CHANGE FOCUS TO SAVING WILDLAND HABITAT

Make This Hunting and Fishing Day the Best Ever

By Bill Schneider, 9-25-08

Even though it has been around for 36 years, I suspect most people don’t know that this Saturday, September 27, is National Hunting and Fishing Day.

Let’s make this one the best ever by launching a national effort to protect the last of the best wildlife habitat we have left, our 58 million acres of roadless public land.

In 1972, with persist urging from sporting groups, primarily the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Congress unanimously passed a resolution proclaiming the fourth Saturday in September as National Hunting and Fishing Day. While signing the resolution, President Nixon said: “I urge all citizens to join with outdoor sportsmen in the wise use of our natural resources and in insuring their proper management for the benefit of future generations.”

By the end of the summer all 50 governors and 600 mayors had made similar proclamations. And the day quickly became an annual celebration of our fishing and hunting tradition and the critical contributions made by anglers and hunters to the future of our fish and wildlife resources.

We have a lot of disagreement in the comment sections of my columns, but one point on which I’m sure we can all agree is the vital role anglers and hunters have played in the conservation movement. Without their work and financial contributions through license fees and excise taxes (10 percent on all firearms, ammo, archery equipment and fishing gear), we simply wouldn’t have the quality fisheries or wildlife populations we have today. In many cases, in fact, fish and wildlife numbers have never been higher.

This may seem simplistic, but the critical contributions of anglers and hunters can be roughly split into two categories--seeking restrictive regulations on themselves and protecting the habitat fish and wildlife needs to survive. That is, incidentally, fish and wildlife for all people to enjoy, not only anglers and hunters, and these conservation efforts often benefit non-game species as much or more than game species.

The first task has gone exceptionally well. Anglers and hunters are almost always the first to the podium to support more restrictions and higher fees on themselves. The days of over-consumption of our wildlife resources disappeared long ago.

The second task, habitat protection, hasn’t gone as well. We still have lots of work to do, more than ever in fact, as pressure to develop our last natural resources to fuel the needs of an ever-growing, ever-more-consumptive population. Anglers and hunters still face a colossal challenge in keeping huntable and fishable populations for themselves and even more important, as Nixon said, for future generations.

An engrained conflict, especially among hunters, is one reason the goal of protecting wildlife habitat has fallen behind. Many have conservative political ideologies and vote for politicians likely to represent those views, even though those elected officials don’t support doing what needs to be done to protect habitat for future generations.

Conflicts aside, for the past century, anglers and hunters have met one challenge after another, so I’d like to throw a new one out there. Anglers and hunters need to take charge of the challenge of protecting our last best habitat, our roadless public lands.

To date, trying to protect roadless lands has, for the most part, been the domain of national and state wilderness groups. That needs to change. Hunters who want a wild, undeveloped, public land to hunt and anglers who want pristine watersheds to feed clean water into rivers and lakes should temporarily refocus efforts on protecting roadless lands.

I say temporarily because this can be done in a year or less. When the new president and Congress takes office in January, let’s greet them with a proposal from sporting groups, not from wilderness groups, to give immediate statutory protection for our roadless lands, all 58 million acres, and then do the lobbying necessary to get it passed.

With this job done, sporting groups can then go back to loading ammo or tying flies and worrying about the number of archery permits or the size of slot limits and other tasks temporarily abandoned to meet the biggest challenge of them all.

What kind of protection? Wilderness groups want official “big W” Wilderness for the bulk of these lands, and frankly, I prefer this designation, too, because it’s the only one we currently have in our arsenal that would guarantee “wise use” for “future generations.”

But Wilderness is a hot button for lots of politicians and sportsmen and women. The endless debate over the Wilderness has prevented any meaningful progress in protecting roadless lands for the last three decades with little chance of this changing in the future.

So, to achieve fast, lasting protection, we probably need a new, “wilderness lite” designation. The name isn’t important, but something like “backcountry” or “primitive areas” would fit--even “wildlife management areas.” The name isn’t significant; the management is.

The new areas should allow more liberal uses than designated Wilderness, including for example, mountain biking, but ban road building and all motorized use. That’s another conflict for some hunters who use mechanical quads instead of those they were born with. Witness the sponsors of the 2008 National Hunting and Fishing Day, which include Yamaha and feature a photo of the “Grizzly” on the event’s home page.

So, expect some mechanized hunters and the ATV industry to oppose any effort to keep roadless lands roadless, but we can overcome this opposition. Wilderness groups will be grouchy about any wilderness-lite proposal, but eventually will join sporting groups and support this gigantic compromise.

So, hunters and anglers, we’ve always been able to do what needs to be done, so let’s set sights high, set our conflicts aside, and get this job done, too.

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