TAKE ADVANTAGE OR MISS

 The subject is opportunity.  The opportunity I would like to discuss is politics. 

 I love seasons.  Hunting season and fishing season vie with fall and spring in my book for things I like best.  While no one has figured out how to take away fall and spring, there are a whole bunch of folks who have figured out and are working hard to take away my hunting and fishing seasons. Let’s name a few.

 Organizations like PETA, HSUS, Defenders of Wildlife, Animal Welfare Institute, Animal Protection Institute, Greenpeace, and others of their ilk exist to eliminate hunting and fishing along with a whole lot of other animal uses.  Other organizations like the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and others of like bent exist to remove people and their use of any natural resources from as broad an area as possible.  These groups cooperate and their many local subsidiaries and foreign branches form a very effective and potent threat to the future of hunting and fishing.

 Then there are the state and Federal agencies like the Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the state fish and game agencies, and state park agencies.  These agencies and their quasi-private partners like The Nature Conservancy control more and more land within the United States every year.  Acquisition, easements, agreements, critical habitats, view-sheds, native ecosystems, unique biomes, UN designations, wilderness, roadless, and other such excuses place millions and millions of acres off limits while eliminating any active wildlife or habitat management.  The Nature Conservancy, like its British counterpart the Land Trust, will one day with a stroke of the pen bar any hunting or fishing on its lands as recently happened with stag hunting in Britain.  The agencies increasingly hire employees hostile to hunting and fishing while they enjoy growth in budgets, personnel, and authorities over states, hunters, fishermen, and rural communities that would have been unimaginable to our Founding Fathers.  They openly talk about the demise of hunting and fishing as they hire more people from the previously mentioned groups that they believe will butter their bread when we are gone.

 The United Nations deserves special attention since they are played like a fiddle by the organizations mentioned above and the Federal agencies that “partner” with them.  When they recently worked to get Federal Invasive Species legislation passed through our Congress, UN staff persons mysteriously showed up in Washington meetings to offer ideas and encouragement on why more central power in necessary to eliminate Invasive Species, control guns (like the European Union), and why more (there over 20,000 already) plants and animals should be added to UN Appendices banning their use or shipment.  Radicals from the named groups switch jobs between Federal agencies and organizations like the World Wildlife Fund while influencing the growth of international controls and elimination of hunting, fishing, and habitat management worldwide.  The US claims a UN treaty (actually a Convention) as authority for seizing state authorities over plants, animals and their uses.  Along with this Federal power growth goes Federal harm to private property owners, only a small part of whom are hunting and fishing operations.

 Finally there are the politicians.  There are the Federal politicians who pass laws that give Federal agencies new and expanding powers like the Endangered Species Act.  These powers are taken from the states.  There are also the state politicians who tolerate this power transfer as long as they get their grants and highway money and education funds and P-R and D-J etc.  The “best” state politicians are considered the ones who run for Federal office salaries, not the ones who stay home and fight for their states rights.  These state politicians, by refusing to fight for their Constitutional duties, are just as guilty as the Federal politicians who get reelected by pandering to these folks who are h---bent on doing away with hunting and fishing seasons.  These politicians are the key for us though.  The bureaucrats have to do what they say or get fired.  The organizations can’t use bad laws to get bad court decisions or agency cooperation to harm everybody else and do away with our favorite seasons in the process if the politicians replace these laws that only fatten bureaucrat salaries and organization powers with laws that help fish, wildlife, habitats, and those of us who use them.

 Many laws need to be amended and some (I am not afraid to say) eliminated.  There are use programs and management programs that would do a far better job of assuring a diverse environment while paying for themselves.  Under our system, politicians introduce and vote for programs to do this just like they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the pickle we are in today.

 What’s the opportunity?  The elections a year from now will be here before you know it.  Whether you vote D or R or some mix, you need to know where the folks who want your vote stand.  You need to tell them why you will or won’t vote for them. Write letters to them and to papers.  Talk to neighbors, friends, relatives, and coworkers.  If these things aren’t on their radar screens, things will only get worse.  If enough of us tell them what we feel strongly about, they will begin to respond to us and not to those who would do away with us.

 Jim Beers

17 December 2003