“We’ve been growing, and very active about going out soliciting new members,” Karwatowski said of the watershed chapter, now at 130 members. “And to think that this all started in Michigan, with a few people trying to protect their local streams, to the conservation of their natural resources.”
Started in 1959 by 16 fishermen in Traverse City, Michigan who wanted to protect their local river, TU defined itself as “the largest and oldest coldwater conservation organization in America” while growing to its current size of 140,000 members in 400 local chapters throughout the country.
“TU has been instrumental in restoring more than 10,000 miles of rivers and streams around the country and has been a force in protecting habitat for trout and salmon from Alaska to Maine,” the organization’s CEO, Charles Gauvin, announced at the start of the current birthday year. “As it marks its 50th birthday, Trout Unlimited can take great pride in its accomplishments as a steward of and advocate for America’s trout and salmon and their watersheds.”
Karwatowski, who headed the Kingston-based Catskills Mountain Chapter of the organization before moving to West Shokan 20 years back, said that more than membership numbers, TU’s importance, as well as the local chapters’ role in the larger whole, have come from the many tangible contributions they’ve made, from significant reforms to state and federal water laws to careful looks into dam removals, minimum flow standards, and other modern-day policies accepted by all.
“We are undeniably the group that has had the most impact on our water policies, outside of the government,” he noted. “Here in New York State and the Catskills, our importance has had as much to do with the financial support fishermen from the city have given the organization, as well as the number of key figures who have emerged around flyfishing along our local streams.”
Karwatowski said that although originally from the Schenectady area, and used to lake fishing throughout the nearby Adirondacks, he didn’t get the trout, or Catskills Mountain fishing bug until he moved to the area for work with IBM, where he is still employed to this day.
“I just happened into some folks tying flies at a sports show at the Armory in Kingston,” he recalls. “I had never thought of trying to catch fish that way. Now, looking back, all I can think of is all the trout I’ve landed…”
When he joined TU in the 1980s, its Catskills Mountains chapter was fresh from a battle preventing the building of a Prattsville water power system that many felt would decimate the Schoharie Creek’s trout population.
Eventually, from that single chapter, from which Karwatowski became regional TU vice president, then the state’s Council Chair, new ones spawned in Greene County, Sullivan County, the southeastern Catskills, and for a while in Delaware County… as well as within the Ashokan Pepacton Watershed corridor whose members now meet the fourth Wednesday of every month at the Boiceville Inn.
“It’s been an organic growth,” he said. “Issues change, river to river, and distances get too long to travel.”
In addition, Karwatowski noted the numbers of people who have moved into the region over the years, carrying with them conservation awareness and a love for Catskills streams, and those streams’ long history.
On that latter note, he talks for a bit about how there were four fishing-oriented shops in Phoenicia when he moved to the area. As well as about all the fishing legends to have come from the Catskills, from flyfishing’s ancestral godfather, Theodore Gordon, to its scientist, Art Flick, and homey local characters, including the Dettes, Woodstock’s Frank Mele, and the Wulffs of nearby Hardenburgh.
“Inevitably, there will be bits of conflict. It’s a club with members holding many different opinions,” Karwatowski added, speaking of things from the Prattsville fight to lengthy court processes over Hunter Mountain water diversions to more recent internal policy battles over the Belleayre Resort, stream releases, and general development pressures throughout the area. “This is not a bad thing; collaboration, in the end, is really the thing we’re after.”
In the final round, the organization has found itself returning over and over again, at least on a larger basis (withstanding its membership’s individual opinions), to what its local chapter president calls “the TU mantra.”
“We only make comments on our areas of expertise,” Karwatowski said. “And it’s not like a chapter ever stands alone. We pool our resources for research purposes, for backing.”
He paused, thinking back over folks who had left the fold over the years because of single issues, only to come back later… even if in new chapters.
“The reality is you have to be in it for the long haul,” he added. “From development to sewage treatment plans… there’s lots of lots of issues always coming up. No one issue can ever be a ‘make it or break’ it one. That’s how we’ve made it fifty years.”
So are their Boiceville Inn meetings all political business? Or is there an element of fish tales being told?
And what about other activities?
Karwatowski spoke about the regular meetings being fun… but often boisterous and lively in their discussion elements.
There were also a host of special events the Ashokan Pepacton Watershed Chapter of Trout Unlimited were sponsoring on a regular basis, from a regular mentoring relationship with cadets from the West Point military academy, who’ll be coming up this coming weekend to fish, to the support of ten fish tanks as part of the regional Trout in the Classrooms project, regular stream clean up days, flytying workshops each winter and spring, and a regular series of guest speakers that have included state and New York City environmental officials, leading scientists, and various authors.
“The only pronlem,” Karwatowski quipped, “is that some of us end up spending more time in meetings now than actually fishing.”
And yet it’s all added up to a busy and productive fifty years on a national basis, built chapter by chapter, that gives TU’s local members a strong feeling of comraderie with similar trout fisherfolk in Montana and Wyoming, Connecticut and New Mexico. As well as a continuing sense of purpose, and connectness to the local worlds they all inhabit.
“We now have tools,” he said, after noting how some who have grown up in the area tell him how happy they are trout has finally become a key element in local school life. “We’re passing on a better awareness of what the environment means for all of us, as well as some of the ways we need to show stewardship for it.”
On a national basis, Trout Unlimited will be celebrating this year’s big birthday by having its quarterly magazine, Trout, publish a special 50th anniversary issue in June and its weekly television Outdoor Channel program, On the Rise, focus on key conservation efforts throughout the year.
“As TU celebrates its 50 years of conservation, we must bear in mind that it is TU volunteers who have made the organization what it is today,” said Bryan Moore, Vice President for Volunteer Operations and Watersheds. “TU members are the backbone that keeps the organization growing and moving forward in everything from on-the-ground restoration of rivers and streams to involving young people in conservation. The 50th anniversary celebration is really a celebration of our 140,000 members around the country.”
Meaning, of course, our local folk, as well.
For more on the bigger celebrations, visit www.TU50.org.
For more on the local Ashokan Pepacton Watershed Chapter of TU, including upcoming scheduled events, visit www.apwctu.org.

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Procedural Progress

Back on April 13, all the talk following a special public hearing called for by the town board was about how angrily some speakers denigrated news coverage of the farmstand law, while others charged that the town was becoming somewhat like a socialist state, per refrains being used elsewhere in regards to bailouts and the nation’s entitlement programs.
Then, at a special session held Tuesday, April 21 by the Shandaken Planning board, things were back to a town officials only, pouring over the actual detail work involved in passing any new law correctly.
The planners were required, by town zoning law, to review the proposed town law and recommend its passage by the town board, with mitigation. Or not. After nearly two hours of discussion, they chose to suggest a couple of minor changes that the town board will now consider and likely include before adoption. After, again as required by law, another public hearing on the matter.
With Ulster County Planner Dennis Doyle present in an advisory capacity, the planners waded through the proposed law despite a few warnings from the sparse audience that they were rushing through what is a complicated issue that required more research.
The planners recommended that lighting restrictions be loosened to allow for security lighting. They also recommended dropping specific restrictions on products sold. Instead, they suggest simply limiting non-produce items to no more than 20 percent of the size of the operation. As for limiting the size of the produce stand to 2000 square feet, the planners agreed, noting that variances would be available for a larger size operation.
Hours of operation will still be regulated, with a maximum of 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM. There will still be restrictions on what can be sold. And yes, all the lights would still have to be turned off when the stand closes for the night..
At one point, Doyle warned the board that they might be setting up a situation where existing stands would need to come in for permits. Almost immediately, the discussion veered to the situation involving former supermarket owner Al Higley, whose Hanover Farms enterprise on Route 28 drew the law’s opponents at the previous public hearings.
“This being Shandaken, this is aimed at some existing stand, correct?” Doyle quipped, later adding that, “Farmstands are usually fairly simple in most communities”
At the meeting’s opening, Higley approached the planning board’s seven members and handed each an 8 1⁄2 by 11 manila folder filled with correspondence concerning his business and the town’s permitting process over the years.
Now the law is back in the hands of the town board, which is expected to hold a public hearing and adopt the law at its May 4th meeting, if all can be accomplished in one evening. If not, the denouement of the months-long process, and all its necessary procedural elements, will come in June.
The most recent public hearing on the law on April 13th was held open on the advice of Zoning Board of Appeals member Keith Johnson, who told the town board that if they closed the hearing it set a clock ticking for making a decision on the law. Holding it open, he said, gave the board leeway.
In a telephone interview just prior to the Planning Board session Tuesday, Supervisor Peter DiSclafani explained the intent of the law. He said that currently the only new, lawful activity permitted for such markets in hamlet residential zones is the severely limiting farm stand law. That law, which is unaffected by the produce stand law, allows only 100 square feet to do business, and then only if it is attached to an actual farm.
Since there are no farms in town, another law must be drafted to allow stands. The trick, DiSclafani said, is providing enough restrictions to protect the rest of the neighborhood.
Such sentiments were echoed April 13 by Pine Hill resident Mary Herrmann, who noted that the law, if passed, allows produce stands all over town. Herrmann said she, like most folks, would not want a huge operation next to her house running fully lighted 24 hours a day.
On the other hand, Oliverea resident Joan Lawrence Bauer said she was “heartsick and frightened” by the town board’s effort to overregulate.
“If you pass this law now,” she wondered, “ what will you pass next week?”
That was before the town’s officials got back to procedures, with the county’s help.
Earlier this year the town board passed several new laws regarding property use, as do all towns, looking to changing trends, as well as other municipal entities.
Oliverea resident Sean Lathrop offered a fresh perspective on the matter at the last public hearing, urging the town and produce stands owners such as Higley and the nearby Alyce and Roger’s Fruit Stand to form a coalition and use “forward thinking leadership” to cultivate a much larger produce selling industry — sort of a giant farmers market concept.
“Let’s make something out of this,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing if people came from all up and down the 28 corridor to our town for produce nine months a year.”

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A Truly Natural Uproar

"There’s a lot of misinformation put out there about the bill. A lot of people have been concerned," Lieberson said, echoing many of the bill’s defenders. They point to claims that the husband of the bill’s original sponsor (Rosa DeLauro, D-CT), was working for Monsanto, implying that if that fact was untrue, then the rest of the criticism of the bill must be unfounded. Actually, DeLauro’s mate, Stanley R. Greenberg, CEO of globally influential Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, lists Monsanto, along with Boeing, British Petroleum and numerous other business titans on his "private sector clients" list in his profile. But even the mere mention of Monsanto, whose sinister reputation in health, environmental and agricultural circles was enough to send ripples of dread through the organic and small farm community, sent a message that the company was at the root of the bill.
Monsanto itself was quick to post an oddly defensive denial, expressing near indifference to the bill and asserting that Greenberg hasn’t represented them for over a decade. Many took this apparent inaccuracy about Greenberg’s terms of association as indication that the rest of the criticism could be dismissed.
Conversely, a closer look at the critics’ charge that DeLauro had received $183,500 in PAC money from the agricultural sector in 2008 showed no trace of Monsanto among the donors (though Agri-giant Cargill is present and American Crystal Sugar, prepared to launch a product based in genetically modified sugar beets, is a large donor, as is the Western Peanut Growers Association, which is of interest because the marketing of GM peanuts was approved in early 2007.).
Natural foods and farms organizations are divided in their positions on the bill and much of that difference of perspective can be discerned by weighing in the funding sources of the groups in question. Some groups, for instance, are calling for a boycott of the Kellogg’s company due to their interest in Monsanto’s genetically engineered beets while other organizations billing themselves as farmer advocates, including local ones, boast Kellogg’s among their sponsors.
The industrial ties of funding foundations can markedly slant a group’s outlook.
A large part of the concern about HR 875 and a cluster of other food bills poised on the brink of introduction is grounded in mistrust of federal government legislation in the post-9/11 era, with all of the unanticipated effects and fallout from inclusions in a number of bills and the vague and adaptable language employed in some which have become troublesome laws.
With small farmers and the organic community having been stung by agribusiness-inspired legislation repeatedly in the past two decades, many are staying alert to new food legislation and when news that biotech arch-villain Michael Taylor had been recruited to help direct personnel traffic on President Obama’s transition team emerged, the huge reaction which Lieberson noted became inevitable.
One of the more vocal and astute critics of what he considers abuses of biotechnology, Jeffery Smith, portrays Taylor’s trapeze act of swinging easily from one branch of industry to a branch of government and back again as a blatant example of what most ails the Food and Drug Administration. After a five-year stint at the FDA and some years lobbying for Monsanto, Taylor was on hand back at the FDA to oversee that agency’s acceptance of the GM bovine growth hormone rbGN (or rbST, as well as increased antibiotics and other substances) in milk as basically the same as milk without those extra treats. He also authored the "substantial equivalence" doctrine used to presume that genetically engineered foods are safe, hence marketable, because they are as essentially the same as natural foods- a profundity which led to the infamous contradiction which Monsanto and other biotech-based firms feast upon- that, at the same time, GM foods are "substantially equivalent" yet essentially different enough to be patented and owned.
Now, prepared to persuade regulators that the products of nanotechnology are as harmless as the genetically-modified fish proteins in Breyer’s ice cream, Taylor has returned to the trade-secret spotlight.
While well aware of the ongoing war between big agribusiness and smaller agriculture, not all local growers and marketers were aware of HR 875. Matthew Ballister of Sunfrost Farms in Woodstock, for instance, searched it out online as he answered questions on the phone. About half of his produce is organic, he said.
"People have a bit of misconception about what it takes to maintain a steady food supply to them," Ballister said, opining that the Woodstock Farm Festival was "redundant" because "the very same farmers, or type of farmers, that go there to sell are the people we buy from and buy our business on for 37 years... but organic fruit is very difficult in this region. Fruit is hard enough to get right because people want big, colorful, unspoiled, picture perfect stuff without blemishes, so it needs to be sprayed a lot with serious fungicides. Some companies try organic for a while and discontinue or have a very short season."
The produce manager at Kingston’s popular Adams Market hadn’t heard of the bill, explaining that 90% of their produce comes from California with the 5% percent or so of organic foods they sell coming from their subsidiary company Mother Earth in King’s Mall.
Other Farm outlets and vendors in the county were unavailable or surprisingly unaware of the potential regional impact of the bill. Local farm stand owners on Route 28 either could not be reached or declined comment.
But Brendan McDonough, produce manager of Sunflower Natural Foods Market in Woodstock was keenly aware of HR 875.
"It could impact us greatly because I try hard to support the local growers and our customers are very conscientious here in Woodstock, looking for local product," McDonough said. "Part of the green impact has to do with where it comes from-not just how it’s made, so ‘organic’ is certainly a big part of what we believe in our mission statement. At least 50% of our produce in the summer is certified organic. There’s very little in the winter because there’s not many around here doing greenhouse work through that season. The environmental footprint is much smaller when you don’t have to truck things all the way from California and a drop-off of local supply because of what appears to be a misguided attempt at regulation would certainly effect us adversely. I would encourage our community to find out more about the law and contact our congressional and senate representatives to express their views...particularly Congressman Hinchey."
Challey Comer, the Farm-to-Market Manager for the Watershed Agricultural Council’s Pure Catskill Program was less troubled by the legislation. .
"On the record, I don’t think I’m educated enough about it to really comment, especially because we work with all different types of farms. That’s why the NOFA comments were really valuable to us," Comer explained, referring to a page on the pending legislation posted by the Northeast Organic Farming Association. "We’re a regional bilocal campaign specific to the Catskills. We cover six counties in the area, including all of Ulster County. We do an annual farm directory, give out grants for fairs, festivals, farm and food-related events. We do direct public outreach and also connect farmers with restaurants, retailers and wholesale buyers."
The three leading points of the NOFA statement about HR 875 states that it does not ban organic farming or backyard gardening and farmers’ markets or other direct sales of produce.
But while it is true that the bill does not do so explicitly, there’s no shortage of other organizations who feel it accomplishes these ends implicitly through cloudy or missing wording or specifics of its phrasing.
The NOFA statement follows with some quite sage observations of how the law should be tailored, saying it should be "scale-appropriate" and not apply "one-size-fits-all" regulations on vastly different operations. It insists "safety solutions must be based on actual risk assessments for different products and scales of farms, not assumptions based on an industrial food model."
Their provision that it is based on "sound science" seems to be a jab at the fraudulent science used to promote GM foods (in the eyes of groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and others concerned with integrity in science.)
The other NOFA recommendations can be viewed at [http://nofany.org/hottopics/food_safety.htm].
So, how real is the threat to organic growers and backyard gardeners? Quite real, according to 3/5 of the growers and marketers outside of the conglomerate factory farms.
In the next issue, we’ll take a closer look at the language of this bill and related legislation, as well as the embracing structure of the agricultural industry, Hinchey’s related struggle to clean up the FDA and an astonishingly aggressive corporate plan to control the world food supply which is being associated with the new food safety legislation.