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The Politics of Hunting and Fishing
It’s time to vote for candidates who understand hunting, fishing, and conservation—and vote out the ones who don’t
Montana’s stream access laws are the gold standard in the U.S., in large part because of the sportsmen who fight for them.
Wiki Commons
It
is a confusing time in the United States, especially for those of us
who love the outdoors and hunting and fishing. There are so many changes
coming at us so fast. From hunting access to clean water, we are losing
ground to a surging population and a growing indifference—well, it
might be better to call it what it is: a growing ignorance —about conservation and the environment. Land, water, air support not just our hunting and fishing, but our every endeavor. The current state of our politics is perhaps the perfect example of
where we have allowed our nation to stagger. We have achieved the
unthinkable, allowing one political party—the Democrats—to be the sole
representative of the decades-long American triumph in protecting
wildlife habitat, clean water, wetlands, and public lands. The major
problem with that? Most of us don’t seem to be Democrats. Many, if not
most, hunters and fishermen that I know view Democrats as the party of
identity politics, gun control, open borders, and an increasingly
powerful and meddlesome federal nanny-state.
So what do we do? We vote for candidates from a Republican party that has declared war on everything from the wetlands protections that have restored American waterfowl hunting to the Clean Water Act
that restored most of our fishing, to the public lands where most of us
hunt, shoot, and camp. Don’t believe me? The actual platform of the GOP
reads:
Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership… The enduring truth is that people best protect what they own.
(That
last line may or may not be true. There are as many examples of people
destroying their private lands as there are examples of outstanding
stewardship. But what is almost certainly true is that if our public
lands become private, you and I will no longer be hunting or camping on them.
Whether those lands are stewarded or destroyed will be thoroughly
beyond our control. And as far as that “ control of water ” mentioned
there so glibly, well, 62 percent of all water in the arid West comes
from snowpack on what are now federally managed public lands. It doesn’t
take a business genius to see what kind of money and power would be on
the table with a transfer of those water assets into the global
marketplace.)
Contrast that GOP statement with the Democrats platform in 2016:
Contrast that GOP statement with the Democrats platform in 2016:
As a nation, we need policies and investments that will keep America’s public lands public, strengthen protections for our natural and cultural resources, increase access to parks and public lands for all Americans, protect species and wildlife, and harness the immense economic and social potential of our public lands and waters.
Which
one would somebody like me, a Southern-born gun nut who has raised his
family in the West precisely because of the access to hunting and
fishing on public lands and waters, support?
The recent mid-term elections might have revealed that we, as a people, were tired of the stark power struggles between the two political parties—the winner-take-all, scorched-earth mudslinging and mendacity of the campaigns. Some writers I respect certainly thought so and it is true that one of America’s most moderate Democrats and champion of public lands, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, was re-elected over a Republican opponent who was once an outspoken advocate of transferring public lands to state control. But Tester didn’t win by much. Of the 504,374 people who voted, 48.4 percent cast their votes for the Republican, Matt Rosendale, a former land developer from Maryland. That’s 244,116 Montanans, many of them hunters and fishermen, who chose for their state—one of the most iconic public hunting and fishing bastions on earth—to be represented by a man with a demonstrated record of being anti-public lands and who, in his limited time in public service to the state, was known primarily for blocking critical and long-planned conservation easements that would have opened public hunting access to thousands of acres of private land and protected big game winter range and other wildlife habitat.
Who exactly are we?
Let’s go east and look at Florida.
The recent mid-term elections might have revealed that we, as a people, were tired of the stark power struggles between the two political parties—the winner-take-all, scorched-earth mudslinging and mendacity of the campaigns. Some writers I respect certainly thought so and it is true that one of America’s most moderate Democrats and champion of public lands, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, was re-elected over a Republican opponent who was once an outspoken advocate of transferring public lands to state control. But Tester didn’t win by much. Of the 504,374 people who voted, 48.4 percent cast their votes for the Republican, Matt Rosendale, a former land developer from Maryland. That’s 244,116 Montanans, many of them hunters and fishermen, who chose for their state—one of the most iconic public hunting and fishing bastions on earth—to be represented by a man with a demonstrated record of being anti-public lands and who, in his limited time in public service to the state, was known primarily for blocking critical and long-planned conservation easements that would have opened public hunting access to thousands of acres of private land and protected big game winter range and other wildlife habitat.
Who exactly are we?
Let’s go east and look at Florida.
From Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, south Florida is in ecological freefall. We published a long series on what was happening there
just last year and tragically enough everything in the story—all of the
worst-case scenarios—not only came to pass, but have turned out to be
much, much worse than anyone could have predicted. Entire fisheries on
both coasts are being poisoned by a red tide event that is fed by the
surreal amounts of nutrient pollution being dumped east and west from
Lake Okeechobee through manmade canals. Beaches are closed to swimming
and fishing is at a standstill; an entire tourist economy, and all of
the jobs and money it generates, is in imminent danger of collapse. The
disaster is decades in the making—and during each decade, everybody who
knew the waters there, from sport and commercial fishermen to surf-shop
owners, said that the problem had to be fixed, that it was getting worse
every year, yet their warnings were never heeded. And both political
parties have been up to their ears in money from both the sugar industry
and land development and agricultural interests that profit from not
fixing the water pollution problems. (We’ve known exactly how to fix it for decades.)
The blue-green algae bloom on Lake Okeechobee
Nasa Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens
But the administration of Republican Governor Rick Scott has been particularly negligent and eager to dismantle regulations
that protected clean water, and to do the bidding of polluting
industries. During the political campaigns leading up to the November
elections, the common cry was “Vote your Water!” meaning, “Please do not
vote for Rick Scott,” who was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
The list of the Scott administration’s failures,
compiled during the water crises, which is still going on as I write
this, was extremely damning. Nearly every newspaper in south Florida
chronicled Scott’s direct responsibility for the disaster, including
that his administration had cut $700 million from the budgets
of the water-management districts tasked with monitoring and responding
to disasters exactly like the one that is now unfolding.
The media was rife with stories about how the blue-green algae and the red tide and the obvious failures of the Scott administration, would result in a sure victory for Scott’s Democratic opponent, Bill Nelson, in the race for the Senate seat. But none of that happened. The race was tight, but a small majority of Floridians who voted—more than 4 million of them—did not “Vote Their Water!” Instead, they decided that Rick Scott, despite all that was happening to the economy and water and quality of life in south Florida, was the best man to represent them in Congress.
The media was rife with stories about how the blue-green algae and the red tide and the obvious failures of the Scott administration, would result in a sure victory for Scott’s Democratic opponent, Bill Nelson, in the race for the Senate seat. But none of that happened. The race was tight, but a small majority of Floridians who voted—more than 4 million of them—did not “Vote Their Water!” Instead, they decided that Rick Scott, despite all that was happening to the economy and water and quality of life in south Florida, was the best man to represent them in Congress.
Given
that Florida is one of the top fishing states in the U.S., many of
those 4 million voters who chose Scott must have been serious
fishermen—possibly even fishing guides—boat salesmen, and tackle store
owners. Why would they vote for someone with Rick Scott’s record?
I don’t know.
I don’t care, either, any more than I care who originally decided to dam up Lake Okeechobee, turn it into a poisonous soup, spew the soup out east and west to wreck two coasts, all the while blocking the critical flows of water to the Everglades, the Biscayne aquifer, and Florida Bay.
It does not matter.
Whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican does not matter, either in this case. If a candidate has an A-rating from the NRA, but is anti public lands, believe me, we can find, or produce, a candidate with an A-rating from the NRA who is also pro public lands. In Montana, we have conservative politicians who would probably love to get rid of our expansive stream access law, viewing it as an affront to private property rights, but they have learned not to try and attack this extremely popular law if they want to be re-elected. We can have conservative leaders who are strong conservation advocates. We simply have not demanded that yet, and so we don’t have them. We’ve been lying down on the job, arguing over trifles, and dining on the fruits of the toil of those who came before us. The fruits are running out.
We have to get to work.
I don’t know.
I don’t care, either, any more than I care who originally decided to dam up Lake Okeechobee, turn it into a poisonous soup, spew the soup out east and west to wreck two coasts, all the while blocking the critical flows of water to the Everglades, the Biscayne aquifer, and Florida Bay.
It does not matter.
Whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican does not matter, either in this case. If a candidate has an A-rating from the NRA, but is anti public lands, believe me, we can find, or produce, a candidate with an A-rating from the NRA who is also pro public lands. In Montana, we have conservative politicians who would probably love to get rid of our expansive stream access law, viewing it as an affront to private property rights, but they have learned not to try and attack this extremely popular law if they want to be re-elected. We can have conservative leaders who are strong conservation advocates. We simply have not demanded that yet, and so we don’t have them. We’ve been lying down on the job, arguing over trifles, and dining on the fruits of the toil of those who came before us. The fruits are running out.
We have to get to work.
From
this day forward, our environment, our American heritage of
conservation, must not be the domain of any single political party. I
don’t care if you are a Dittohead or a Maoist, you do not want a
thousand tons of dead fish awash in a mat of toxic green algae in front
of your house. No flat-earther wants their daughter or son to be
poisoned by drinking a glass of water from the tap in the kitchen.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats want to see the river in their town
catch fire or hear their child wheezing from asthma.
The fishing and hunting that we love and spend some of the finest hours of our lives pursuing—that we will pass down to our children and theirs—are the interest on the principle of conserved and sustainably managed lands and waters. First, there must be conservation—strong, concrete policy, that prioritizes clean air and water, healthy lands, flowing rivers, topsoil, and forests. Then comes public access, wildlife habitat, fishing, hunting, boating, swimming, camping, food to eat and water to drink, tackle shops, and truck, gun, and ammunition sales.
If elected representatives do not understand that, then we must, as citizens and the ultimate stakeholders, inform them and do our part to dispel their ignorance. If those elected representatives, once informed, still do not act in our best interests, then they must be voted out of office as soon as possible, before more damage is done, as in Florida.
The fishing and hunting that we love and spend some of the finest hours of our lives pursuing—that we will pass down to our children and theirs—are the interest on the principle of conserved and sustainably managed lands and waters. First, there must be conservation—strong, concrete policy, that prioritizes clean air and water, healthy lands, flowing rivers, topsoil, and forests. Then comes public access, wildlife habitat, fishing, hunting, boating, swimming, camping, food to eat and water to drink, tackle shops, and truck, gun, and ammunition sales.
If elected representatives do not understand that, then we must, as citizens and the ultimate stakeholders, inform them and do our part to dispel their ignorance. If those elected representatives, once informed, still do not act in our best interests, then they must be voted out of office as soon as possible, before more damage is done, as in Florida.
Too
many of us on the conservative side of the spectrum have argued
endlessly that the 10th Amendment to the Constitution means that the
federal government should not impose environmental laws on the states,
that the responsibility for protecting the environment belongs to the
states and the citizens of those states. We ignore the extraordinary
successes of federal law in restoring clean rivers, wetlands, air,
oceans, fisheries, wildlife, and wildlife habitat (even while enjoying
the benefits of that which we say we despise).
