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.’

PUBLIC LANDS, HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? AND WHY?

On several auspicious occasions during the 2013 Montana legislative session, public sportsmen were asked an important question by legislators who represent private land interests.

The question was: “How much public land is enough for you?” Standing in the shadows behind this question are the people who demand the taking over of federal public lands by state governments where back-scratching politics ensure the public estate would be sold off or effectively given away to private interests.

If the American people cannot provide an informed, reasoned answer to this key question they are at a critical disadvantage in the perennial struggle to keep public lands and waters in public hands. Embedded in the larger question are such sub-questions as: what important values are served by public ownership that can’t be served by private?  Who will be turned away from enjoyment of the American land by privatization versus who will sip the cream in the future. There are more such sub-questions but you get the picture.

So I will attempt to provide my brief response to that question:  “How much public land is enough?”

I will not quantify my answer in terms of acres, square miles, and so on.  I will answer it qualitatively as I once heard a rancher answer the question of how much land he needed to make a profit. The rancher’s answer was ‘enough to run 200 cow/calf pairs, however many acres that turns out to be.’

My Answer

For the urban population of Montana who overwhelmingly desire opportunity to recreate in our great outdoors, we need the following:  – however many acres that turns out to be - .

We need enough river and stream access, and enough access facilities, so that families and anglers can easily drive to fishing and other water-bourne opportunities near their homes.

We need enough huntable wildlife habitats proximate to our population centers so working-class families with young children and tight budgets can economically enjoy nearby hunting opportunities. Montana families should not be priced out of the Montana outdoors.

We need enough large wilderness areas so that we can maintain a healthy biotic community supporting all native large game species while, at the same time, making wild adventure available to those folks who hike and thrive on the wilderness experience in all seasons.

We also need those high-quality wilderness habitats to be big enough to serve a growing demand for such hard-to-reach hunting opportunities from hunters both resident and non-resident.

We need enough acres of publicly owned lands within large working landscapes so all Montana hunters can pursue game in fair-chase hunts amid natural surroundings – and this in the same locale where, farmers and ranchers are earning a living with profitable agricultural businesses.

We need large spans of open prairie in our central and eastern regions of Montana – places where sage grouse and pronghorn can share the horizon with an occasional publicly owned bison herd – because Montana possesses only half its natural heritage without those wild prairies and their native wildlife.

We need large open landscapes of land still wild in its character simply because we are Americans and Americans have always, and will always, need these frontiers of the heart in which we can feel free. As Aldo Leopold once observed: “What use forty freedoms and no blank space on the map?”

When these needs are met we will have enough public land.

  ~~ Ron Moody

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Hot public land access news is de ja vu all over again

By Ron Moody

“It’s De ja Vu all over again,” Yogi Berra once famously remarked in what has become history’s most famous redundancy.

When it comes to public access to public lands and waters the latest hot news raises the ghost of the great Yogi – to suddenly discover the lack of access to millions of acres of federal and state public lands is de ja vu distilled to its bitterest essence.

A spate of news stories last week were sparked by release of a new report by the Center for Western Priorities (CWP). {http://www.westernpriorities.org/}

That study reveals (hold your breath here) that some 4 million public acres in states of the Rocky West were inaccessible to their owners – the American people. For those western public estate activists who have been around a few decades the question pops immediately to mind, “yes, and your point is?”

In discussing the new report CWP’s Trevor Kincaid reportedly observed: “As far as we know, we’re the only group that’s ever looked into this.”

Sigh.

I’m delighted the report was developed and issued by CWP. The news coverage it generates could conceivably make a difference, somehow. But the actual information is infuriatingly old, old stinking news.

The public access barrier is all too familiar to anybody wanting to use public lands and waters. CWP missed it but the federal General Accounting Office, the investigative agency of Congress, completed a nationwide survey of access to federal lands in April 1992. Yes, that’s the 22-years-ago 1992. The report number is GAO/RCED-92-116BR for anyone wanting to look it up. The structure of the report was a national survey of local federal land managers and was done at the request of Congressman Bruce Vento, then chair of the House SubCommittee on National Parks and Public Lands.

In 1992, according to the GAO report, some 50.4 million acres, or about 14 percent, of the nearly 700 million total acres of federal land lacked public access. Just counting fingers and toes I don’t come up with much progress over the intervening generation of American citizens.

That 50.4 million-acre number isn’t going to shrink over the next 22 years unless a few more locked-out citizens generate some fire-in-the-belly about the loss of use of their property. The number of lost acres could even increase.

How to solve the problem is almost as well understood as is the knowledge of existence of the problem. A year after the GAO report the Recreation Roundtable, a recreation industry group, recommended Congress deliver a $50 million appropriation to access acquisition with $25 million each to the Forest Service and BLM. Fat chance of getting that through Congress today but it is a known action and would help.

Currently, activists are proposing a dedicated earmark from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to pay for access acquisition.  Since the House of Representatives is preoccupied with totally defunding the LWCF so they can further defund the national treasury, they are likely too busy to think of actually paying for access acquisition.

And so it continues, year after year.  And who is to blame?

I say ‘We The People’ are to blame. Politicians frequently exhibit sensory loss, particularly to their hearing, but they can smell a vote from a mile up wind. Solutions to the access problem will magically become real when votes ride on access issues.

Meanwhile, back at the locked gate, one small group of citizens has established a unique record of dedication to the public access problem along with a string of successes in breaking locks to lands and waters.

That group is headquartered here in Montana and they are the Public Land and Water Access Association (PLWA). You can find them at http://www.plwa.org/

I won’t go into their history in this column. But PLWA stands on a side of the access issue that distinguishes them from other public resource advocacy groups – they take action to open access instead of just talking about it.

This makes PLWA greatly unpopular with those people who either make money by locking up access or simply want to keep the public treasure for themselves. As you might expect this leads to PLWA being a small group since the average joe or jane has no stomach for being unpopular in service to the public good.

In 1993, the magnitude of need to open access to federal lands was about 28,000 easements. At that time the acquisition rate was about 350 easements per year.

Whatever the number is today I predict it’s lower than 350.

At this rate of progress we will have to pay a toll just to step off the pavement 20 years from now.

As a footnote I dedicate this column to memory of the late Paul Berg of Billings Montana. In the later years of his life Paul showed up at every public discussion of access issues in Montana and loudly demanded a redress of the grievance while waving a copy of the 1992 GAO report and a copy of the 1993 Recreation Roundtable report. Before his death Paul bequeathed his copies of those reports to me with orders to keep waving them.

I’m afraid it’s been too long since I last followed those instructions. But one good result of the new CWP report is that it made me dig the copies out of my files and take them back in hand for future waving.

Sage Grouse restoration – Western conservation politics under ESA gun

By Ron Moody

A feather storm of emails about sage grouse has passed through the Inbox over the past month or so.

With so much virtual clamor, and with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) taking comments on Sage Grouse management plans in administrative districts across the Rocky Mountain West, and with Rocky Mountain states scurrying to come up with their own Sage Grouse plans, a person could be forgiven for thinking something good is about to happen for the dowdy ‘Sage Hen.’

Don’t count on it.

This once-cherished game bird is, first slowly and now more quickly, losing its grip on existence as formerly wide-open sage prairies are sliced and diced by human exploiters. Nothing visible so far in all the proposed ‘management plans’ is likely to change the bird’s fall into “endangered species” purgatory.

The ESA (Endangered Species Act) is intended to be the last resort before extinction.  Sometimes ESA has worked to restore a healthy population to a species (bald eagle, alligator), sometimes it hasn’t (spotted owl, various amphibians).  Where we stand today, we can only speculate as to the end result of an ESA listing for the sage grouse.

What is certain, however, is that resorting to the ESA to save the Sage Grouse will be the most protracted, toilsome, divisive and costly of all the choices people could make. All the human interests connected to the legal status of the sage grouse will be harmed by an Endangered Species listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and they all know it.

With predictable perversity, however, those speaking for the various economics interests active on the western landscape are going into the management decision-making process with myopic focus on their own wallets. Just as predictably, environmental and conservation voices (they are not the same) are asking for monumental shifts of land use policy with no substantive means of making their vision materialize.

So both BLM and State Sage Grouse plans eventually will constitute the lowest common denominator of what’s left after oil and gas companies, ag and livestock interests, local electric co-ops, transmission companies, etc. have fully employed their political pull to shape their share of the management burden to their own liking.  Over on the green side, management plans will deliver just enough ecological discipline so wildlife advocates can make faint claims of victory in fund-raising letters.

This low-ball outcome may be enough to save the Sage Grouse from actual extinction. But I see no hope that it will put the species back as it was when the game stock could support a three-bird daily bag limit – or even support a hunting season for that matter.

Indeed, the first scapegoat offered up by the industry crowd is the upland bird hunter. “It makes no sense to be hunting a bird that is in danger of being listed,” they say.

Well, yes it does make sense. 

In their zeal to make somebody else pay the piper for sage grouse restoration, industry people are adamant that state fish and wildlife agencies carry the leadership burden. They do this for two reasons: first, it is thus the sportsmans’ wallet that is flattened, not theirs; and second, they know state agencies are even more vulnerable to political manipulation by “job-creating” industries than is the federal BLM.

Bird hunters probably have more to give than they have offered to date in terms of bag limit and season reductions. But zero should not be an option. Once a hunting relationship is severed by ESA, or by the state, only long, costly, chancy litigation will ever bring it back. 

More importantly, ending hunting entirely means that society as a whole thinks hunters should continue to pay for sage grouse management via game agency activity while they are simultaneously elbowed away from the resource table.  That might have worked in past decades. Today, however, a shrinking hunter population and economic factors are strangling state agency budgets.  Unless agency revenue sources broaden, species that don’t produce enough license dollars will fall into that non-game species black hole obscurely listed in every department budget.

There is one judgment, however, that hunters cannot escape. ESA listing of a game species is, by its very fact, an indictment of failure on the part of the North American System of Wildlife Management. 

The methods by which sportsmen restored waterfowl, for example, by demanding passage of federal and state laws then funding habitat via duck stamps and Ducks Unlimited have not been offered to the sage grouse.  Prairie species as a group have not enjoyed the attention of an ‘unlimited’ or ‘forever’ sportsman support group.

One persistent criticism of the North American System is that it plays favorites among species.  The wildlife species that wins the hunter popularity contest get the support it needs to prosper. Other species languish on a scale proportional to sportsman interest.

Like the grizzly that once shared its prairie domain, sage grouse require large-scale habitats. As always habitat is the key to survival. But habitat restoration on any scale is costly. On a large scale it is dauntingly expensive.  So somebody is going to have to pay the piper’s price or the sage grouse is doomed to that eternally endangered limbo that is the most common product of the ESA.

All of the folks, both public and private, who make money off the western landscape, and folks like hunters and bird watchers who take their reward in barter with nature, could come together and agree to a cost-share plan offered in a positive ‘can-do’ spirit.

No sign of that happening yet. We’re still in the eye-gouging, don’t-look-at-me phase of the democratic decision-making process. Given our western tradition of never moving beyond this phase I’m not predicting anything good for the Sage Grouse.

WHAT TO DO?
BLM Lewistown District plans open houses Dec. 10 at the Yogo Inn in Lewistown and Dec. 18 at the Petroleum County Courthouse in Winnett. Both meetings are 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. The Greater Sage-Grouse Draft RMP Amendment/Draft EIS is available at http://blm.gov/f9kd.

The Montana Sage-grouse Advisory Council is seeking comments on the DRAFT Greater Sage-grouse Habitat Conservation Strategy. Deadline is Dec. 4, 5 p.m.  The strategy details a state-led effort to address threats to the species as identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and to preclude the need for listing the sage-grouse as a federally threatened or endangered species.

http://fwp.mt.gov/fishAndWildlife/publicComments/sageGrouseAC.html