Via HuffPo, Field and Stream a magazine that speaks for sportsmen nationwide, has turned on Bush and Cheney for their disastrous environmental policy. Take a look:
| Rod and gun in hand, and backing the Second Amendment right to own firearms, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have won the hearts of America’s sportsmen. Yet the two men have failed to protect outdoor sports on the nation’s public lands. With deep ties to the oil and gas industry, Bush and Cheney have unleashed a national energy plan that has begun to destroy hunting and fishing on millions of federal acres throughout the West, setting back effective wildlife management for decades to come[...]
Despite our dismay at seeing western landscapes transformed in this way, none of us—hunter, angler, wildlife watcher—can discount the need for energy. We use it in our vehicles; we use it to heat our homes and cook our meals. Clearly, something must be done to secure supplies. But only 3 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas lies under domestic soils, while we used 25 percent of the global total in 2002. In other words, our energy security can never result from more drilling in our public wildernesses. Of course, the worldwide quest for fuel damages the environment wherever it is unleashed. As Doug Grann, the president and CEO of Wildlife Forever, the conservation arm of the North American Hunting and Fishing Club, points out, we cannot sacrifice the wildlife and wild country of this planet while doing nothing to develop alternative fuels and improving the fuel efficiency of our cars, factories, and homes. Legal efforts mounted by conservation organizations over the inadequacies of the BLM’s environmental impact statements, and input by hunters and anglers to their senators—who are now debating a national energy bill—can affect how much hunting and fishing will be left on these federal lands. |
Why do I think this is part of a broader realignment already underway? Back in the 1980's, sportsmen played a key role in the Republican-led drive to roll back environmental regulation out West, and their support was crucial to the Sagebrush Rebellion that swept the intermountain states in the late 1970's. But over the intervening decades, they've learned something quite important: environmental protection actually protects hunting and fishing too. What once was seen as something threatening their way of life is now seen as protecting it. And there's no way - and I do mean NO way - that the current incarnation of the Republican Party will ever support the type of regulation they now realize they need.
It's a pattern out West, one that repeats itself every 30-40 years. Cattlemen, ranchers, sheepherders, and sportsmen (and in this incarnation, outdoor recreation enthusiasts) join together to push back against a federal authority that hasn't kept up with changes in their local economies. Change happens in fits and starts, with old policies freezing in place until they can't be tolerated any longer. An odd dynamic, but its happened so many times before, its hard to see why it won't happen again. Particularly since all the warning signs are already there!
Rebalancing the nation's land use and environmental policies will, I believe, be one of the great legacies of the next political realignment. Our understanding of the science and economics of land use has come a long, long way in the last decade (here's one good example of what I mean), but our policy-making institutions have not kept up. Clinton made some important moves in the final days of his presidency, but they were only preliminary, and virtually all of them were rolled back in the early years of Bush's first term.
Only time will tell, of course, but the timing is right, and it feels like the public is ready for a new approach towards our environment.
Want more? Start here.
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