By Bill Schneider
Back on December 15, I caused a minor tremor with my column about a natural alliance foiled, I wrote about two like-minded groups, hikers and mountain bikers, who instead of working together to preserve Wilderness had played into the competition’s hand by becoming foes in the debate over saving the last of roadless America. Now, I’m writing about a similar natural alliance, but this time we still have a chance to do it right.
Eco-politics can be a minefield, but in this case, we should be able to step carefully through it and form an unbeatable alliance working to win protection for the remaining roadless lands. An alliance between hunters and hikers has come together a few times with outstanding results, such as the designation of Montana’s Scapegoat Wilderness, but the divide-and-conquer forces, the people who do not want any more Wilderness, have been able to keep this alliance from solidifying.
Anti-Wilderness lobbies have been successful in breeding distrust among hunters, claiming that pro-Wilderness groups are nothing but eastern vegans and animal rights zealots whose true intention is a complete ban on hunting. As soon as they “use” you to lock up the Wilderness, the argument goes, they’ll turn on you and oppose hunting and support gun registration.
Poorly named groups like the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus (mostly senators and representatives who rarely fail to champion resource extraction on public lands, including Richard Pombo, R-California, the recent architect of efforts to sell off vast tracts of public land for development) and the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance promote these myths in hopes that hunters won’t form a union with hikers and take the leadership position in deciding the future of our wildlands. These two groups and others have helped keep the Wilderness drought going for twenty-five years by keeping a laser focus on anti-hunting issues such as a local bear hunt in New Jersey or elk study in Oregon that might recommend cougar hunting or a proposal for dove hunting in Michigan instead of seeing the big picture, the dramatic loss of wildlife habitat, which is the greatest-ever threat to hunting. I spent more than an hour searching the websites put up by these two groups for any serious sign of concern for habitat protection but found little more than a litany of diatribe and scare tactics about local trapping and hunting issues orchestrated by the evil “antis.”
For decades, for example, the words, Sierra Club, have been used in the same series as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and The Human Society of the United States, the two leading anti-hunting groups in America. As it turns out, the Sierra Club does not deserve to be in the same sentence as PETA and HSUS. Quite to the contrary, the biggest hiking club boasts of having more than 100,000 active hunters and anglers as members. Not only is the club making sincere efforts to dispel the myth that it’s anti-hunting, but it has launched a special pro-active program called Natural Allies to promote unity with hunters so the two powerful lobbies, hunters and hikers, can work collaboratively on wildland protection, which should be the primary goal of both groups.
But what does the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance say about the Sierra Club’s genuine efforts at coalition building? After listing anything any Sierra Club member or local chapter (quite decentralized from and uncontrolled by the Club’s management, incidentally) has ever said or done about any obscure hunting issue, the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance states: “The Sierra Club is, at best, no friend of hunting and outdoor sports.”
What USSA is really saying is some Sierra Club members make mistakes and do embarrassing things. Well, I’d like to point out that hunters make mistakes and do embarrassing things, but you don’t see a list of them on the Sierra Club website. No organization controls the behavior or political opinions of its members.
Okay, let’s get real. The Sierra Club is not a pro-hunting organization. Ditto for the National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife, two more major green groups that do not oppose hunting. However, individual members or local chapters of these groups occasionally take anti-hunting stances on local issues, all of which are used by groups like USSA to keep the powerful coalition from forming.
Also feeding the paranoia of hunters is the traditional unwillingness of major green groups to stand up behind a podium and say: “We support hunting.” They resist this for fear of losing members who don’t support hunting, not realizing that from a long-term standpoint, this reluctance contributes to the continuing loss of wildlife habitat and prime hiking areas. This why hunters won’t call themselves “environmentalists” instead preferring “conservationists” because the fear criticism of being a turncoat from their peers next time they’re down at the saloon.
But one major green group, the Sierra Club, has broken ranks. The club leadership has its priorities straight and is smart enough to see that the incredible benefit of forming alliances far outweighs the danger of internal strife or loss of membership. Actually, it’s not that hard to build resentment against hunting because hunters are their own worst enemy. Many people oppose hunting because they observed or know of some unethical or hazardous mistake made by a hunter, but instead of putting up a list of ethical faux pas by hunters on its website to emphasize the negative, the Sierra club trumpets a list of member profiles (from members who are active hunters) talking up the positive benefits of working together.
Tunnel vision by hunters is, at the least, incredibly self-defeating when many green groups, not just the Sierra Club, are willing to set their differences aside and work together to protect wildlife habitat. Nothing would benefit hunters more than widespread habitat protection, and nothing protects in better than Wilderness designation.
If we lose our roadless lands here in the New West, we lose the highest quality big game hunting. Everybody knows what’s happening—more and more private land roaded, subdivided and paved. Sometimes wildlife can thrive in the midst of civilization (witness our burgeoning, but unhuntable, urban deer herds), but there’s no hunting on landscapes chopped into ten-acre ranchettes. With private land becoming increasingly unavailable for big game hunting, it puts more and more pressure on public land. Motorized access, when allowed, not only moves big game out (often back on private land closed to hunting), but this public habitat soon suffers from overuse. The end result? Greatly reduced hunting opportunity. The answer for hunters is no more roads and the best, long-term way to achieve this goal is Wilderness designation. Coalition building among natural allies such as hunters and—I’m not afraid to say it out loud—environmentalists can end the Wilderness drought.
Kermit the Frog once famously said “it’s not easy being green,” but if hunters really take a long look into the future, it won’t be that hard.
It’s true that the membership of Sierra Club—no different than the membership of the Republican Party or the Christian Coalition or any broad-based organization—includes many people opposed to hunting, but in this case, the parent organization has made its policy quite clear. You can read it yourself on the Sierra Club website. The policy, adopted way back in 1994, basically, albeit bureaucratically, says that the Sierra Club considers regulated hunting “acceptable.” The same hunting and fishing page on the website includes a link to wonderfully written, must-read article by renown outdoor writer Ted Williams published in Sierra Magazine.
I concede that the Sierra Club’s hunting policy probably grows out of eco-political realties instead of newfound consciousness that hunters have funded conservation of wildlife and play a pivotal role in resource management. But, hey, who cares? By working together, everybody gets the same victory. Hunters get protection for key habitat and hunting areas on public lands; hikers get protection for key hiking areas—or as they say over on Wall Street, no downside risk.
In his article, Williams interviews Chris Potholm, a professor of legal studies at Maine’s Bowdoin College, who laments the fact that enviros rarely reach out to sportsmen for help in saving wild places. "If they did, they'd be invincible,” Potholm predicts. “Whenever sportsmen combine with environmentalists, you have 60 to 70 percent of the population, an absolutely irresistible coalition.
"We've won referenda in Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, Rhode Island, Maine, Minnesota, and Arizona because we were able to get environmentalists and sportsmen to cooperate," reports Potholm. "We can win environmental referenda anywhere if we can get environmentalists and sportsmen working together.”
Such statements should scare the stuffing out of anybody who believes western public lands are little more than reserves of extractable resources and who routinely opposes Wilderness proposals. Hunting organizations should see this as a logical way to preserve quality big game hunting in the New West. So, let’s team up and make this happen.
By Bill Schneider
Back on December 15, I caused a minor tremor with my column about a natural alliance foiled, I wrote about two like-minded groups, hikers and mountain bikers, who instead of working together to preserve Wilderness had played into the competition’s hand by becoming foes in the debate over saving the last of roadless America. Now, I’m writing about a similar natural alliance, but this time we still have a chance to do it right.
Eco-politics can be a minefield, but in this case, we should be able to step carefully through it and form an unbeatable alliance working to win protection for the remaining roadless lands. An alliance between hunters and hikers has come together a few times with outstanding results, such as the designation of Montana’s Scapegoat Wilderness, but the divide-and-conquer forces, the people who do not want any more Wilderness, have been able to keep this alliance from solidifying.
Anti-Wilderness lobbies have been successful in breeding distrust among hunters, claiming that pro-Wilderness groups are nothing but eastern vegans and animal rights zealots whose true intention is a complete ban on hunting. As soon as they “use” you to lock up the Wilderness, the argument goes, they’ll turn on you and oppose hunting and support gun registration.
Poorly named groups like the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus (mostly senators and representatives who rarely fail to champion resource extraction on public lands, including Richard Pombo, R-California, the recent architect of efforts to sell off vast tracts of public land for development) and the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance promote these myths in hopes that hunters won’t form a union with hikers and take the leadership position in deciding the future of our wildlands. These two groups and others have helped keep the Wilderness drought going for twenty-five years by keeping a laser focus on anti-hunting issues such as a local bear hunt in New Jersey or elk study in Oregon that might recommend cougar hunting or a proposal for dove hunting in Michigan instead of seeing the big picture, the dramatic loss of wildlife habitat, which is the greatest-ever threat to hunting. I spent more than an hour searching the websites put up by these two groups for any serious sign of concern for habitat protection but found little more than a litany of diatribe and scare tactics about local trapping and hunting issues orchestrated by the evil “antis.”
For decades, for example, the words, Sierra Club, have been used in the same series as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and The Human Society of the United States, the two leading anti-hunting groups in America. As it turns out, the Sierra Club does not deserve to be in the same sentence as PETA and HSUS. Quite to the contrary, the biggest hiking club boasts of having more than 100,000 active hunters and anglers as members. Not only is the club making sincere efforts to dispel the myth that it’s anti-hunting, but it has launched a special pro-active program called Natural Allies to promote unity with hunters so the two powerful lobbies, hunters and hikers, can work collaboratively on wildland protection, which should be the primary goal of both groups.
But what does the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance say about the Sierra Club’s genuine efforts at coalition building? After listing anything any Sierra Club member or local chapter (quite decentralized from and uncontrolled by the Club’s management, incidentally) has ever said or done about any obscure hunting issue, the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance states: “The Sierra Club is, at best, no friend of hunting and outdoor sports.”
What USSA is really saying is some Sierra Club members make mistakes and do embarrassing things. Well, I’d like to point out that hunters make mistakes and do embarrassing things, but you don’t see a list of them on the Sierra Club website. No organization controls the behavior or political opinions of its members.
Okay, let’s get real. The Sierra Club is not a pro-hunting organization. Ditto for the National Audubon Society and Defenders of Wildlife, two more major green groups that do not oppose hunting. However, individual members or local chapters of these groups occasionally take anti-hunting stances on local issues, all of which are used by groups like USSA to keep the powerful coalition from forming.
Also feeding the paranoia of hunters is the traditional unwillingness of major green groups to stand up behind a podium and say: “We support hunting.” They resist this for fear of losing members who don’t support hunting, not realizing that from a long-term standpoint, this reluctance contributes to the continuing loss of wildlife habitat and prime hiking areas. This why hunters won’t call themselves “environmentalists” instead preferring “conservationists” because the fear criticism of being a turncoat from their peers next time they’re down at the saloon.
But one major green group, the Sierra Club, has broken ranks. The club leadership has its priorities straight and is smart enough to see that the incredible benefit of forming alliances far outweighs the danger of internal strife or loss of membership. Actually, it’s not that hard to build resentment against hunting because hunters are their own worst enemy. Many people oppose hunting because they observed or know of some unethical or hazardous mistake made by a hunter, but instead of putting up a list of ethical faux pas by hunters on its website to emphasize the negative, the Sierra club trumpets a list of member profiles (from members who are active hunters) talking up the positive benefits of working together.
Tunnel vision by hunters is, at the least, incredibly self-defeating when many green groups, not just the Sierra Club, are willing to set their differences aside and work together to protect wildlife habitat. Nothing would benefit hunters more than widespread habitat protection, and nothing protects in better than Wilderness designation.
If we lose our roadless lands here in the New West, we lose the highest quality big game hunting. Everybody knows what’s happening—more and more private land roaded, subdivided and paved. Sometimes wildlife can thrive in the midst of civilization (witness our burgeoning, but unhuntable, urban deer herds), but there’s no hunting on landscapes chopped into ten-acre ranchettes. With private land becoming increasingly unavailable for big game hunting, it puts more and more pressure on public land. Motorized access, when allowed, not only moves big game out (often back on private land closed to hunting), but this public habitat soon suffers from overuse. The end result? Greatly reduced hunting opportunity. The answer for hunters is no more roads and the best, long-term way to achieve this goal is Wilderness designation. Coalition building among natural allies such as hunters and—I’m not afraid to say it out loud—environmentalists can end the Wilderness drought.
Kermit the Frog once famously said “it’s not easy being green,” but if hunters really take a long look into the future, it won’t be that hard.
It’s true that the membership of Sierra Club—no different than the membership of the Republican Party or the Christian Coalition or any broad-based organization—includes many people opposed to hunting, but in this case, the parent organization has made its policy quite clear. You can read it yourself on the Sierra Club website. The policy, adopted way back in 1994, basically, albeit bureaucratically, says that the Sierra Club considers regulated hunting “acceptable.” The same hunting and fishing page on the website includes a link to wonderfully written, must-read article by renown outdoor writer Ted Williams published in Sierra Magazine.
I concede that the Sierra Club’s hunting policy probably grows out of eco-political realties instead of newfound consciousness that hunters have funded conservation of wildlife and play a pivotal role in resource management. But, hey, who cares? By working together, everybody gets the same victory. Hunters get protection for key habitat and hunting areas on public lands; hikers get protection for key hiking areas—or as they say over on Wall Street, no downside risk.
In his article, Williams interviews Chris Potholm, a professor of legal studies at Maine’s Bowdoin College, who laments the fact that enviros rarely reach out to sportsmen for help in saving wild places. "If they did, they'd be invincible,” Potholm predicts. “Whenever sportsmen combine with environmentalists, you have 60 to 70 percent of the population, an absolutely irresistible coalition.
"We've won referenda in Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, Rhode Island, Maine, Minnesota, and Arizona because we were able to get environmentalists and sportsmen to cooperate," reports Potholm. "We can win environmental referenda anywhere if we can get environmentalists and sportsmen working together.”
Such statements should scare the stuffing out of anybody who believes western public lands are little more than reserves of extractable resources and who routinely opposes Wilderness proposals. Hunting organizations should see this as a logical way to preserve quality big game hunting in the New West. So, let’s team up and make this happen.
By Bill Schneider