Everyone who loves the outdoors and follows politics even occasionally should read this article by Field and Stream's Conservation Editor Bob Marshall. It details the effects that the latest draft of federal budget will have on sportsmen...and NONE of them are good.
"The federal government spends about $5 billion a year in conservation programs that are essential to the habitat that supports hunting and fishing, but it gets back about $14 billion in direct tax payments from people who make their livings in those industries--and that's a conservative estimate," explained Dale Hall, Ducks Unlimited CEO and former Director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "This makes no sense. Yes, we need to cut, but we need to do it intelligently. And we have to look everywhere."
Mr. Marshall does a very good job of giving us a blow by blow on the potential impacts that these cuts could have on sportsmen, so instead of rehashing that, I'm going to briefly explain why we need to care about these issues.
The first step is that we have to get away from labels. We use words like "conservative", "liberal" and "environmentalist" as shortcuts to refer to some common groups of people, but they don't do justice to all the subtlety and nuances of these complex issues. At some point in the distant past each of these terms might have described a logically consistent set of policy stances, but any such pretext has long since been washed away by our echo chamber approach to political commentary. For example, just because you support strong national defense, it does not logically follow that you must therefore oppose attempts to preserve wildlife habitat. The two issues are almost entirely unrelated. So then why are we constantly drawing these arbitrary lines and dividing up unrelated issues into these comfortable old labels?
So where am I going with this? I see a lot of my fellow sportsmen using these labels to divide up every political issue into "us" vs "them". These environmental issues are critical to ensuring our future outdoor recreation opportunities and, unfortunately, the pundits often see to it that they fall into the "them" category. We need to actively resist this trend.
Wanting to preserve our outdoor opportunities is not an inherently "conservative" or "liberal" stance. It belongs to neither the Republican nor the Democratic party. When executed wisely, these goals can be accomplished regardless of your stance on the culture wars, entitlement reform, foreign policy or any of the other issues that usually divide Fox News from MSNBC.
-K.M.
The first step is that we have to get away from labels. We use words like "conservative", "liberal" and "environmentalist" as shortcuts to refer to some common groups of people, but they don't do justice to all the subtlety and nuances of these complex issues. At some point in the distant past each of these terms might have described a logically consistent set of policy stances, but any such pretext has long since been washed away by our echo chamber approach to political commentary. For example, just because you support strong national defense, it does not logically follow that you must therefore oppose attempts to preserve wildlife habitat. The two issues are almost entirely unrelated. So then why are we constantly drawing these arbitrary lines and dividing up unrelated issues into these comfortable old labels?
So where am I going with this? I see a lot of my fellow sportsmen using these labels to divide up every political issue into "us" vs "them". These environmental issues are critical to ensuring our future outdoor recreation opportunities and, unfortunately, the pundits often see to it that they fall into the "them" category. We need to actively resist this trend.
Wanting to preserve our outdoor opportunities is not an inherently "conservative" or "liberal" stance. It belongs to neither the Republican nor the Democratic party. When executed wisely, these goals can be accomplished regardless of your stance on the culture wars, entitlement reform, foreign policy or any of the other issues that usually divide Fox News from MSNBC.
-K.M.
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