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Hunter, Angler, ConservationistPage 3
Opening Doors “The people that buy hunting and fishing licenses in this country have one thing in common: They vote,” says Dave Nomsen, vice president of Pheasants Forever, which has worked closely with the Conservancy on wetlands and prairie conservation projects. “In the past few years, we’ve had unprecedented access to the administration in Washington. We’ve been very vocal about our concerns, especially in protecting the funding for programs like Conservation Reserve and Wetlands Reserve.” (Pheasants Forever, the Conservancy and 20 other sporting and conservation organizations worked this year to urge Congress to restore funding to the Wetlands Reserve Program.) Nomsen adds, “I think we are looking at a day where that door will always be open to the fishing and hunting groups, no matter [which party is] in the White House.” Nomsen attributes that open door to the formation of large umbrella groups like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) and American Wildlife Conservation Partners that unite dozens of sportsmen’s groups under one banner. “TRCP is doing a lot of new things,” he says, “like engaging union members, who may not belong to any conservation organizations now, but they are sportsmen, and they share a lot of our common concerns.” From the sporting groups’ perspective, the Conservancy opens a lot of doors as well. “The Conservancy has great green credentials,” says Steve Moyer, a vice president at Trout Unlimited. Furthermore, smaller organizations like Trout (with approximately 150,000 members) can’t begin to tap into the kinds of money the Conservancy brings to projects. Moyer notes, for example, that in a joint $50 million effort to remove dams from Maine’s Penobscot River—an important spawning and nursery ground for endangered Atlantic salmon—Trout Unlimited is largely relying on the Conservancy’s expertise in raising money from state and federal agencies. For Keith Lenard—who worked for the Conservancy before going to the Elk Foundation—the two groups started in different parts of the conservation world, and traveled paths that inevitably converged. “I look at the creation of the Conservancy in the 1950s, when hunters were still the driving force of conservation—really the only force,” he says. “Then land trusts like the Conservancy created a whole new model, and started to lead the hunters along to where we are now.” The potential of the convergence, Lenard believes, is only beginning to be realized. “The hook-and-bullet crowd ... [is] still not a mainstream conservation movement. But we bring a whole new group of people into the room, with the same goals. There’s a whole lot of cross-pollination going on now.” Nationwide, the Conservancy has worked with sporting groups to advocate for policies that favor conservation, to raise public funds for conservation, to restore rivers, to preserve working forests and to maintain public access to industrial forests that otherwise would have been sold to private developers. The Conservancy has worked with hunting and fishing organizations on projects large and small. In South Carolina, the Conservancy is working with the 600,000-member Ducks Unlimited to protect large parts of the 1.6-million acre ACE Basin—the coastal region where the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers converge. More than 160,000 acres have been protected so far. Meanwhile, in Clinton County, Pennsylvania, the Conservancy works with the 20-member West Branch Hunt Club, which is aiding the restoration efforts of forest ecologists by helping to control the white-tailed deer population. In one especially complex partnership, the Conservancy joined forces in 2003 with the Conservation Fund, the Elk Foundation and the Wild Turkey Federation in Tennessee to protect more than 75,000 acres and prevent the fragmentation of huge blocks of forest. Together, they and other groups helped unite a patchwork of state wildlife management areas with forestlands in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains. The forestlands were being sold by coal and timber companies and would surely have been developed. The deal drew public support largely because the groups’ work ensured that hunting and fishing would be allowed to continue. “That connection to hunting and fishing groups is where we’re headed in Tennessee,” says Scott Davis, who directs the Conservancy’s work in the state. “The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency knows that it’s not about a single species. What’s good for a golden-winged warbler is good for a wild turkey. What’s good for a freshwater mussel is good for a smallmouth bass…It’s about an intact forest and clean water, which is good for everybody.” For Bruce Kidman, director of government relations for the Conservancy in Maine, maintaining public access for hunting is critical to the organization’s work: “Public access, on the face of it, has very little to do with the mission of the Conservancy…But if you are going to live in a community, you have to find the common ground, and in Maine, that is access for hunting and fishing.” Hunting helps foster a relationship to the land that is crucial to future conservation efforts, adds Brian van Eerden, who manages more than 15,000 acres of Conservancy lands in southeastern Virginia, almost all of it leased to hunting clubs. “Aldo Leopold told us that everything is connected to everything else in nature,” says van Eerden, “and we can see how sportsmen share this idea on such an intimate level with their children, passing these powerful experiences on from generation to generation. As we become more urbanized, we see things as more compartmentalized, and ecosystems do not function that way.” |
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Copyright © 2008 The Nature Conservancy
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