Guns and Greens

Possibly you weren't aware that your Audubon membership makes you an anarchist. Neither was I until March 2003, when the Federation of Fly Fishers received a letter about me from G. Roberts, one of its members: "Let me get this straight: You give the Aldo Leopold Award to a guy who works for the National Audubon Society, an anti-fishing and hunting mob that worked, and succeeded, in closing the Channel Islands in California to all fishing, even fly-fishing. . . . The 'antis' will not stop their fight until they have put an end to fishing. . . . So-called mainstream environmental groups such as Audubon and the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC] now contain radicals who favor property damage, and eventually, the destruction of our economy and civilization." A handwritten note at the bottom urged me to forget the lavish pay and quit "whoring" for Audubon.

Because I write environmental articles for hook-and-bullet magazines, I am deluged with such communications, many less cordial and all from hunters and anglers supremely ignorant of the issues. Such is the disconnect between sportsmen and enviros. But it works the other way, too. Mr. Roberts, for instance, had missed it, but he would have liked my piece in Fly Rod & Reel on how the environmental community alienated sportsmen with its inept attempts to promote marine protected areas (MPAs) in general and the Channel Islands MPA in particular.

Four years ago, with virtually no outreach to sportsmen, the NRDC attempted to promote MPAs by distributing maps suggesting that enormous offshore and inshore swaths from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod—20 percent of the area and basically all the best fishing spots—be considered for no-fishing MPAs. This despite the fact that recreational fishing, though hurtful to some species, is on the whole far less damaging than commercial fishing. Anglers, marine biologists, and fish managers were horrified. "Although the NRDC certainly meant well and created the problem inadvertently, if they had wanted to arouse opposition, they could hardly have done it any more effectively," commented Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute. Meanwhile, the Ocean Conservancy was launching its Ocean Wilderness Challenge, calling for the designation of "at least five percent of U.S. waters as wilderness." Ninety percent of sportfishing occurs in the 1 percent of U.S. waters closest to shore. Still, the proposal sounded okay until the conservancy explained that, unlike terrestrial wilderness, there would be no fishing in ocean wilderness, thereby confirming in the minds of sportsmen what extractive industries had been telling them all along: that wilderness is really a plot by selfish greenies to kick everyone else out. Both the NRDC and the Ocean Conservancy have been and are effective leaders in protecting marine resources, and both are now working hard to educate sportsmen about MPAs, but the future of these desperately needed management options remains in doubt.

While Audubon stayed out of the MPA squabble, some of its members did not. But that's the price big organizations pay for their grass roots. It was ever thus, and it can't be helped. Sportsmen have never comprehended this. Their paranoia, bred of society's unwarranted disapproval of blood sports, allows them to be easily manipulated by special interests. In political and financial strength, the 47 million Americans who hunt and/or fish are to environmentalists what the NFL is to Pop Warner football. So you'd think that the environmental community would be doing some manipulating of its own—or at least communicating. But it consistently blows opportunities.

"Environmentalists don't reach out to sportsmen," remarks Chris Potholm, founder and CEO of the Potholm Group, a polling and strategic-advice company that has engineered 60 environmental referenda victories in 30 states. Every time Potholm ear-hauls sportsmen and environmentalists together, he's marshaling a minimum of 65 percent of the population—"an absolutely irresistible political juggernaut that can win anywhere," he says. For example, enviros are united in their contempt for the ultraconservative, anti-environmental, pro-coyote-control, access-at-any-cost Sportsman's Alliance of Maine, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't work with it toward common goals. Five years ago, thanks in part to Potholm, they did just that, winning a ballot initiative that got the state a $50 million bond issue for the purchase of wild land. When the Potholm Group first polled voters, only 38 percent were in favor. After a brilliant TV ad campaign featuring No Trespassing signs and a Maine guide paddling his grandchildren in a canoe, the measure won with 69 percent of the vote.

In 2003 the state's Passamaquoddy and Penobscot tribes sought, by statewide referendum, to develop a $650 million, 200,000-square-foot casino in bucolic, wildlife-rich Sanford, Maine. Four thousand slot machines and 180 gaming tables would provide more gambling space than any casino in Las Vegas. There would be an 875-room hotel, a 2,000-seat theater, a convention center, a golf course, and 10 nightclubs and restaurants—everything the Pine Tree State didn't need if it wanted to preserve its reputation for quietude and natural wildness. You don't usually get far in Maine when you take on the Indians. Still, L.L. Bean—the outdoor-equipment and clothing store in nearby Freeport—decided to try. With help from Potholm, it brought together a coalition of environmentalists and sportsmen. The first Potholm polls came in at about two to one in favor of the casino. The pro-casino side outspent its opposition $6.8 million to $2.7 million, but the alliance of sportsmen and environmentalists was unstoppable. That November Maine voters rejected the casino by about two to one.

"Maybe the best example of what sportsmen and environmentalists can accomplish together is the Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement [CARE]," says Mike Daulton, Audubon's assistant director of government relations. This group of 20 organizations has one purpose: securing federal funding for the national wildlife refuge system. Its members include such philosophically divergent groups as Ducks Unlimited, Defenders of Wildlife, Audubon, the Wilderness Society, and the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, but conflicting agendas haven't affected the coalition. "CARE has made a tremendous difference," says Daulton, getting steady increases in refuge appropriations, from $178 million in 1997 to $391 million in 2004.

By far the biggest obstacle facing environmentalists who seek to forge alliances with sportsmen is the hook-and-bullet press. Aldo Leopold's lament more than half a century ago is truer now than then: "The sportsman has no leaders to tell him what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport, it has turned billboard for the gadgeteer." Today owners of some hook-and-bullet magazines not only publish billboards for gadgeteers, they are the gadgeteers. For every publication such as Field & Stream—which, under a new editor, has recently taken to running honest articles about real issues—there are a half-dozen that run disinformation aimed at boosting circulation and ad revenue by playing to readers' fears about the dreaded and ubiquitous "antis." In terms of journalistic integrity they're right down there with the supermarket tabloids.

Consider the green spray-painting of Representative Don Young (R-AK) by Outdoor Life. No member of Congress works harder against fish and wildlife than Young, whose environmental voting record, as collated by the League of Conservation Voters, hovers around zero. Not only does he refuse to work with environmentalists, he defines them as "my enemy," "not Americans," and "self-centered, waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots." But Young never misses a chance to ape for the hook-and-bullet press, dressing like Elmer Fudd, brandishing ordnance, and going on and on about how much he hates "antis." Before the 1994 election, Outdoor Life told its readers that Young "is your kind of politician," that he "fights the good fight," and that "you'd be hard pressed to find a more fearless Washington advocate of the sportsman's life." Before the much closer 2000 election, which Young might have lost without the support of sportsmen, Outdoor Life again oozed and gushed about Young, calling him "a top watchdog" and a "hardheaded defender of sportsmen's rights."

Moreover, few sportsmen read magazines like Audubon and Sierra, published by groups they've been told oppose hunting. In the quarter-century I've been associated with Audubon, we've worked tirelessly to recruit sportsmen. Both magazine and organization have consistently supported hunting; in fact, I have been assigned to promote it, most recently in a piece entitled "Wanted: More Hunters" (March 2002), about exploding deer populations. In the same issue David Seideman's editorial summed up my central point: "What's sadder than an innocent animal taking a bullet for the conservation cause? Extinction that causes forests in spring to turn silent and barren for want of songbirds and wildflowers."