COMMENTARY

On Energy Development, Hunters and Anglers Push Back

By Chris Hunt, Guest Writer, 4-30-08

	Soon to be a common sight on our public land. Photo by Chris Hunt.

Eight months ago, President Bush signed an executive order directing federal agencies to do everything necessary to “facilitate the expansion and enhancement of hunting opportunities and the management of game species and their habitat.”

The president gave those agencies--specifically the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (FS)--a year to come up with a plan to implement this order, which was, conceptually anyway, drafted to combat news that participation in hunting was waning in the United States. It should also be noted that participation in fishing is dwindling as well.

About the same time, the BLM announced plans to lease the Roan Plateau in Colorado for natural gas development. Plans were also announced to lease nearly 45,000 acres of land in the Hoback River drainage of western Wyoming, and the West was--and still is--in the throes of a full-on energy boom. Sportsmen--the very people who stood to benefit from Executive Order 13443--were deeply involved in important campaigns to protect a number of special places throughout the West from irresponsible oil and gas drilling that would not only trash important fish and game habitat, but significantly reduce hunting and fishing opportunity.

And the agencies, operating under a more pressing directive from the White House to make the recovery of domestic fossil fuel reserves beneath public land as easy as possible for industry, have seemingly ignored the executive order to enhance hunting. It’s a problem of duplicity, and one the administration either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care to consider. To put it simply, you can’t improve opportunity if you continue to turn habitat into industrial zones, no matter how much “facilitating” you do. Participation in hunting is declining, just as places to hunt become more scarce.

The BLM and FS have until August to come up with a plan to implement President Bush’s order. By all barometers, little, if any, progress has been made. Meanwhile, sportsmen continue to fight for the places they hunt and fish, and they continue to battle the agencies, which seem so willing to enforce the president’s order to drill--at all costs, apparently--but not so willing to protect the places fish and game need for survival. One must only connect the dots--if we lose habitat, we lose opportunity.

The Roan, for instance, is a fishing and hunting oasis in a sea of industrial development. Home to trophy deer and elk herds and populations of genetically pure Colorado River cutthroat trout, as well as a very respectable fishery for introduced brook trout, the Roan is a hunting and fishing destination--if any patch of public land deserves the “hunting enhancement” order, the Roan is it.

The public lands atop the plateau represent about 1.5 percent of the Uinta-Piceance Basin gas field, 90 percent of which is leased or available for leasing. Sportsmen from all over Colorado have mobilized in defense of the Roan, going so far as to support a new plan from lawmakers that would slowly phase development in--this is a far cry from our initial request that this little piece of public real estate be left alone as the rest of northwestern Colorado is turned into a pincushion. We called it “balance,” but that’s true in name only. “Balance,” we’ve come to understand, is a relative term, at least to the agencies operating under orders from this administration.

Or, as Tony Dean, the reputable sportsman and host of the wildly popular Tony Dean Outdoors, noted in a recent conference call with Western reporters, “Anytime I hear the word ‘balance,’ I know sportsmen are about to take it in the shorts.”

In Wyoming, where sportsmen have banded together to protect the state’s namesake mountains along its western border with Idaho, we’ve made some progress, but without help from Congress, the Wyoming Range could be drilled, and its hunting and fishing resources lost forever. We need only look east to the sage steppes of west-central Wyoming to see the impact irresponsible energy development can have on game populations--at least 40 percent of the mule deer herd in the area has vanished. Industrial-grade roads lead from one razed well pad the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot to another just like it, all them devoid of vegetation and frequented by 18-wheel trucks hauling pipe, drilling mud and supplies to feed the industry as it pulls gas from the ground.

And the BLM, the federal agency in charge of leasing land belonging to every American to industrial interests? Just following orders.

Hunters and anglers have come to one elementary conclusion. Executive Order 13443 is simple lip service, offered up by an administration with an agenda favoring industry and swept under the carpet by undermanned agencies already stretched to meet the demands placed upon them. While we certainly welcome the idea of enhancing hunting opportunities, which translates in a very unsophisticated fashion to protecting the places huntable creatures live, actions speak louder than, well, executive orders.

But there is hope. In late May in the shadow of the Tetons, three hunting and fishing conservation organizations--Trout Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership--are convening a first-of-its-kind symposium. It’s a gathering of the most credible scientific and political minds in the West, and its mission is to tackle the challenges surrounding one simple question: What is responsible energy development and what does it look like on the ground?

Most sportsmen agree domestic energy production in these uncertain times is important--although most would also agree that nearly a decade of increased production and the habitat destruction accompanying it has not translated into lower fuel prices for either petroleum or natural gas. The sacrifice is simply becoming too much to bear, and answers are needed if we are to protect the Western hunting and fishing heritage.

I invite you to be a part of the solution, to participate in the Responsible Energy Development Symposium planned for Jackson Hole, Wyo., May 21-24. With input from sportsmen, we can generate an agenda of change and seek true balance on our public lands that will ensure future generations of hunters and fishermen won’t need toothless executive orders to protect their pastimes. We can approach a new Congress and the next presidential administration with a reasonable plan to develop our nation’s energy reserves while protecting our uniquely Western culture.

Please visit www.sportsmen4responsibleenergy.org, and learn about the ongoing campaign to protect the places we hunt and fish. Click the link to the symposium, and register. Rooms are available at Jackson Lake Lodge for a special price, and you won’t find a more inspirational locale from which to ponder the future of the West’s sporting heritage.

I hope you’ll join us in our search for meaningful reform when it comes to energy development. Sportsmen are uniquely situated to deliver change--we just need to come together to make it happen.

Chris Hunt is the communications director for Trout Unlimited’s Public Lands Initiative. He can be reached via e-mail at chunt@tu.org.

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