Folks,

I am starting to become more conscious of building flies I'm not ashamed to be left in a fish, or a stream bed. Synthetic materials have been the rage of fly tying for the last several decades, and for good reasons with respect to catching fish. Nymphing is now more about getting the fly down fast, and Lead has been the material of choice for this until recently. While Tungsten can replaced Lead split-shot, this creates another "body" on the line, and that promotes snags and tangles. Sure, I can cast with split-shot, but I prefer to weight flies at the vice.

So I'd like to suggest/request from this forum to consider the question of whether some tying materials should be excluded for environmental reasons in the same regard that some people resist converting to fluorocarbon because of its inability to degrade over time.

Flies themselves are such small items. It may seem silly to impose such restrictions based on their tiny mass alone with so many other accepted offenses to our environment outside of our control. But maybe there is a principle to be upheld here, and maybe toxicity and/or biodegradability should become a criteria for the fly tying industry and its practitioners. We have always been a resourceful lot...should we not be concerned about the natural resources we visit to apply ourselves in this endeavor as well? Food for thought, at least for me.

If all flies, lures and poppers were tied with non degradable material and we had ten times the number of fly fishers on the water and all losing flies consistently maybe there would be a case for concern. Besides that there is far too many restrictions on our liberty already. The Green thing in my opinion is very much a political football that I refrain from playing with.

Thanks for the response though I'm not yet agreeing that things I construct and put into the environment are political in nature. It's too direct a thing. We make things that are supposed to look like food so trying to minimize their negative impact seems reasonable on a personal level. So for me going forward, no more fluoro leaders and no lead wire in my flies. I'll make larger nymphs with multiple ceramic beads if they can tolerate the bulk, and use tungsten split-shot where they can't. Not much sacrifice, and certainly as you point out, not much benefit either.

What about not buying products from China? They do more harm than all of us combined in a lifetime. So much fly stuff is made over there in the name of saving money.

Watch Racing Extinction on Discovery Channel. It will blow your mind!!

I had written this big, long diatribe that devolved into the crash of society into circa 1900 civilization. Yeah, that was too much.
We are fighting an uphill battle against the idiots and fools. They are destroying us faster than we can save us.

I keep my vehicles in good working order, and don't go out of my way to pollute the environment. Any pollutants in my fly tying kit are of no consequence by comparison.

Green. Arrggghhh. I hate what that word has grown to mean. You may not have intended it mean anything but a concern for the environment, but activists, the mainstream media, and the advertising media have made it a political "holier-than-thou" expression of superiority.

It's all relative. I'm not going to worry about my flies as long as I can pick up a full bag of trash every time I go to the creek.

Kirk