Hunting | Dispatches from the Middle River

Hold Them Accountable

October 4, 2011 by Tom Sadler · Leave a Comment

Montanan Tony Bynum see danger in Congress and their attack on our public lands. Bynum expresses his concern about the Wilderness and Roadless Release Act and the points out how the recent demonizing of the Antiquities Act is so much pandering to right wing nit wits and really a diservice to hunters and anglers.

He talks about how the Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument is a prime hunting destination this time of year and because of the Antiquities Act it will still be that way 100 years from now.

Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument (courtesy BLM)

Pretty hard to recruit and retain hunters and anglers when we lose venues to irrational demonization of laws that create and protect these prime hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation places. As Bynum puts it,

“Let’s remember what matters most. What legacy shall we leave our children and theirs? Public land, open hunting for the common man is a tradition out west. I wish to leave that legacy to my children and, when this heritage is threatened by bad leadership decisions, we need to hold our leaders’ feet to the fire. It is far better to manage wisely and preserve our intact systems than it is to dismantle and try to rebuild them later.”

When the political carnival barkers start braying about access it is time to ask them if creating more venues might not be a pretty good way to create more access?

Read Bynum’s opinion piece in the Missoulian (click here).

Filed Under: Conservation, Fishing, Hunting, Politics · Tagged: Antiquities Act, Conservation, Fishing, Hunting, monuments, wilderness, Wilderness and Roadless Release Act

Roadless wolves invoke “access” shibboleth

October 3, 2011 by Tom Sadler · 2 Comments

I don’t know Ben Long but I like the way he thinks. Over the years I have heard the “access” dodge employed by politicians to justify tearing hell out of the public lands. They like to don the camo cloak and rant and foam about the lack of access. Long writes:

“America’s national forests belong to everyone, and all Americans deserve and rightfully demand access to this national birthright. Such access is like oxygen for hunters and anglers, but beware: Industry barracudas and their pals in Congress are trying to hoodwink sportsmen into supporting bad legislation by promising more lenient access.”

Dig a little deeper and you find the access issue is a little more complicated then the politicians would have you believe. Especially with legislation like the Wilderness and Roadless Release Act. Legislation that is opposed by TRCP, TU, AFFTA, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and RMEF (they originally supported it, but to their credit changed their stance when their members raised hell).

Read Long’s piece (click here) on why this legislation is not the “access” panacea the proponents claim.

Filed Under: Conservation, Fishing, Hunting, Politics · Tagged: access, Conservation, Fishing, habitat, HR 1581, Hunting, roadless, wilderness, Wilderness and Roadless Release Act

Conservation Funding and “It’s All About the Water, Stupid…”

September 19, 2011 by Tom Sadler · 1 Comment

Since striking up an on-line friendship that lead to a two part interview on their blog (click here and here to read them) Chi Wulff has become one of my daily must reads.

Mark has a excelllent post about a a recent conversation (or conservation as it is written in the post, in this case pretty much the same thing) with his mentor Ed.

Ed makes three important points about the state of economic affairs and ends with this:

“Both parties have shit on their hands when it comes to sins agains the environment and sheer economic stupidity. Folks bitching about how evil one party is over the other are falling prey to the useful idiot trap and miss the point entirely. We need to figure out how to do the right thing to protect key environmental treasures regardless of what party happens to be in power.”

Headwaters of Flat Creek

Click here and read Chi Wulff’s Three Things From Ed: It’s All About the Water, Stupid……

The entire post is worth the read. Ed has both common sense and economic standing on his side. Ed makes a very compelling case for the habitat equals opportunity equals economic activity equation and joins the growing chorus of voices saying those in outdoor recreation better pay more attention to what is going on.

Unfortunately our elected officials in the U.S. Senate don’t read Chi Wulff or know Ed. They decided to follow the lead of the U.S. House of Representative and take the budget axe to conservation funding in the Agricultural Appropriations bill last week.

Click here and read the details from Ducks Unlimited’s “Senate committee votes to cut funding for farm conservation programs”.

Filed Under: Conservation, Hunting, Politics · Tagged: agriculture, appropriations, chi wulff, Conservation, DU

Keepin’ It Wild

July 26, 2011 by Tom Sadler · Leave a Comment

Falls in St. Mary's Wilderness Area

UPDATE:

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation caught a lot of flak for supporting legislation to open up roadless and wilderness areas. There membership didn’t agree with that position and RMEF to its great credit withdrew its support. Read it here.

More on this topic later but for now some brilliance from Hal Herring: Roads to Nowhere

Here is a taste,

“What we are witnessing with the demand to dismiss any new discussion of wilderness or roadless public lands is part of the tremendous move in our country to privatize wildlife and to make the quality hunting and fishing available only to those who can afford to buy land and rivers, lease hunting rights, to bring hunting and fishing into line with the other privileges that are the sole province of the wealthy.”

and his parting comment,

”I’m not saying that we need to start declaring wilderness and roadless designations willy-nilly across the public lands. I am saying that we don’t need politicians to wave their manicured hands and declare the debate over, and declare themselves, their ideology, and their contributors’ the winners.”

Get some Hal!

Filed Under: Conservation, Fishing, Hunting · Tagged: atv, h.r. 1581, legislation, ohv, roadless, wilderness

Veto Pen for the Rusty Machete

July 21, 2011 by Tom Sadler · Leave a Comment

Here is a an update on the conservation funding bill that is headed to the House floor next week. The administration weighed in this afternoon with a STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY on H.R. 2584, The Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act.

The SAP, as they are known, is five pages of details of the funding and policy problems created by this bill should it become law. Worth a read if you are still unsure how bad this is…

Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Business, Conservation, Fishing, Hunting, Politics · Tagged: appropriations, Conservation, EPA, funding, HR 2584, Interior, SAP

Conservation Gets the Rusty Machete Treatment

July 8, 2011 by Tom Sadler · 4 Comments

UPDATED:

July 21: Veto Pen for the Rusty Machete

July 12: The Full Appropriations Committee put the boots to the corpse leaving the work of the Subcommittee unchanged.

Thanks to Moldy Chum, Headwaters (with a hefty dose of info on the appalling bad HR 2018) and MidCurrent for helping get the word out. If you have added you voice let me know so I can thank you here.

###

An Appropriations Subcommittee in the U.S. House left conservation funding and policy a mutilated corpse on the floor of their hearing room yesterday.

The funding cuts don’t put conservation programs on life support, instead they just left the body on the floor to bleed out. And to make sure they sent a strongly worded message to those of us who care about conservation, they added provisions to the legislation that undermine critical conservation and environmental policies.

How bad is it?

Here is a sample courtesy of TU and NWF (follow the links for more details):

The Land and Water Conservation Fund: cut by 80%to $62M, an all time low for the program
North American Wetlands Conservation Act funding cut by 47% to $20M
USFWS Resources management budget cut 95% to 2.85M
State Wildlife Grants cut 64% to $22M

They hung a sign around the corpse with these provisions:

Stopping EPA from finalizing protections for wetlands and streams
Stopping a rulemaking to protect streams from mountain top removal mining
Blocking recent protections for the Grand Canyon watershed from mining

Folks, it is time to raise a stink about this and make our elected officials understand that habitat equals opportunity that creates economic activity!

If we don’t then we only have ourselves to blame.

Add your voice!

TU’s Steve Moyer aptly points out in their press release:

“Fishing and hunting generate $76.7 billion annually in economic activity in the U.S.,” said Steve Moyer, VP for Government Affairs at Trout Unlimited. “We can’t expect to sustain this powerful economic engine if we’re removing the very conservation programs that make it run.”

TRCP’s Steve Kline had this to say about the EPA provision:

“Clean water is an incredible economic engine, driving such industries as commercial and recreational fishing, hunting, boating and tourism. When water quality degrades, as we see in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay and now dismayingly on the Yellowstone River, the national economy suffers. We can ill afford to lose the millions of American jobs that depend on clean water, and unfortunately today’s subcommittee action may put our nation’s clean water jobs in real jeopardy,” said Steve Kline, director of the Center for Agricultural Lands at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

Hal Herring gets it right in his post on The Conservationist

Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives zeroing-in on natural resource conservation programs at a time when conservation, tragically (and temporarily I hope) has become a political football toted mostly by Democrats.

Some of it has less to do with backlash politics than it does some shrewd elected lawmakers, schooled well in the grim arithmetic, who understand that slashing Medicaid will result in a kind of Frankensteinian flash-mob of villagers with torches and pitchforks, while defunding the clean water protection that has so vastly improved our waterways and lakes, even as our population has doubled, will go largely unnoticed (at least in the short-run) and may even win them some powerful friends in the would-be polluter lobby.

Teeg Stouffer, who runs Recycled Fish, emailed this:

My concern right now is that while it’s right to balance the state and national budgets, infrastructure / transportation / industry / energy have strong lobbies that make sure that those sectors are preserved. And while they are important to sustain a way of life our waters sustain life.

Leaders lose sight of the biggest things, or think that they’ll take care of themselves. Left alone, they probably would, but we won’t leave them alone (see infrastructure / transportation / industry / energy).

And yet … hope and perseverance. This is no time to put down our shovels or our pens.

It is time to light our torches.

If they don’t see the light let them feel the heat.

Our elected officials either ignore the interests of anglers and hunters or they think nature will take care of itself. The case for other sectors is being made more effectively than the case for outdoor recreation. We are seen as “hobbyists” and our venues will take care of themselves or are not as important as the other sectors. Our interest are economically legitimate but poorly understood.

This is the worse I have ever seen in 30 years of doing conservation work. Unfortunately our years of wishful thinking that Republican’s care about sportsmen may finally be catching up with us. I don’t care whether you label it politics or culture, we are seeing how the Republicans in the House value our community and what we know is essential for hunting and fishing to survive in this country.

If the hunting and fishing community does not step up and express outrage over this assault on the very foundation of our traditions then we only have ourselves to blame.

NOTE: This post is being updated as more information comes in, check back now and then.

Stay tuned, this is only gonna get worse…

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Filed Under: Conservation, Fishing, Hunting, Politics · Tagged: appropriations, Interior, LWCF, mining, NAWCA, riders, SWG

Sportsmen, Conservation and the Economy

July 1, 2011 by Tom Sadler · Leave a Comment

“Fly Fishing Retailers Hang in the Balance.”

“Dismiss the notion that conservation funding is akin to a charitable donation, and understand that fly fishing manufacturers and dealers are among the most vulnerable if government conservation funding is slashed as planned.”

These warnings open Tim Romano’s report, “Bull Moose Sportsmen’s Alliance Event Underscores Critical Link Between Conservation and Jobs” in Angling Trade. I was there, he is right.

The event, “Taking Aim at Conservation: American Sportsmen at a Crossroads Forum” was part of road trip bringing 35 sportsmen and women from  seven states to Washington to unveil the Alliance’s policy agenda and educate Congress on policies and programs  that are important to hunters and anglers in America. As a strong supporter of BMSA I had been asked to participate in a panel discussion during the forum.

The first part was devoted to special guests speakers. We heard remarks for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, U.S. Senators Jon Tester (D-MT), Mark Udall (D-CO) and U.S. Senator James Risch (R-ID). A common theme from the speakers was the importance of hunting and fishing to the economy. And while that was good to hear there was also an acknowledgement that the fiscal situation and political climate were extremely difficult in Washington.

What I think was a more important part of the forum was a panel discussion about sportsmen and conservation. It was my privilege to share the panel with Kirk Deeter of Field & Stream and Angling Trade fame, Steve Moyer, Trout Unlimited’s VP of Conservation Gary Taylor, Legislative Director for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, Montana State Senator Kendal Van Dyk, New Mexico State Representative Nate Gentry and Alliance Co-director Gaspar Perricone.

Each panelist was asked to address questions posed by Alliance Co-founder Tim Mauck. What emerged from the responses was a clear sense that the lack of conservation funding and the attacks on conservation and environmental policies were not only an imminent threat to fish and wildlife but also a threat to the economic contribution made by the outdoor recreation industry.

“It’s time that many Americans, particularly those who draw their livelihoods from the outdoors industry realize that our nation’s “conservation deficit” is just as real and just as much a burden for future generations as any financial budget deficit,” said Deeter.

For those of us who cherish hunting and fishing and especially those of us who work in the outdoor recreation industry the message is clear. Ignore these warnings at your economic peril.

It is time to add your name to the list of folks who are willing to speak out in support of a simple equation; conservation of habitat creates recreational opportunity and that means economic activity and jobs.

Filed Under: Business, Conservation, Fishing, Hunting · Tagged: Bull Moose Sportsmen's Alliance, Conservation, Deeter, education, ethics, Fishing, Fly Fishing, Hunting, Risch, Salazar, Tester, Udall

Sportsmen’s Organizations Oppose Conservation Cuts

March 1, 2011 by Tom Sadler · Leave a Comment

A deliberate move away from America’s long conservation tradition…

Responding to the draconian cuts passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in HR 1, 42 of the country’s leading hunting, fishing and outdoor organizations sent a letter to the U. S. Senate today urging restoration of funding to conservation programs.

The key point for me:

While we fully acknowledge that conservation programs should shoulder a fair and proportional burden of reductions to the Federal budget as required to address the budget deficit, these provisions of HR 1, in our view, represent a deliberate move away from America’s long conservation tradition and, specifically with respect to the interests of the hunting, fishing and outdoor community. We are very disappointed that the House considered these actions without consultation with the hunting, fishing and conservation community, and appeal to you to please give significant and favorable consideration to our perspectives. These vital conservation programs with long-standing track records of success are foundational to fish, wildlife and habitat conservation, good for the economy in creating jobs particularly in rural communities, and critical to providing opportunities for access to and enjoyment of fish and wildlife resources by America’s sportsmen and sportswomen. [emphasis mine]

You can add your voice with this Action Alert from Trout Unlimited

Full letter after the jump.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Conservation, Fishing, Hunting, Politics · Tagged: budget, Congress, Conservation, Fishing, funding, HR 1, Hunting

A Conservation Nightmare

February 26, 2011 by Tom Sadler · 4 Comments

We were warned

When Bob Marshal wrote, This will be the year that will test the commitment of the outdoors community, he gave us fair and early warning of the assault on conservation that was coming.

The conservation battles sportsmen fought to protect fish and wildlife habitat in the past may seem like speed bumps to the wall being raised in Washington this year.

Hal Herring took up the battle cry when he wrote Are There Any Politicians Who Really Understand Sportsmen’s Concerns?

What is disturbing is that we seem to have lost any conservative political leaders who understand sportsmen’s concerns, or, in the same vein, who recognize that there can be value in undisturbed land, or waters, or that intact ecosystems, with their healthy game and fish populations, also hold economic value in producing clean water, clean air, grazing, wildlife, flood or invasive weed control, all those elements that may not always add to the bottom line of corporate profit, but are the actual bottom line of life on this planet.

Not long after that Kirk Deeter added his voice in Should Conservation Be a Political Issue?

In my humble opinion, conservation shouldn’t be a political issue. It should be a cultural issue. And in that regard, I think those doing the real heavy lifting to protect wild places for fishing and hunting aren’t so much “green” as they are “camo.”

U.S. House takes an axe to conservation

Yesterday Deeter sounded the alarm loud and strong in his reaction to the US House of Representatives passage of HR1, Proposed Conservation Funding Cuts Could Devastate Fly Fishing Resources.

HR1 is a bill in Congress right now that would slash funding for a number of important conservation programs that impact fly fishing from coast to coast. I don’t care what your political persuasion is…if you’re a fly fisher, this should concern you, because any threat to habitat is a threat to opportunity. And in many cases, once a resource is gone, it’s gone.

He joins calls to action from Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited!

Are you getting the message yet? If not, then you are not paying attention!

Money Talks

February 10, 2011 by Tom Sadler · Leave a Comment

Now we are talking!

Here in Virginia we have a Lt. Governor, Bill Bolling, who loves to fly fish which is great in and of itself.

More importantly he “gets it” when it comes to the how important fishing, hunting and outdoor recreation is to Virginia’s economy.

Check it out!

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M46moS7YvoA

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Filed Under: Business, Conservation, Fishing, Hunting · Tagged: Bolling, Conservation, Fishing, Fly Fishing, habitat, VDGIF, Virginia