They taste just fine, though).

The one big exception to the Department’s policy is the Willoughby River in the Northeast Kingdom, where the wild rainbow trout population is supplemented every spring by hundreds of  hatchery-raised fish. Pressured by members of the Orleans Rod and Gun Club, the Department worked out an arrangement whereby the club raises fish from a brood stock that came “from the same exact run” as the wild Willoughby rainbows, in the words of fisheries biologist Rich Kirn.

Obviously, this, too, was a political rather than a scientific decision, with the Department using good science to make sure that the stocking did not degrade the wild fish population. In one sense, it has succeeded. Anglers flock to the river every April as the rainbows leap their way up the river toward Lake Memphramagog, spending money in local hotels and restaurants and catching (mostly) the stocked fish. The stocked fish that are not caught, rarely survive the summer.

But as some biologists see it, even this kind of stocking is a way of avoiding the underlying problem –that the fishery had declined because of habitat degradation. In their view, stocking is a poor second choice compared to habitat improvement.

“We’re better off trying to restore the habitat and trying to promote the health of those streams rather than rely on stocking,” said Jack Williams of Trout Unlimited. “It’s much better in the long run to address habitat problems or look at changing the fishing regulations, even if it’s easier to meet the demands from the fishing public by stocking.”

The Department does not really disagree. It does a lot of work protecting habitat, but it can’t roll back the farming, logging, and building that has warmed and polluted Vermont’s rivers for the past 200 years.

And as Rich Kirn said, stocking the degraded rivers “helps keep people connected with those waters, and maintains an interest in making them better.”

Another political decision, and arguably a good one.