Montana’s outdoor recreation traditions are at stake in the Republican primary
by
Andrew McKean
| May 10, 2020 1:00 AM
| May 10, 2020 1:00 AM
Those of us Montanans who like to
hunt, fish, and hike just want to do more of it, unburdened by the
political implications of our activities.
Of course, it’s hard to escape
politics, even far from the trailhead or the boat launch. Our ability to
access rivers and streams in the state is itself a political
expression, an ability won by passionate access advocates and then
upheld by our courts. Our ability to hunt public wildlife is assured
only because people who came before us understood that without access to
the state’s elk and deer herds, bighorn sheep bands, and grouse coveys,
they’re private property for all practical purposes.
Even our ability to hike, ride, or
drive our public lands without encountering industrial facilities like
gas fields or abandoned mines is dependent on which administration is in
charge of public-land management decisions.
Given that politics is about choice,
this year’s Montana governor’s race offers a stark alternative between
candidates who have vowed to uphold our hard-fought traditions of
access, public management of public wildlife, and citizen-crafted
policies and those who would close our streams, profit from our public
wildlife, and leave management decisions to a crony crew of insiders.
In the Democratic primary, the
public-access and public-trust policies that have made Montana a
destination for outdoorsfolk and stoked the engine of our outdoors
economy are shared by most candidates. It’s on the Republican side that
the starkest choices await primary voters.
Our current one-term Congressman,
Greg Gianforte, has had problems with Montana’s stream-access law since
he tried to block legal access to a fork of the Gallatin River across
his property near Bozeman. A settlement with Fish, Wildlife and Parks
resulted in mitigating some of the impacts by public recreationists, but
the issue remains: Gianforte’s instinct is to defer to private-property
rights, even when the law — and tradition — of public recreation access
is clear.
That instinct has been formalized
and intensified with Gianforte’s pick for his lieutenant governor,
Kristen Juras, a former law professor who has written that landowners
should have the “right to exclude” the public from legally accessible
waterways. How would Montana’s remarkable stream-access law fare in a
Gianforte-Juras administration?
Gianforte’s main Republican
opponent, current Montana Attorney General Tim Fox and running mate Jon
Knokey, have distributed a detailed outdoor strategy in which they
pledge to not only uphold traditional recreational access, including to
Montana’s streams and rivers, but they’ve committed to improving access
to the state’s 3 million acres of inaccessible public land.
Then there’s the issue of access to
public wildlife. That’s a bedrock principle of the North American model
of wildlife management, but a number of Western states have eroded that
pillar by giving quotas of hunting licenses to landowners to sell to
whomever they want. It’s called “Ranching for Wildlife” in Colorado and
“Cooperative Wildlife Management” in Utah, but it amounts to the same
thing – selling the public’s wildlife to the highest bidder.
Gianforte has a demonstrated
history of siding with large landowners when it comes to mitigating
impacts of wildlife. During his previous run for the governor’s office
he said that requiring a landowner to provide public access in order to
qualify for tools to offset impacts of wildlife amounts to a taking of
private-property rights, even though multiple Supreme Court cases have
ruled that wildlife, and the impacts on forage or fences, must be borne
by landowners as a “condition of the land.”
It’s a short step from thinking
that landowners can do whatever they want with depredating wildlife to
rewarding large landowners who harbor big-game herds with hunting
licenses that they can sell to outfitters for high-dollar hunts.
Fox and Knokey, meanwhile, have
pledged to use incentives to open more private land to public hunting,
using access tools like block management to direct hunters to the most
problematic big-game herds in the state, and collecting broad and
diverse input as the state drafts an elk-management plan that aims to
use public hunting as the primary tool to reduce concentrations of elk.
That’s the bright line between the
two candidates. One uses the cudgel of the courts to challenge
public-access traditions. The other uses collaboration and consultation
to resolve friction between private property and public resources.
These differences are ultimately
political, but they transcend party affiliation. In this primary
election, I encourage Democrats to vote the Republican ballot and cast a
ballot that recognizes and continues our Montana values of
collaboration and public access to public resources. A Fox/Knokey
primary victory would ensure that November’s general election is about
other issues — funding for social services, investment in public
infrastructure, and rebuilding our agricultural economy — and not about
who gets to access our remarkable natural resources.
Ballots are in the mail over the
next week. Vote, and then go hiking, fishing, or hunting without having
to fret about the political consequences of doing what you love.
Andrew McKean is a freelance outdoor writer and former editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life magazine. He lives in Glasgow.
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