Montana the ‘Wall Street’ of wildlife – and a crucible of conflict

If you want to see financial news on the front page of your local paper every day you should live in New York – the closer to Wall Street the better.

If, however, your passion is for wild animals and the wild places where they live, and you expect full front page reporting on the topic, then Montana should be your home.

The high level of public attention given by Montanans to what goes on over at Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department makes plain: elk and trout are to Montanans as stocks and bonds are to New Yorkers. Indeed, you can think of Montana as being the ‘Wall Street’ of America’s wildlife economy.

The New York Times is never going to devote as much front page space to deer numbers in the Adirondacks as the Billings Gazette gives to wolves in the Beartooths. But even there, among the metropolises of America, people care deeply about wild things and wild places – particularly in mythic precincts like Montana. 

So Montanans frequently see the nation’s ‘newspaper of record’ reporting on what we are up to out here among the elk and antelope, grizzly bears and wolves.

This national spotlight is hard to grasp for a western people who live amid open landscapes and never see themselves as featured actors on the national stage; but the whole world watches every move Montana makes in caring for its wild treasury.

The actions taken by Montanans in regard to how we care for wild things and wild places set the conservation agenda and frame the public debate to a degree unparalleled in other, tamer states.  Because of this, Montana FWP breaks the front pages at home and abroad more often than any other single agency of state government.

 

Human nature is such that everybody looks at a topic like wildlife management through the lens of their own personal benefit.  That makes it hard to see the big picture of how wildlife management, along with the recreational management that conjoins it, are not political islands isolated apart from the whole cloth of our civil body politic.

Some hunters routinely demand that management exclusively produce abundant game for them to hunt. Simultaneously, wildlife watchers demand that management produce happy, healthy critters for them to see and photograph.

Everything we do about wildlife management is woven into the fabric of people’s personal economic, health, social, and political well-being.

Be too poor and you can’t afford to recreate in the wild.  Be uninformed and you will not understand values beyond your immediate desire - or how to benefit from those seemingly alien values held by persons with different desires.

My point here is that a single state wildlife management program must produce and preserve the wildlife resource valued by ALL the people. But it must do that within the often conflicting paradigms of the both the individual values of self-interested citizens and the holistic realities of a complex, largely urban society.

The simple truth is that we human wildlife lovers have long since plowed under a planet Earth were wild things and wild places can exist apart from human influence.  The only chance of survival for the wild in the 21^st Century is in a beneficial interactive relationship with dynamic humanity.

Wildlife can no longer exist in this human-dominated world without a human support system strong enough and supportive enough to give wild things a wild place in which to live. Accepting this truth is particularly hard for urban folks who still believe there is a wild frontier somewhere outside the city limits where nature can be left alone to ‘balance’ itself.

How we preserve our wildlife is another of those telling metrics that reveal the quality of our civilization - just as other observers measure us by the way we treat the poor, or care for children. 

So how is all this playing out in our public arena today?

The lines of conflict among factions of our society have become starkly polarized between different culturally driven views of wildlife management. In the eyes of an objective anthropologist, Montanans fighting over wildlife appear more tribal in their behavior than political.

To illustrate this point, here are four big crevasses dividing Montanans, and Americans, on management of wildlife:

-        Urban versus Rural  (a huge social-economic divide in Montana often argued as altruism versus economics, or public interest versus private property rights)

-        Preservation philosophy versus Conservation (save wildlife versus wisely use wildlife)

-        Abundance management versus ecological management (breeding lots of elk and deer versus sustaining a healthy biotic community)

-        European-style privatized management versus American-style public management (democratic public hunting versus pay-to-play hunting)

Reflecting the Montana cultural priorities I describe above, every session of the Montana Legislature devotes about 20 percent of its work load to fish and game legislation. Every session the legislature will introduce 250 or more game and fish bills addressing all of these four social divides.

Here are some examples of perennial hot topics that put these tribal crevasses on glaring display:

Bison - very much an Urban – Rural argument. Since rural interests dominate both legislative houses bills to further limit bison restoration are certain to stay on the front page.

Large Carnivores, wolves, lions and bears, intersect three of these crevasses – urban-rural, preservation-conservation and abundance-ecology.  So this topic will stand at the top of the legislative agenda for the foreseeable future.

Money is to be made in wildlife both in controlling and selling access to wildlife and in providing support services like guiding. Commercial interests will forever try to tip the scales of law in their favor to the disadvantage of the public. Just like in all of society money permeates wildlife politics and connects to all four crevasses.

Access, both to private land and to public land, is the single most volatile fracture at play in the Legislature and on Main Street. Control of access is the single most powerful fulcrum point for having one’s way on any resource conflict.  So this is the most hotly contested point on the battlefield. Expect more ditch bills, privatized license bills, property rights bills.

A hundred years from now our descendants will judge us for how we resolve these conflicts. I wonder how important that prospect is to a ‘selfie’ generation obsessed with its own gratifications. One thing is for sure, everything we do is on the record and we will not escape history.

If there can be a ‘Greatest Generation’ then, logically, there can be a ‘Worst Generation.’