Wood fishes in Fletchers Cove. Photo: Nick Sobczyk / Axios
Trout Unlimited CEO Chris Wood is confident that the conservation community will "come out of the woodwork" to defend public lands in the Trump 2.0 era.
Why it matters: Wood is a D.C. stalwart with close relationships on both sides of the aisle and an optimistic view of what's possible in a sharply divided Congress.
Axios recently hit the water with Wood once again to fish the Potomac shad run at Fletchers Cove…
What he's saying: Wood said he's worried that Trump's proposed cuts could "hollow out" land management agencies like BLM and the Forest Service.
- "What's going to happen is they're not going to be able to fill grazing permits in a timely manner, and they're not going to be able to fill oil and gas permits in a timely manner, and the campgrounds are going to be dirty, and the trails aren't going to be maintained."
- That could turn into a "self-fulfilling prophecy" in which people believe that public lands should be sold off or given to states.
Yes, but: Wood thinks the conservation and sportsmen's communities would fight public lands sales.
- "The hunting and angling community is a generally conservative one, and is slow to anger, but once you light that fire, Katie bar the door."
Zoom in: So far, Wood said, he's seeing "strange" silence from Hill appropriators on DOGE-driven agency cuts, but he expects that to change as Trump's grace period wears off.
- He's also still bullish about the prospects of a mining package that offers industry an easier path to permitting and creates a first-ever hardrock royalty.
- Wood named Sens. Martin Heinrich and Jim Risch as possible champions. They're the same coalition that got the Good Samaritan mine cleanup bill across the finish line last year.
Speaking of Good Sam, Wood said the rulemaking to get cleanups off the ground could get done within a year.
- Although TU has good relationships with folks at the agencies, he said, "morale is really, really low."
The big picture: Wood is generally optimistic about the Trump administration and the environmental laws that constrain it. Fletchers Cove illustrates why.
- "This is a river that when Dad was in school here in the '60s, he said, 'You wouldn't go near the Potomac because it would make you sick.'"
- As he spoke, an osprey dove into the Potomac near the boat and plucked a shad out of the water.
- "The shad weren't here when I first moved to D.C. And now the osprey are back, the eagles are back, the cormorants are back, the shad are back, the stripers are back. And it's all because of the Clean Water Act."
What's next: Wood is also on the board of Friends of Fletcher's Cove, which is working with the National Park Service to get the cove a desperately needed dredging.
- It's gradually filling up with sediment because of fill left over from an infrastructure project placed just upstream in the 1960s.
- That project — "the fight of the century" for shad fishers, as Wood put it —is set to begin as soon as this winter.
