The Green Sportsman

The best thing a sportsman can do for the future of hunting and fishing now seems obvious: Drive a hybrid.

Affirmation of that claim (made often in this space to the ridicule of green-bashers) came last week from none other than President George W. Bush. His message was delivered by Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who announced the Sportsman-in-Chief was reneging on a big promise made to fellow hunters and anglers just a few weeks ago: The Conservation Reserve Program would not be expanded as pledged, but frozen in place, if not seriously reduced. (Read the report here.)

The reason: Energy policy.

The nation needs those CRP acres, the prez now believes, to plant corn to produce ethanol, a program the administration has made a critical part of its so-called energy policy.

That news sent most sportsmen's conservation groups reeling last week. It's bad enough they've been embarrassed by the administration--again. But this time the news could truly prove disastrous to fish, wildlife--and hunters and anglers. This statement by Delta Waterfowl was typical.

Most wildlife professionals consider CRP the single most effective conservation program in history. The program pays farmers to keep marginal acres out of production, allowing them to return to native grasses and shrubs. The 36 million acres of upland cover have been essential to comebacks of waterfowl, upland birds, a wide array of non-game species, as well as improving water quality for fish and humans.

Beginning in September, Bush was swimming in accolades from conservation groups for pledging not only to renew CRP in the coming Farm Bill, but expand it. As late as January Johanns was repeating those promises.

So what changed?

The price of corn.

When the president announced a drive to increase ethanol production a year ago corn prices were around $2 per bushel. By January they had doubled to $4 a bushel. Investors, taking the administration at its word, were pouring money into proposed ethanol plants and worried about finding enough corn to make a profit. Suddenly farmers getting between $25 and $125 per acre for doing nothing by keeping land in CRP, were thinking it might be worth going back to work for $700 per acre.

So the president has retracted his promise to sportsmen to make a new one to the Ag lobby: CRP enrollees might be able to opt out of contracts that typically turn 10 to 15 years. That was bad enough, but barring new contracts could be even more devastating. Over the next two years contracts expire on more than 10 million CRP acres.

Terry Riley, vice-president for policy at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, worries about a ripple effect: “If people planting soy beans switch to corn, the price of soy beans rises, and landowners who don't have land suitable for corn but have prairie that can produce soybeans might start busting prairies for the first time,” he said. “It's a cycle that could do real damage to some of the progress we've made over the last decade.”

The way to stop that chain reaction isn't to ditch ethanol plants. It's to have a sane energy policy focused on conservation and development.

If Bush supported raising mandatory vehicle efficiency standards by 3 gallons per mile, endorsed a carbon tax to keep gas no lower than $3.50 per gallon, and poured the revenue into alternative energy development, fish and wildlife might have a chance.

Instead he sticks with fellow oilman Dick Cheney's sneering advice that "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

So he continues to drill first, look to the future second.

The best we can do until he's replaced is drive a hybrid. Of course, we'll need to haul much smaller boats.

A number of years ago I was covering a sting operation with federal game wardens when one of the veterans posed this riddle.

Q: What's the definition of a sportsman?

A: A poacher who lacks opportunity.

That indictment stuck in my mind as I watched duck hunting harvest numbers plummet across much of the vast Mississippi Flyway over the last few years. Too many hunters were reinforcing the warden’s joke. They angrily demanded answers from fish and game agencies. They hatched conspiracy theories involving conservation groups. Some even pushed for the opening of wildlife refuges traditionally closed to the sport because they claimed these properties were "holding all the ducks."

That greed was embarrassing. Now new research shows it was also ignorant.

A pair of LSU graduate students has just completed a study on wintering mallards that has proven to be ground-breaking, as well as myth-busting.

Over the last two years, Bruce Davis and Paul Link placed radio tracking devices on almost 400 mallards in southwest and northeast Louisiana to gain insight into the birds’ behavior on the Louisiana wintering grounds.

Preliminary findings show the mallards remained on the wintering grounds much later than previously reported, hanging around until mid-March and even into the first week of April; they tended to stay in smaller groups than other species, and they rarely changed their routines due to hunting pressure, remaining largely diurnal and spending most of their time on lands open to hunting, not crowding onto protected refuges as many hunters claimed.

In fact, the researchers said they often tracked birds to marshes and fields where hunters were set up nearby with large decoy spreads – complete with motorized spinning-wing decoys.

"The hunters didn’t even know the birds were there," said Davis.

Bottom line: These mallards were simply beating the hunters. They didn't fall for the spreads. They didn't fall for the calls. The hunters just weren’t good enough.

"I was taught a long time ago that one of two things happens when a gun goes off in a duck marsh," said Link. "Either a duck falls out of the sky dead, or it flies away a smarter duck."

This will probably be little consolation to those hunters who leave the marsh after a slow morning looking for someone to blame.  But then maybe we shouldn’t call them hunters. Maybe they're part of that group of wanna-bes that lack opportunity.

Kind readers, please sit down. I am about to dispel the smear by some of you that I only criticize President Bush. Today I come to praise him.

President Bush has taken his most positive step ever for the environment in announcing his support for permanent improvements in conservation tax incentives. The result could be a huge boost to the growing private land conservation movement, a critical key to the future of fish, wildlife – and sportsmen.

Until last year, landowners putting their property in conservation easements with land trusts could deduct up to 30 percent of their annual gross income for up to six years. While attractive to wealthy landowners, the rule was a burden to owners of small and medium-size properties who found themselves land-rich but cash poor due to the skyrocketing development value of fish and wildlife property, especially in the west. Yet small properties often are critical for allowing public access to prime hunting and fishing habitat.

Green groups -- both hook-and-bullet and enviro -- targeted this problem because they know most fish and wildlife are produced on private land. The more of that habitat base we can protect from development, the happier our future will be.

Congress addressed that issue last year with the Pension Protection Act, allowing landowners who earn at least 50 percent of their income from farming or ranching to deduct up to 100 percent of their income for 15 years, if they donate a qualifying conservation easement. Non-agricultural landowners can deduct 50 percent of their income for 15 years.  The measure was temporary because a nervous congress wanted to judge the financial impact.

As soon as President Bush signed the law, however, proponents – including almost every sporting conservation group - announced plans to petition congress and the administration to make the changes permanent. Given the administration’s new interest in fiscal restraint, there were worries the issue could be DOA. Not any more.

President Bush’s support comes at the same time Senators Max Baucus of Montana and Charles Grassley of Iowa, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, respectively, introduced legislation that would codify the change.

I’m not surprised by the president’s action. After all, tax policy is an issue he understands – and giving tax breaks to property owners is something he loves do.

Now, if we could only get him give some beaks to the rest of us property owners – the 300 million Americans who own the public land, air and water his policies continue to degrade.

Reaction to Monday’s post tells me we have agreement on this much: People care – passionately – about the issue of global warming, whether naysayers or believers.

In watching the debate unfold on this blog, I would urge readers to focus on this contribution posted by Rick: “We, particularly as sportsmen, have a DUTY to see that our environment is protected. . . Can we stop global warming, if it exists? I don’t know but am skeptical. Can we stop climate change if that is what this is all about? No. But shouldn’t we try and leave this world cleaner for our kids and grandkids? Hell Yes!”

That really is the bottom line for sportsmen.  Do we care enough about our traditions to make sure future generations can enjoy them?

When the world's foremost climatologists reported last week that global warming was real, caused by human activity, proceeding faster than thought, already causing serious environmental damage, and, if left unchecked, could threaten the future of life forms on this planet, the Bush Administration responded just as we have grown to expect: It didn't say much, or anything new.

To the many sportsmen who wonder why politics is such a big part of reporting on conservation issues, there can be no better--or sadder--example. Whether you hunt and fish on private leases or public lands, the future of your sports are linked directly to the health of the greater ecosystem in which you roam, boat, or wade. Just as selenium leaching from waste rock at a phosphate mine 100 miles away can kill the trout on your stretch of private water, a rising global temperature will not stop at your posted signs. And that's why it isn't enough for a politician--especially a president--to proclaim his love just for hunting and fishing. If he doesn't show as much love for the environment that makes fish and game possible, he's a bigger threat to sportsmen than any animal rights group.

This president and the congress that blindly followed him for six years have a lot to answer for to all sportsmen. In the words of former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, this may have been the first administration in history that was “anti-conservation.”

And they didn't try to hide it. Vice-President Dick Cheney set the tone with his famously sneering comment in 2001 that "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

They backed it up by inviting lobbyists from their largest campaign contributors--oil, gas, coal and other energy industries--to write an energy policy that ignored conservation and needlessly swept aside long-held environmental protections to allow more production and more consumption of fossil fuels.

And when the world's top climate scientists issued one report after another that burning fossil fuels was the primary cause of global warming, the Bush Administration's reaction was scorn, ridicule, and a gag order. In recent testimony to Congress the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the most respected scientific groups in the world, reported repeated attempts by the administration to change scientific findings on the subject, including deleting references to the potential fallout from rising temperatures in scientific reports, omitted the terms ‘global warming' and ‘climate change' in correspondence, and barring scientists from speaking with reporters without the presence of a political operative. Their entire report is available here.

Any time science conflicted with ideology in this administration, science always lost. When Bush wanted insight into global warming, he invited science fiction writer Michael Crichton to the White House for a chat – because Crichton's novel “State of Fear” was a thriller about scheming scientists using faulty global warming disaster scenarios to manipulate the government. Meanwhile, instead of asking for a chat with the nation's leading climate scientist - James E. Hansen, longtime director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies - Bush's administration had him gagged because his research showed global warming was real and a serious threat.

In discussions over how history will judge the presidency of George W. Bush, most debate focuses on his foreign policy, fiscal policy, and his style of politics. But the far more lasting impact his tenure will have on sportsmen will be his policy on the environment. It will not be a happy legacy for the nation – and especially for sportsmen.

There's little doubt the damage done to fish and game through the policies set in place by Bush over the last six years will take many more years to repair. We should start now.