Shifting Baseline & Genetic Pollution with Dylan Tomine — WildFed Podcast #152

What a fun and thoughtful conversation today with Dylan Tomine. In addition to working at Patagonia as a Fly Fishing Ambassador, and recently releasing a book under Patagonia's publishing house called “Headwaters,” Dylan Tomine has traveled the world fly fishing and writing about it. His writing is engrossing and almost lyrical, each short chapter feeling almost like a dream you’ve had about some distant adventure on the water. He really captures the feelings of being there, somehow communicating, though subtly, the “why” behind adventures like these.

But adventures aside, our conversation today takes us into other territory. In particular, that pesky little concept known as “shifting baseline syndrome” wherein anglers tend to think of their childhood fishing experiences as the time when “things were good” and then become dismayed as they watch fisheries decline as they grow older. But the concept really comes to life when you think of it generationally. Our parents saw their childhoods as “the good old days,” not realizing that it was considerably better for their parents, and so on and so on. In other words, without context, we tend to notice degradation in our own time but fail to see where we are in the big picture of history. If we could see the truly good old days we’d realize the real extent of the habitat loss, drawdown on species density, and the loss of biodiversity.

Our relatively short lifespans give us a very limited window through which to view our place in the planet's ecological history. Bottom line, while thankfully, here in the US at least, our waters are still fishable, we can scarcely claim the incredible fish populations that we could a few centuries back.

Daniel and Dylan also discuss the very controversial, though currently still active fish stocking programs that are meant to offset declining fish populations. Declining, in most cases, not because of recreational fishing, but because of dams, pollution, general habitat loss, industrialization, and other insults to our waters and the fish that live in them. As Dylan points out here in the episode, and in a great chapter of Headwaters called “The Myth Of Hatcheries,” the hatchery programs today seem to be leading us down a path of extinction for the very sub-populations of the species they are meant to save.

All this to say, it’s complicated. Those of us who fish, love to fish. And we also love the fish we fish for. We're not sure there are simple solutions, but these difficult conversations have to happen. We're honored to get to have that conversation with one of the great fly fishing authors of our time… Dylan Tomine.

View full show notes, including links to resources from this episode here: https://www.wild-fed.com/podcast/152