The Sustainable Angler Podcast: The Venturing Angler’s Tim Harden

Rick Crawford

I have been a long-time reader of The Venturing Angler and had a blast interviewing its founder, Tim Harden. I first met Tim at Abaco Lodge when I was there conducting a sustainability assessment for the lodge and had the opportunity to fish a few days together. Now, here we are about a year and a half later from catching countless bonefish in the Bahamas, and in this episode we cover a lot of ground. We discuss everything from how and why Harden started The Venturing Angler, an in-depth discussion on climate change and some conservation success stories such as A Day for Bristol Bay that raised over $100K to protect the famous salmon fishery from the proposed short-sighted Pebble Mine. Finally, we talk about our responsibility as anglers to take action and protect what we love and we conclude with a chat about Wu-Tang? Yes!

Some additional topics and links we discussed….

• Paul Hawken has written numerous books on sustainability and also has a booked called Project Drawdown: 100 Solutions to Solve Global Warming, which I highly recommend.
• Great Paul Hawken Quote: “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”
• Some excellent conservation and climate change nonprofits worth checking out and supporting: Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, IndiFly, Conservation Hawks, Protect Our Winters and Save Bristol Bay.
• Another book recommendation: Some Stories: Lesson from the Edge from Business and Sports by Yvon Chouinard and Points Unknown: The Greatest Adventure Writing of the Twentieth Century (Outside Books)

Special thanks to our sponsors, OluKai and Monic Fly Lines for sponsoring this episode of The Sustainable Angler podcast, which is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. We also recently created a YouTube channel, so don’t forget to subscribe there! If you like what you are hearing, it would help us out a lot if you gave us a follow, rating or review and/or subscribed and shared our episodes through social media so that we can continue to educate and create more awareness about environmental threats to our fisheries while also sharing success stories that inspire action!