Shoot 'em, Don't Hug 'em
BY DAN ATKINSONI'd like to tell you a story about some people from Eugene. Roughly a year ago, one of them named Vegan read an article in The Other Paper about a tree that the city of Eugene was about to cut down for the simple crime of being rotten. Outraged at this assault on Mother Creation, she called up her activist network--Numskull, Dreamer, Squirrelnuts, and Kia--and invited them over for a cup of Chai.
"We've got to do something about this tree!" she cried. All her friends agreed. "What we should do is call attention to the tree's plight," said Squirrelnuts. "To do that, we must give it a name. How about 'Storyteller'?"
With that the activist community swung into full mobilization, making signs, organizing benefit concerts involving Calobo and the Groove Juice Special, holding vigils, contacting city officials, and distributing leaflets.
Yet for all their efforts, the Eugene activists could not save Storyteller. Why? Because it was a decaying tree in the center of a fast growing urban area that wasn't exactly suffering from a botanical shortage.
So it goes. All over the country, dipshits like Vegan, Numskull, and their friends are wasting their time for little or no gain in terms of environmental protection. You may find them living in trees to save ten acres of forest--or even just a single tree. They may break into animal research facilities to "free" animals into habitats they are unaccustomed to. But wherever you find them, chances are these people aren't getting much done. "Well," you ask, "if the tree-huggers and otter-lovers aren't getting anything done, who the hell is responsible for most of the environmental protection we have come to enjoy over the past 100 years?"
Let's allow Dyan Zaslowsky, author of These American Lands: Parks,Wilderness, and the Public Lands, to field that query. "Ironically," he writes, "the need to try to preserve wildlife was first recognized by those who most loved to kill it--the hunters."
Though it may seem ironic, it makes perfect sense. Without protected wilderness areas and parks, and controls on the killing of creatures within those areas, the very ability to hunt and fish would cease to exist. "Few interest groups police themselves as conscientiously as sportsmen," writes Zaslowsky, "for they divined that their avocation came a step closer to extinction with each species that was threatened." Thus, beginning in the mid-1800s, hunting and fishing clubs such as the New York Sportsmen's Club began to enforce game laws long before any government agency was established to do so.
This tradition of self-regulation among sportsmen (and sportswomen, and even sportswomyn, I suppose) manifested itself most strongly in the first conservation movement, around the beginning of the 1900s. Such leading conservationists as Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Bird Grinnell were all avid hunters.
Grinnell, who published the outdoor-enthusiast magazine Forest and Stream, frequently editorialized against reckless hunting and called for the creation of private organizations dedicated to wildlife protection. He founded the first one in 1886 and named it the Audobon Society.
It was also Grinnell who convinced his close friend Roosevelt to utilize a little-known precedent as the means to establish the first National Wildlife Refuge in 1903. By the time Roosevelt left office in 1909 he had created 50 more of them.
Aldo Leopold, whose impassioned plea for a "wilderness ethic" remains relevant even today, was largely responsible for the creation of the first "wilderness area" in New Mexico.
The willingness of hunters and anglers to regulate themselves has persisted to the present day; they have repeatedly proven willing to submit to excise taxes on fishing equipment and ammunition to help pay for wildlife management. Furthermore, their support has continually been critical to the passage of major environmental legislation. The Wilderness Act of 1964 would not have made it through Congress without the support of hunters and anglers.
More recently, in 1990 a referendum asking voters in Nevada--home of the Sagebrush Rebellion--to approve a $47-million bond issue for the purpose of acquiring more public land passed with the support of sportsmen. Initial opinion polls had shown that the measure would lose by a margin of four to one. "Whenever sportsmen combine with environmentalists," Chris Potholm, professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College, told Sierra Magazine in 1996, "you have 60 to 70 percent of the population, an absolutely irresistible coalition."
Yet sportsmen are not just active politically. They also often volunteer to get their hands dirty in habitat restoration and maintenance. Consider Trout Unlimited, "perhaps the most effective force for environmental reform among sportsmen's groups," according to Sierra Magazine. It is actively engaged in the restoration of coho salmon habitat up and down the West Coast. How do I know? I spent two weeks as a volunteer at a habitat restoration site on Lagunitas Creek in California. I had hunted, I had fished, and so had half the people I was working with.
Yet those of us who enjoy fishing and hunting are continually victimized by more self-righteous environmentalists. Maybe I don't have to kill a quail or catch a trout to enjoy the outdoors. Perhaps I'd be better off praying to trees or communing with squirrels. But consider this: "since the development of modern wildlife management in the 1930's, no American wildlife has been exterminated by sport hunting," according to the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality in 1974, and I doubt it has changed in the past 26 years.
Indeed, due to the aggressive extermination of predatory wildlife on the American continent, most game animals suffer from overpopulation. Since 1900, white-tailed deer populations have burgeoned from 500,000 to 30 million; elk from 40,000 to more than 1 million; antelope from 5,000 to 1 million; wild turkeys from near extinction to 4.2 million. Consequently, big green groups such as the Audobon Society and the Sierra Club not only do not oppose hunting, they recognize its necessity as a game-management tool.
I'd like to conclude with this note: Edward Abbey, the writer and philosopher often credited with inspiring the founding of Earth First!, once wrote an entire chapter about the time he killed a rabbit by hitting it in the head with a rock. I rest my case.
Dan Atkinson, a junior majoring in Journalism, is Managing Editor of the
Oregon Commentator
