Sportsmen vs. the Northern Forest

A decade ago Paul Stream lay in ruins, choked with silt bleeding from Champion roads and clearcuts. "Walking in places I used to fish was like slogging around in quicksand," Deen recalls. "It was an absolute disaster. Champion got up there with their chippers and took everything. There was nothing left to cut." But now, after ten spring runoffs have scoured its bed, Paul Stream is almost completely back. What thinking angler would want to re-open the core area to industrial forestry?

Despite the glaring flaws of the 133,000-acre Champion lands rescue in Vermont, maybe it was the best deal for fish and wildlife that state politics would allow. There wasn't lots of time for tweaking and negotiating, and the framers deserve hearty ovation for pulling it off. Instead, they're getting beaten up by sportsmen for banning logging on the little 12,500-acre core area. And now sportsmen are campaigning to do away with this reserve.

It started with 74 camp owners in the West Mountain Wildlife Management Area who had leased land from Champion. Under Champion, the leases expired after five years, although they were usually renewed if the holders behaved. When the public took possession of the management area the camp owners knew they'd have to clear out, but in a fit of benevolence the state granted them occupancy for life plus 20 years. Lifetime leases are unheard of in public land acquisitions. In New York, for example, camp owners who had leased land from Champion have been allowed to remain on what's now public land for just 15 years; and that is more than generous. Still, the Vermont camp owners were not satisfied, and they demanded permanent leases. Governor Howard Dean and the legislature refused.

So at meetings of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs the camp owners proclaimed that The Nature Conservancy (TNC)—co-holder of the management area easement—had been taken over by anti-gun, anti-blood-sport, anti-Vermont flatlanders who had it in for the "traditional uses" of camp squatting, logging in the core area and ATV mud slinging on former Champion property (even though the state and Champion had long ago banned ATVs from all their lands). It was only a matter of time, pronounced the camp owners, before TNC did away with other traditional uses such as hunting, fishing and trapping, never mind that these uses had been guaranteed by the easement.

"There was this clause that said 'non-compatible uses' could be phased out of the core area," remarks avid hunter and angler Pat Berry, communications director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council. "The camp owners told sportsmen [untruthfully] that this meant hunting, fishing and trapping, and they believed it. So TNC said, 'Okay, fine,' and it took the clause out. Then the camp owners and the sportsmen they'd co-opted moved on to logging. This was 'a government land grab.' Hearings became crazy bullying sessions. I write a column for Outdoors Magazine on conservation issues. And some of the guys are waging an all-out war against me. I'm 'not a sportsman' because I want a no-logging zone. They're actively supporting the legislators who cast the most damaging votes against water quality and wildlife habitat simply because they opposed the core area."

This past legislative session sportsmen and their allies hatched unsuccessful bills that would have allowed logging in the core area, that would have mandated that logging is, by definition, consistent with preserving natural resources, and that would have deleted language from the enabling legislation that protects wildlife habitat and identifies natural heritage sites.

Whipping the sporting masses to a froth of hysteria and paranoia is Outdoors Magazine editor James Ehlers, a Music Man figure who stomps and shouts and carries on about secret, government-financed, anti-sportsman conspiracies right here in River City. He preaches to his flock that the core area is a preemptive strike on the working class by "egocentric Chittenden County elitists," "narrow-minded misanthropic state officials" and the unholy Pooh-Bahs of the "shape shifter" Fish and Wildlife Department. "No cutting of trees means no habitat for [game] animals, which means no hunting." The Nature Conservancy is a "Goliath" but sportsmen (under his leadership, of course) have brought it "to its knees after being ignored, excluded, patronized and prejudged." TNC is "saving the last great places on Earth for themselves." The Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife is staffed by "disgruntled, coerced scientists." The Montpelier-based environmental group Forest Watch is a bunch of "emotional Bobos." Governor Howard Dean keeps "an ever thoughtful eye towards a wealthy America and discriminating microbrew drinkers." In the core area sportsmen can: "Come and watch healthy trees grow old, fall over and die. Come and watch the deer look for browse that is too high for them to reach. Watch them leave and die. . . . Come and observe the underbrush wither and die because the large 'old growth' trees are blocking out the sunlight." "Biodiversity," warns Ehlers, "is the rallying cry of hell-bent preservationists everywhere. It is to the environmental community what rear-end revealing pants are to high-school kids today. . . . The tweed academia even have a name for it—sacred ecology—and the Vermont Biodiversity Project zealots are on a crusade to control the social agenda, equating the constitutional rights of humans with the supposed rights of bugs." And so on and so on and so on.

"Why are you upset?" I asked Ehlers. "You can do anything you want in the core area."

"There won't be any management for game species," he responded.

"But doesn't game—brook trout, bobcats, deer and such—need old growth? Isn't restoring old growth management too?"