National Outdoor Book Award Winner Speaks To CalTrout

Anders Halverson is the author of An Entirely Synthetic Fish — a National Outdoor Book Award Winner and a riveting book about the spread of rainbow trout across the country, often at the expense of native species.

A biologist (he’s a Research Associate at the Center of the American West), Halverson has also worked as a journalist, which explains how he built a series of riveting narratives around fisheries management in the USA.

In addition to winning the National Outdoor Book Award, An Entirely Synthetic Fish has generated uniformly positive reviews. It uses the rainbow trout as a symbol for intrusive fisheries management techniques which have often decimated native species, and while you’d think a book on that subject would feel dry and technical, An Entirely Synthetic Fish is anything but.

On a recent book tour, Halverson spoke to several groups of CalTrout members, and graciously gave up some of his time for this interesting, wide-ranging interview for CalTrout’s The Streamkeeper’s Log.

The Interview

Q: Your book was something of a surprise; I expected a dry-to-the-taste-buds science book, and instead ended up reading a series of riveting stories.

That was my goal. When I decided to write the book,I was finishing a PhD in aquatic ecology. But I’d been a reporter before becoming a biologist, and I wanted to write a popular book about the history of freshwater fisheries management in this country. Somehow I convinced the National Science Foundation to give me a grant to do it.

I decided to write about rainbow trout to provide narrative focus. But ultimately, the book turned is really about people and how we’ve related to the natural world over the last 150 years.

Take the title. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people about that.

Q: It threw me too.

I want to state for the record that the title is meant to say more about us than the fish. It’s a quote from the director of the federal fish hatchery program who was moved to declare in 1939 that his agency was now capable of creating “an entirely synthetic fish.”

Q: Got it. Besides the title, what parts of the book do people react to most strongly?

The thing I hear the most about is the Green River “rehabilitation.” In 1962 we poisoned all the fish in a 15,000 square mile watershed so that it would be safe to introduce rainbow trout. It was such a massive project and nobody has really heard about it. But it was also a turning point in how we relate to native species and wilderness. In fact the backlash was one of the things that led to the creation of the Endangered Species Act.

Q: You mentioned that facts about the Green River project were hard to come by; how did you write the Green River chapter?

I expected to find all sorts of stories on the front pages of the newspapers from the day. But when I started going through the microfiche, I couldn’t find a thing. Finally, I found some stories in the sports pages. That’s almost the only place the project was covered–in stories that talked about how great the fishing was going to be.

It’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there was simply no controversy about the project at the time. Imagine the US Fish and Wildlife Service killing all the fish in an area the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined so they could introduce a nonnative species.

Q: They were poisoning a whole watershed and nobody cared? [Read more...]