Those willing to clear cut, overfish or pollute public fisheries into oblivion have enjoyed the most permissive administration in modern times, and given the fleeting nature of all things political, they’ve mined it for all it’s worth.

In Ted Williams’ latest book – Something’s Fishy – he exposes those actively participating in the destruction of our fisheries in a muscular collection of essays and articles.

In Williams’ capable hands, his well-researched pieces – especially the people and stories – leap from the page like characters in a crime noir novel.

In fact, at times it does feel like I’m reading a script (though if I were, every story would have a happy ending, which they don’t), but Williams is simply saying laying bare what few want to acknowledge.

A good example is this early passage from “Salmon Stakes” – an essay about the ongoing battle for the Klamath:

In an effort to appease irrigators, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BuRee) had dewatered the Klamath River, which drains a 9,691-square-mile watershed of high desert, woods, and wetlands in southern Oregon and northern California. By July the agency had cut the flow from its Iron Gate Dam from 1,000 cubic feet per second – previously deemed by the administration as the bare minimum necessary to prevent extinction of the system’s coho salmon – to about 650 cfs. From July 12 to August 31, more water went down the main diversion canal to irrigators than down the river to salmon.

Meanwhile, farmers were getting – and wasting – so much water that they were flooding highways and disrupting traffic.

Williams continued to build the suspense by highlighting the methods used to silence scientists protesting the diversion, and, sadly, the result was the largest die-off of adult salmon man’s ever seen.

As one knowledgeable federal insider told me, “Williams isn’t always fun to read, but he’s almost always right.”

That’s a pretty good summation of Something’s Fishy; it’s not always easy to read (if some of his essays don’t make you angry, then you might want to check for a pulse), but it’s always fascinating.

Still, sprinkled among the hard-hitting environmental essays are a handful of more lyrical pieces, and two things become clear.

First, Williams’ strength as a writer is often obscured by his subject matter. When freed from its journalistic reigns and allowed full play on the page, his prose delights as much as it informs.

“Finally the great fish came up and over the lip, and, rod low, I skidded her onto the wet weeds. There was more than two feet of her, and, even if she didn’t belong in Patagonia, she was the most beautiful thing I had seen there – the essence of the trip, if not the place. I needed two hands to hold her while she caught her breath.”

Second, Williams is a rare beast; he’s an environmental writer who is also a sportsman.

In truth, it’s his sportsman’s perspective that makes him so valuable to the sporting community

While the bulk of Williams’ essays are focused directly on those who see wilderness (and the laws protecting it) as something to be mined and slashed into oblivion for short-term profit, he also displays little patience for sportsmen on the wrong side of the debate

In this passage, he blasts an Idaho fly fishing guide was fighting the reintroduction of cutthroat trout:

“When the state of Idaho sought to restore native Yellowstone cutts to Island Park Reservoir, one prominent guide – and educator of local anglers – declared “They’re stupid, and they fight like slugs.” So fierce was the public opposition that the project was abandoned.”

“Environmentalists” who stymie native trout recovery programs with misleading, fear-based campaigns about the use of short-lived, fish-selective poisons also fall into Williams’ cross hairs.

In fact, one essay “Save the Redwoods: Kill Everyone” takes an “environmental” group to task for their blind, tree-sitting pursuit of a logging company who happened to be one of the most responsible on the West coast.

Still, the real targets of Williams’ essays are those who would lay waste to a whole ecosystem for the profit of a single oil field, mine, or other extractive industry, and it’s in these instances that Williams’ penchant for research truly shines.

His ability to expose lies and hypocrisy is uncanny. He’s also a tireless champion not only of fish and wildlife, but also of those who would protect them, and whose careers stand in jeopardy as a result.

Something’s Fishy not only informed (and at times inflamed) me, but it’s become an invaluable resource for my own writing efforts. Williams packs a lot of information into a short essay, and his article about the Klamath River revealed things to me I didn’t know – and, I live here.

This brings me to a criticism of the book. While original publication dates can be found in the back of the book, Williams fails to set his essays in a time and space relative to the reader.

While I understand that William’s essays are previously published, I had no way of knowing if the issue I was reading about was still extant, when the article was actually written, and if any course of action was still relevant (an epilogue or two could have been handy).

Of course, Williams is a journalist and not an advocacy group, and the Internet makes researching most of the issues an easy job.

Something’s Fishy is a weighty book: I counted 52 different essays, spanning fishery issues worldwide. Taken as a whole, his essays on salmon alone amount to a book’s worth of research into the West Coast salmon and Atlantic Salmon issues – neither of which is simple for the bystander to experience.

Almost all of the books I receive for review are given away on the Trout Underground, but I’m retaining Something’s Fishy purely for its research value, though you’ll have to excuse me for also enjoying the writing.

Something’s Fishy scores on several fronts, and it’s a good example of the kind of book that should sell as well as anything in the fly fishing space, but (sadly) almost certainly won’t.

If you’re one of the lucky few who lives near the right city (the tour touches down in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, with a trip to Orvis in Vermont), then consider making plans to see fly fishing’s most popular writer.

It seems like a lifetime’s passed since I first read Gierach’s Trout Bum (late 1980s), and in one sense, it was a lifetime ago.

Back then, I lived in the kill-or-be-killed Silicon Valley, and today I live minutes from good trout water in a sparsely populated rural county.

I won’t pretend Gierach’s wholly responsible, but yeah, his books did suggest there was an alternative to slowly growing heavier, angrier and more desperate in the grip of "civilization," and though I didn’t make a play for the whole trout bum lifestyle, I worked things out well enough to get a little chunk of it.

My favorite Gierach book? The answer varies almost hourly, but I seem to keep returning to Even Brook Trout Gets the Blues, mostly for the title essay.

What about the Undergrounders? Can you pick a favorite Gierach title?

See you at the bookshelves, Tom Chandler.