I have been thinking about the
Montana Miracle, and what implications it might have for actionable items. I immediately thought of ANWR and the
upcoming legislative battle.
As this article from February and March 2002 of Field & Stream shows, there is some initiative for environmentalists and conservationalist minded hunters working together but also alot of work to do.
As someone with a boot in both camps--I belong to one of the oldest big-game hunting clubs in America and also to the Nature Conservancy--I would say to my fellow hunters, if you don't want to see America become like Europe, with hunting confined to estates reserved for a wealthy elite, then get over your prejudices and join forces with the environmental movement; and to my fellow environmentalists, if you want 15 million allies, get over your snobbery and find common ground with hunters.
Our percieved snobbery has as much to do with bias, as it does with another issue that has been discussed here recently, gun control.
Environmentalists as a class tend to be youngish liberals inclined to outdoor activities like hiking and mountain biking, and consider themselves to be on the side of the angels. And indeed, many of the ones I know are gun-control zealots. They picture the hunter as a redneck meathead.
Still, the responses from Field & Stream readers, not your typical pro-environmentalist group, were two positive and one negative with a Dept Of Interior staffer writing in to balance it out. Now that is a rather small sample size, but could we get another, say 3 million votes out of those 15 million and make serious inroads in several red states?
As I read Phil Caputo's story, I was reminded of the week I spent in an Athabaskan village in 2002. Looking out over the Yakutak River valley, I asked an older gentleman if the caribou migrated down the river. "They used to," he said. "Since the pipeline, they don't anymore. I miss my caribou meat." Every time I hear the administration say that drilling in ANWR won't damage the wildlife population, I hear that man wishing the caribou back.
Paul Ehlert
Carlisle, Iowa
I am becoming more and more convinced that any ANWR debate should be framed by Democrats with conservationalist hunters in mind.
