CHEYENNE, Wyo.—An advisory group appointed by the Bush administration says hunters and fishermen—touted as the nation’s first conservationists—ought to continue to play an important role as advocates for conserving wildlife and habitat.
But the Sporting Conservation Council says conflicting government policies, dwindling interest in hunting, and growing threats to big game, fish and fowl populations have made that role a more challenging one.
The council recently released a package of draft reports outlining those concerns and possible long-term policy solutions. Drawn from expert testimony at a conference in Denver in April, the reports will be the starting point for a planned presidential conference on wildlife policy in Washington, D.C., this fall.
The goal is a 10-year, national wildlife management policy.
Council members said such long-term planning will require bipartisanship—and they’ve even reached out to both the John McCain and Barack Obama campaigns with the assumption that one of the two will soon be in a position to enact their recommendations.
“I hope succeeding administrations will take a look at this and say, ‘Here are some people who dug into this and here are some of the things they said could be done. Why don’t we tackle four or five of them, or 10 or 20 of them?'” said council member John Tomke, president of Ducks Unlimited-Mexico.
Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton created the 12-member council in 2006, drawing mainly from representatives of hunting groups. President Bush signed an executive order last year asking the council for ideas to promote hunting and wildlife conservation.
The council looked at threats to wildlife habitat and wildlife populations, including from energy development in the West. One report suggested that state and federal wildlife agencies collaborate to set goals for big-game populations and for protecting habitat before and during energy development, such as on Wyoming’s Pinedale Anticline.
The report by Steve Mealey, a former supervisor of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, also suggested that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management exercise its ability, when necessary, to put land temporarily off-limits to oil and gas drilling.
Mealey also was behind a report that examined how global warming could affect hunting and fishing. The report called for more research into how climate change could affect wildlife.
An environmental group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, issued a press release Wednesday characterizing the Sporting Conservation Council’s reports as critical of Bush administration policies. The release quoted the oil and gas report, which said that drilling had become “a major wildlife concern.”
“Principles of ecosystem management are the exact opposite of the Bush approach, which reduces natural resources to the special interests dedicated to their exploitation,” the group’s executive director, Jeff Ruch, said in the release.
But council members said their reports were scrupulously nonpartisan.
“We saw this as an opportunity to add real value to some good intent on the administration’s part,” Mealey said. “They were very sincere about asking how can we do things better and we took that very, very literally. We weren’t a bunch of stone-throwers.”
The premise of all of the Sporting Conservation Council reports is that hunters and fishermen have played an important role in modern conservation. They helped create what’s now called the “North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” which provides that anyone—not just the wealthy elite—should have the right and be able to hunt and fish, according to the report.
But the council worries that as interest in hunting declines, Americans are also becoming less concerned about maintaining wildlife and habitat.
A decrease in hunting could mean less revenue generated for wildlife management through taxes on the sale of hunting gear and through the sale of state hunting licenses, the report said.
Tomke, with Ducks Unlimited, said a possible solution is encouraging youngsters to take up hunting and fishing—even though children nowadays are more involved in structured activities such as organized team sports.
“One of the recommendations of our group is to create more structured activities for outdoor recreation—hunting, recreational shooting, fishing—on federal lands,” Tomke said.
In another of the reports, council member Daniel Dessecker, a biologist with the Ruffed Grouse Society, recommended improving collaboration between federal, state and tribal land management and wildlife agencies. His report on habitat conservation said government agencies often have different goals for habitat and wildlife populations.
