Sportsmen gather for clean water summit

Spot news story for The Memphis Daily News

Feb. 18, 2011

Earlier this week, Ducks Unlimited hosted the Sportsmen’s Summit for Clean Water, a think tank of national organizations brought together to look at grassroots conservation and communication efforts in their various communities and ways to effectively enforce the Clean Water Act of 1972.

About 70 leaders from five organizations – Ducks Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation, the Izaak Walton League of America, Trout Unlimited and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership – came from as far away as Colorado and Florida. The groups collectively represent several million members.

“We’ve been working for several years to re-establish the intent of Congress that was laid out in 1972,” said Scott Yaich, director of conservation operations for Ducks Unlimited. “Their full intent was that the Clean Water Act be used to protect and conserve wetlands and things like intermittent streams, recognizing that all these waters are connected to navigable waters where the longtime federal interest had been back to the 1800s.”

The groups involved in the summit have been working to restore protection to wetlands that have been affected by Supreme Court decisions in recent years … (read more)