In the arena – but what difference does it make?

Spring turkey season is less than a month away. It appears, however, that some other nimrod will have to keep the gobblers honest this year.

For I will be hunting votes rather than beards and spurs.

I made it all the way to age 67 before the beasts in the political arena finally cornered me. Circumstance conspired with my own preachments about citizenship to cut off my retreat. I am left with no escape but to turn and face the electorate by putting my own name on the ballot. So now I’m a candidate for the Montana State House of Representatives.

What could I have possibly been thinking?

Like any other American citizen I care about my country, and in a general fashion, devote serious concern to all the decisions that must be made to operate the world’s largest constitutional republic.  Any given citizen is forced to specialize to some degree, however, because so many decisions spanning so many aspects of human life are required.

The particular policy specialization upon which I have focused my citizenship has been to advocate for preservation and advancement of what I call “the great American Triumph of the Commons.” I’ve written about that in previous columns so I will not belabor the topic here. (Check the archive on the right column of this page.)

What difference will it make if a hunter-conservationist with a passion for wild things and wild places gets elected to a state legislature?

Regardless of what perception you may have of relative importance of the various levels of government (national, state or local), state government in general and the state legislature in particular is the place where the fate of hunters and anglers goes most often and directly onto the chopping block.

State legislatures decide what power to delegate to the state game and fish commissions. The legislature decides how well or poorly funded the state wildlife agency will be. State legislatures in general, and the Montana Legislature in particular, meddle incessantly in the particulars of licenses, seasons, bag limits, poaching penalties and a myriad of other threads that constitute the policy envelope within which hunting and fishing takes place.

You may hike as far up a Missouri Breaks coulee as you please, or haul your fly rod as deep into the Beartooth wilderness as boots will take you – but you can’t escape that envelope. It’s right there in your wallet where you keep your license. Or it’s waiting for you on the trail in the person of a game warden. Or perhaps it has settled itself into your conscience. But the acts of your state legislature are always with you.

The vast majority of hunters and anglers are completely oblivious to the origins of their legal envelope. A small percentage of outdoors people take some part in deciding seasons and license restrictions, etc. during the public comment part of wildlife commission proceedings. Only a micro-corps of sportsmen, however, actually enter the arena as advocates to the legislature to influence the actual construction of the legal envelope.  The 14 million other American hunters and anglers owe more than they will ever know to these valiant few.

I follow the proceedings of other states with an emphasis on the Northern Rockies. Being a Montana resident I use the happenings here in Big Sky Country to also illuminate the parallel activities going on among the neighbors. What I describe here is just as true in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah – actually nationwide.

By their power to make laws, state legislatures define much of the experience that people encounter when they go hunting, fishing, hiking, paddling or whatever else that people do in the great outdoors.

Whose blood do you see in the dirt of the arena while the Legislature is in session? 

Here in Montana and neighboring states the past decade has been one of steady bleeding away of the value of our public trust institutions. Even more bloody has been the evisceration of the public sportsmen’s’ interest versus the ambitions of other arena contestants such as the energy industry, commercial exploiters of wildlife, and, in some instances, agriculture.

Large areas of Western public lands are no longer worth the effort to hunt because of habitat degradation. Vaster areas can’t be hunted or hiked because legal access is blocked and lawmakers refuse to change that.

Budgets of state wildlife agencies have either languished or actually been cut. Hunting licenses have been legislated into payoff schemes for commercial interests. Trespass laws have been skewed to create an imbalance of power between sportsmen and landowners. (I’ve met too many ex-hunters who quit because the fear of unintended penalties took the attraction out of the sport.) Laws are passed to impede wildlife management in general and transplanting of wildlife to improve the abundance and health of game populations in particular.  This could be the world’s longest paragraph but, hopefully, you have the picture now.

Here in Montana, for too many years, that micro-corps of hunter-advocates I mentioned have made Spartan-like journeys to their Legislature fighting a defensive battle from session to session trying to slow the attacks upon public sportsmen’s’ interests.

Victories have occurred; recent passage of a bridge access bill in Montana being an example. But even that came only after a state Supreme Court decision in favor of the public trust forced the Legislature’s hand.

What difference can be made? That depends on who gets elected.

Regardless of how much effort sportsman advocates exert to influence a sitting legislature – the real decision about whose interest will win and whose will lose was made before the legislature ever convened.

That decision was made on Election Day.  By my estimate about 95 percent of the design of the sportsman’s legal envelope is made on the first Tuesday in November of every election year.

Do you know what your state senator or representative is up to in the state capitol? Does he or she vote on bills according to the values they espoused when they asked for your vote?  2014 is the best year possible for you to seek true answers to those questions.

I think you will find that the hunt for votes has much to do with the success of your hunt for bucks, birds and lunkers.

  ~~ Ron Moody

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