The Fly Fisherman's Silent Spring — Part 2:

The Fly Fisherman’s Silent Spring — Part 2:

/ April 16, 2026 / Leave a comment / Bad News For The Planet

From Diagnosis to Restoration — How Fly Fishermen Can Help Bring the Hatches Back

Experience Locally Act Globally

The salmon came back to Alaska. The mayflies can come back to our rivers. Here’s how.

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1: How the Collapse of Trout Stream Insects Dwarfs the Clean Windshield Phenomenon for the full diagnosis of the crisis facing our trout streams.

In Part 1 of this series, we walked through the forensic evidence of aquatic insect collapse on our trout streams—the billions of mayflies missing from the Upper Mississippi, the vanished sulphurs of the Delaware, the failed PMD hatches from Henry’s Fork to the Madison, the 68% of caddisfly species in decline. We identified rising atmospheric CO₂ as the one environmental variable capable of explaining this global, synchronized catastrophe, poisoning aquatic insect nurseries through the chemistry of dissolved CO₂ in our rivers, lakes, and sediments.

But diagnosis without prescription is despair. Here in Part 2, we turn to what fly fishermen can do, and why there is genuine hope—if we’re willing to think big enough.

The Fly Fisherman as Sentinel

There’s a peculiar irony in our position as fly fishermen. Society often dismisses our concerns as the nostalgia of hobbyists mourning diminished fishing opportunities. But we are, in fact, uniquely positioned observers.

We spend more hours watching specific stretches of water than any other group of humans. We maintain hatch charts going back decades. We know the precise dates when specific species should emerge on specific rivers. We can tell you what a healthy Mother’s Day Caddis hatch looks like on Rock Creek versus a poor one, because we’ve witnessed both. We’re amateur entomologists by necessity—you cannot fish effectively without learning to identify the major aquatic insect orders and their life histories.

When fly fishermen say something is catastrophically wrong with our rivers, we’re reporting observations with a scientific precision that deserves serious consideration. And what we’re reporting is nothing short of an aquatic insect apocalypse happening in real time before our eyes.

What This Means for the Future

The collapse of trout stream insects portends a future that should concern everyone. If the mayflies, caddisflies, and stoneflies—insects whose lineages predate the dinosaurs—cannot adapt to current super-fast rates of atmospheric and aquatic chemistry change, then we are witnessing the beginning of the end of freshwater ecosystems as they have existed for hundreds of millions of years.

The trout themselves, of course, will suffer. Wild trout populations are already documented in decline across the American West, with Montana fisheries reporting concerning drops in whitefish and trout numbers in traditional strongholds. A trout in a river without a hatch is a trout without a future.

But trout are just the beginning. Everything downstream from a dying insect community—birds, bats, amphibians, reptiles, fish, and ultimately the plants that depend on these animals for seed dispersal and pest control—will feel these losses.

A Call to Action for Fly Fishermen

We fly fishermen have a role to play that no one else can fill. We need to:

Document what we’re seeing. Keep detailed records of hatches on your home waters. Photograph “the hatch”. Record dates, intensity, and species composition. Submit data to citizen science programs like the Xerces Society’s monitoring efforts or the Salmonfly Project’s Western river studies.

Raise our voices. The fly fishing community has political and economic weight. Trout Unlimited, the Federation of Fly Fishers, and state angling organizations should be sounding alarms about aquatic insect collapse with the same intensity they’ve mobilized around dam removal or catch-and-release regulations.

Demand funding. The fact that aquatic insect decline research is largely being led by grassroots organizations like the Bitterroot Chapter of Trout Unlimited and the Salmonfly Project is an indictment of how poorly funded this critical research has been. Federal and state wildlife agencies need to prioritize aquatic insect monitoring with the same rigor they apply to game fish populations.

Question the conventional explanations. When someone tells you that agricultural pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, alone explain the collapse, ask them how that explains declines in pristine Yellowstone streams. When someone blames warming water temperatures, ask how that explains declines in tailwater fisheries with stable cold releases. Don’t accept incomplete explanations for a seemingly incomprehensible catastrophe.

Consider the CO₂ hypothesis. The one environmental variable that has changed everywhere simultaneously—in every stream, reserve, and remote wilderness on Earth—is atmospheric and dissolved CO₂. This idea/explanation deserves serious scientific investigation, not dismissal.

As I’ve explored in previous writings on the lethal CO₂ overdose our planet is experiencing, the solution may require the same urgency we’d apply to treating a poisoning victim.

A Ray of Hope: The Ocean Pasture Solution

Here is where I must offer my fellow fly fishermen something more than grief. There is genuine hope—but it requires us to think bigger than any trout stream, bigger than any watershed, bigger even than any continent.

The root problem we face is the backlog of nearly a trillion tonnes of accumulated atmospheric CO₂ from a century of fossil fuel burning. Even if humanity stopped emitting CO₂ tomorrow—which we won’t—this enormous backlog would continue poisoning our aquatic insect nurseries for centuries, because CO₂ takes that long to equilibrate out of the atmosphere through natural processes. Emission reductions alone, even aggressive ones, cannot address the backlog fast enough to save our hatches. We need a different kind of solution, one that can draw down that accumulated CO₂ on a planetary scale.

Fortunately, Nature has one—and She’s been doing it for billions of years. The oceans cover 71% of our planet’s surface, and healthy ocean pastures of phytoplankton are the single largest CO₂-regulating system on Earth. When phytoplankton flourish, they absorb vast quantities of atmospheric CO₂ through photosynthesis, fix that carbon into living biomass, and send much of it to the deep ocean where it remains sequestered for centuries to millennia. A healthy ocean is a thirsty ocean, drinking down CO₂ at scales that dwarf any engineered solution humans could build.

The problem is that our ocean pastures are dying. The iron-rich mineral dust that feeds phytoplankton blooms—carried on winds from arid lands—has been declining for decades as CO₂-driven “global greening” locks more vegetation onto formerly dusty landscapes. Less dust means fewer plankton, which means less CO₂ drawdown, which means more atmospheric CO₂, which means more poisoned aquatic insect nurseries. It’s a vicious cycle—but one we know how to break.

In 2012, with eleven Haida shipmates, I led the world’s first commercial-scale ocean pasture restoration project in the Gulf of Alaska, replenishing depleted mineral dust across 10,000 square kilometers. The following year, Alaska recorded its largest salmon catch in history—226 million pink salmon when 50 million had been forecast. And the catch number stopped when ability to receive another fish on land was overwhelmed, the fish kept arriving for weeks. The ocean pasture we restored captured and sequestered scores of millions of tonnes of CO₂ while simultaneously feeding hundreds of millions of additional fish. It worked exactly as 50 years of institutional science predicted it would. The cost was a few million dollars—compared to the trillions being spent on emission reduction schemes that address only future emissions, not the deadly backlog.

For fly fishermen, this matters profoundly. Ocean pasture restoration is the one solution large enough, fast enough, and affordable enough to actually lower atmospheric CO₂ concentrations within timeframes that matter to our trout streams. Restore enough ocean pastures, and atmospheric CO₂ begins to decline. Declining atmospheric CO₂ means declining dissolved CO₂ in freshwater systems. Declining dissolved CO₂ means aquatic insect nurseries become habitable again. The mayflies and caddisflies and stoneflies whose lineages predate the dinosaurs have survived every previous atmospheric upheaval Earth has thrown at them. Given half a chance—given air and water their ancestors would recognize—they will return.

There is a beautiful symmetry in this solution that should resonate deeply with every fly fisherman. We are a tribe that understands the interconnectedness of ecosystems better than almost anyone. We know that a healthy trout depends on a healthy mayfly, which depends on a healthy river, which depends on a healthy watershed. What fewer of us have grasped is that all of these depend on a healthy ocean, which depends on healthy ocean pastures, which depend on the ancient partnership between wind, dust, and phytoplankton that has sustained this blue planet for eons. When we restore ocean pastures, we are not just saving salmon and whales and seabirds—we are restoring the global CO₂ thermostat that makes our trout streams livable for the insects we love. The same restoration that brought back Alaska’s salmon in such staggering abundance in 2013 can, at sufficient scale, bring back the PMDs on the Henry’s Fork, the sulphurs on the Delaware, and the caddis on the Madison.

This is not wishful thinking. It is proven technology, demonstrated at commercial scale, ready to deploy. What it needs is exactly what fly fishermen are best at providing: informed advocacy, political pressure, and the willingness to speak up for the natural world we love. We need to demand that our governments and fisheries agencies take ocean pasture restoration seriously. We need to support organizations working to scale this solution. We need to connect the dots publicly between the insects disappearing from our home waters and the ocean pastures dying far offshore. The fly fishing community helped save wild trout through catch-and-release. We helped remove destructive dams. We can help restore ocean pastures and, in doing so, save the very hatches that define our art form.

Closing Thoughts from a Streamside Seat

Last summer I stood in a favorite river at dusk, rod in hand, waiting for a hatch that used to be one of the most reliable events on my home waters. The light faded. The water moved. A few fish rose occasionally to take something too small to identify.

The hatch never came. Not in the numbers I remembered. Not in the numbers that would make a trout forget caution and a fisherman forget the passage of time.

I’ve had this experience with increasing frequency over the past decade, on rivers across the West and in the East. And what I feel standing in those waters is not just the fisherman’s disappointment at a thin night of fishing. It’s something deeper—a grief for something ancient and immense that is quietly, implacably dying, and a fear that we are not paying attention to what the dying rivers are trying to tell us.

The windshield phenomenon told us something was wrong in general. The trout stream collapse is telling us exactly what is wrong, and where, and to what precise magnitude. The insects are speaking in a language of absence. We ignore what they’re saying at our peril.

But we do not have to accept this as our future. Every fly fisherman is now, whether we wanted to be or not, a witness to one of the great environmental catastrophes of our time. What we do with that witness status—whether we grieve quietly as the hatches fade or rise to advocate for the planetary-scale restoration that alone can bring them back—will determine whether future generations ever know what it was like to stand in a river at dusk and see the air itself come alive with emerging insects.

The salmon came back to Alaska. The mayflies can come back to our rivers. But only if we act, and only if we think big enough to match the scale of the problem. The oceans are waiting. The ancient partnership between wind, dust, phytoplankton, and life itself is waiting. And somewhere in every fly fisherman’s memory, a June evening is waiting too—the shimmer above the riffle, the trout rising in glory, the air alive with the miracle of emergence.

I believe we can have those evenings back. But we have to fight for them. Not just on our home waters, but everywhere life on this blue planet depends on healthy air and healthy seas. Which is to say: everywhere.

Missed Part 1? Read Part 1: How the Collapse of Trout Stream Insects Dwarfs the Clean Windshield Phenomenon — the full diagnosis of what’s killing our hatches, the quantitative evidence from fisheries research, and why rising CO₂ is the one explanation that fits the global pattern of aquatic insect collapse.

The decline documented in this article draws from peer-reviewed research published in PNAS, Biological Conservation, and other scientific journals, as well as monitoring data from fisheries research organizations including the Salmonfly Project, Trout Unlimited, and fisheries biologists working in the American West, Upper Midwest, and Eastern trout regions. Citations available upon request.

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