Re: Congratlations to the 2017 BCWF Region 2 executive and board
Adriacticum:
I'm not completely sure how to answer your question, but on the surface it means that the Region 2 Board of the BCWF has a new president, Chuck Zuckerman (he was on the BoD in the past), a returning VP (Mark), treasurer (David) and secretary (Jim), and, a new 2nd VP (Dennis, who also has past BoD experience). There were additional directors appointed/elected as well. I say appointed/elected because all of the directors who agreed to have their names stand were agreed upon by the AGM quorum (as in, nobody lost a director vote).
As a lot of people know who have followed some of this stuff, there was some bad blood on the R2 BoD that either arose from or culminated in what I'll call the Ed George affair (I wasn't part of it, I don't know all the inner details, but a lot of us on HBC saw some of the debate/arguments/fall out). That bad blood was evident in a R2BoD meeting I attended earlier this year and it was evident today as well, but hopefully it has been put to rest. It looked to me like one side in the affair clearly won the day, so I'm going to assume that everyone can put that behind them and move on.
I don't want to speak for Chuck Zuckerman except to say that he set out a getting back to basics vision for the coming year that includes outreach to youth and engaging target shooters in Region 2. I hope Chuck is on this forum and can flesh that out a bit - his vision was delivered in a short address to the AGM attendees and I'm not really doing it justice. He had some good stuff to say.
There is also a fair bit of housekeeping that R2 has to get done, but I think that the new BoD will have no problem addressing that. Some of the returning BoD members seem quite knowledgable about some of the real challenges facing Region 2.
The AGM was an eye opener because it brought into sharp focus the challenge we face as BCWF R2 members. Voting is based on club affiliation, which is very clunky and can lead to some political maneuvering. This took up a lot of time and effort and needs to be looked at.
At the same time we had a presentation by Marvin Rosenau on sturgeon. This presentation was very informative. What I got from it (and anyone else who was there please feel free to chime in to either confirm that I'm on the right track or to get me back on track if I'm off) is that after a mid-90s collapse of sturgeon populations we have recovered the population in terms of total numbers. The problem is that we've seen a change in the make up of that population in that the population of younger sturgeon is dropping. What I took from this is that as time goes by we will see the opposite of a baby boom moving through the population. Fewer new sturgeon are surviving and making to to breeding age. The total population may look ok for a while but the time will come when we have another crash.
This seems to be based on (surprise surprise) habitat loss, specifically spawning areas, and that seems to be a result of gravel extraction. There is also a problem with food for sturgeon being taken up by the commercial fishery before it gets to the sturgeon.
There were also some motions put to the R2 AGM regarding bringing action items to the BCWF AGM, including a hunter's bill of rights, a motion to legislate the release of egg bearing prawns and a call for regulation of helicopter based mountain biking (the practice of ferrying mountain bikers into the alpine on a helicopter for approximately $200).
We spent more time in the AGM jockeying for political position and going over recriminations than we did dealing with sturgeon, bills of rights, prawns or regulating wild landscape use by other users. That's something that has to change, and I'm hopeful that it will, but that discrepancy in time and energy allocation is what I'm referring to when I say that the AGM brought the R2 BCWF challenges into sharp focus. We should be focusing on being more effective with conservation and hunter access and spend less time on internal politics. Again, I'm hopeful.
Rob Chipman
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders" - Ed Abbey
"Grown men do not need leaders" - also Ed Abbey