Note from Tony Dean: I wrote this article for Dakota Country magazine.
By Tony Dean
You can’t blame Peter Carrels for wondering if fishermen really care. An Aberdeen, SD writer and Missouri River activist, he’s has spent much of his life trying to return integrity to the Missouri River, and he’s miffed because few have more to gain or lose by the way Missouri River reservoirs are managed, than anglers. But when they had a chance to talk management with the US Army Corps of Engineers, they were no-shows.
The Corps held an official hearing in Pierre, SD on Oct. 29 to take testimony on the various proposals for future dam management. You’d think, with the importance most South Dakotans attach to the Missouri River reservoirs, it would take a good-sized auditorium to hold such a meeting. But this one could have been held in a living room. Only 45 showed, and most of them were Corps or other government employees.
To understand the incongruity of this, you have to know something about Pierre, SD. Here, almost everyone owns a boat and most fish. The local supermarket gives as much display space to fishing tackle as groceries and most businesses owe their success to the economics that come with good fishing. It’s the type of town where you’d think anyone coming in to suggest shipping Missouri River water downstream to float barges, would be lucky to escape with tar and feathers. Instead, the defenders of fishing in central South Dakota turned out to be as formidable as the Taliban.
Only eight testified and just two were private citizens. They included Carrels who drove 160 miles from Aberdeen and a lady who traveled 225 miles from Sioux Falls. Most Pierre fishermen didn’t take the time to travel across town. There were no Missouri River guides, no delegations from Pierre, Chamberlain, Gettysburg or Mobridge, nor a single resort operator along the river. No one represented the tackle stores, baitshops, or motels. Maybe that’s why the barge operator who drove from Missouri got a lot of press in South Dakota newspapers the following day. He walked into the Lion’s den and found a pussy cat.
Some later said they didn’t know about it, though the hearing was well publicized. Perhaps the best excuse one can offer is that our citizens have become so worn down by the process that they dismissed this as just another in a series of hearings and public meetings that seem to lead to nowhere. There’s some validity to that view, and I’ll offer them the benefit of the doubt because no other agency stages so many public hearings and meetings that seem never to result in a decision.
But, unlike Carrels, I’m not surprised fishermen took the night off. They, along with hunters, have always managed to avoid the heavy lifting on key conservation issues that impact their sports; always content to let the environmentalists do it instead, then cursing them as liberals trying to take away our guns.
When the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) tried to change the way wetlands were delineated in South Dakota, fishermen and hunters looked the other way…or…were oblivious to it. The astonishing thing is that the effort, if successful, could have resulted in the drainage of up to 90 percent of South Dakota’s wetlands, and few things could hurt fishing or hunting more than draining what remains of the prairie potholes. Why is it the group that eventually headed the NRCS off at the pass, included as many environmentalists and Native Americans as fishermen and hunters? Where were the waterfowl hunters or the businesses dependent on good hunting? Where were the organizations dedicated to waterfowl?
When North Dakota ranchers who graze at the public trough tried to make grazing the dominant use of the National Grasslands, it wasn’t hunters who led the fight against them. It was the Sierra Club and the North Dakota Wildlife Federation. Hunters, who had much to gain and lose, were conspicuous by their absence.
But you can sure rile them up if you pick the right buzzwords.
When heavy fishing pressure decimated the perch population in Cattail-Kettle Lakes in northeastern South Dakota a few years back, few fishermen called for reduced bag limits. They just blamed non-resident fishermen for over-harvest, the same as they did in 1995 when Lake Oahe was producing such huge bunches of giant walleyes. When the record runoff flushed most of the smelt from Lake Oahe in 1997 and fisheries researchers realized that the predator population had to be dramatically reduced to give smelt a chance to recover, fishermen attacked the biologists, accusing them of trying to ruin the fishery.
Ask Dakota sportsmen to list the biggest problem facing fishing or hunting these days and you can bet non-residents will be at the top. However, lest Minnesota sportsmen who feel locked out by Dakota attitudes toward visiting hunters in recent years think they sit on hallowed ground, I’ll remind them that they stood by silently when nearly all of their seasonal and temporary wetlands were drained. And now that they don’t have good duck hunting because the habitat isn’t there, they travel in increasing numbers to North Dakota.
Go back to the last election and it’s a safe bet most sportsmen cast their votes for George Bush because he was perceived as the pro-gun candidate. Then he gave us Gale Norton and a host of appointees who now regulate the extractive industries they came from, and it’s a safe bet deer, fish, elk, trout or ducks won’t rank high on their list of considerations. No, I’m not grieving for Al Gore. He deserved to lose. His campaign was idiotic and began with embracing the ludicrous Democrat belief that banning guns will curb crime. Only when polling indicated the race would be close, did Gore say he wanted to protect the rights of sportsmen to own guns. Why is it the Democrats, who say they’re for the environment, go out of their way to alienate hunters? Why is it Republicans, who claim to be our gun-rights friends, betray us with their natural resource policies?
Problem is, sportsmen latch on to visceral issues that evoke a gut feel rather than those that demand an intellectual understanding, something the right-wingers have figured out. Tell us the liberals want our guns and we take off the gloves. But say you want to graze on public lands without explaining that you want ALL the grass…or that you want to improve crop production by installing tile to drain excess water off fields quickly, and it becomes an agricultural issue with nothing to do with fishing or hunting. Say you want to save wetlands and the drainage crowd responds, “We don’t want to drain real wetlands, just the nuisance ones.” And they get by, by defining real wetlands as deeper, cattail-fringed marshes, and nuisance wetlands as those wet spots in a field or pasture that hold water only for a short period of time. Amazingly, duck hunters accept that definition, without realizing that the single biggest reason duck hunting is mostly poor in Minnesota and Iowa most years is that all the seasonal and temporary wetlands, the kind breeding ducks require, aren’t there anymore. Instead, it’s easier to say, “All the water in the Dakotas has caused the ducks to change their flyways.” If water is what it’s about, with Leech, Winni and Mille Lacs alone, plus the 9,997 other lakes, Minnesota should have the best duck hunting in the world. But, duck hunters, like other hunters and fishermen, want easy explanations that are cut and dried and black and white.
Why is it we fishermen and hunters have so much trouble sorting things out?
Some hunters reason that since the Conservation Reserve Program is supported by tax dollars, they should therefore have the right to hunt it. They ignore the fact that the individual tax contribution made by licensed hunters, when compared with the rest of the taxpayers is so small it won’t buy a box of shotgun shells. Most don’t even realize that ducks are just as dependent as pheasants on CRP because puddle ducks are ground nesting birds. And as critical as wetlands are to ducks, grass is just as important. Over the past ten years, according to USDA figures, the rate of grassland to cropland conversion in South Dakota’s ten best duck production counties has been staggering, surpassing any gains made by the CRP program. Truth is, we’re losing our prairies, acre by acre, day by day, largely due to Round Up Ready seeds, above normal moisture, and farm bill provisions that encourage planting more crops that are already in the surplus status. Does the world need more soybean or corn production? Only if taxpayers want to continue to make the LDP payment that encourages it. Ironically, those who need our surplus crops, can’t afford to purchase them.
As I scan various hunting websites these days, I am amazed at how popular it’s become to denounce “liberals” and “environmentalists.” They are the ones, say many hunters, who want our guns. Conservatives, they say, protect them.
I’ve always been a conservative, especially on fiscal matters. But the extreme right wing of the Republican party has successfully redefined conservatism, and part of that view calls for exploiting resources, regardless of the impact on fish or wildlife. But are they any worse than the extreme left wing of the Democratic party who regard guns as evil, though most of them probably don’t know an AK47 from a Remington 11-87?
So as I wander into cyberspace, I sense a growing number of sportsmen have become right-wing ideologues who hate environmentalists. Arizona Sun columnist, Dave Gowdey, came to the same conclusion.
“I was raised as an outdoorsman in a long tradition of conservation and environmentalism,” he wrote. “I was taught that hunters and anglers were the first conservationists and that they cared deeply about the environment.”
Gowdey said he learned about Teddy Roosevelt, the man who faced down the corrupt western Senators working for the big timber barons; and his partner, another hunter/angler named Gifford Pinchot who became the father of the US Forest Service. He learned about Aldo Leopold, who wrote the first book on game management and the wonderful series of essays that were compiled into, A Sand County Almanac, a book that should be required reading for all hunters, fishermen, Republicans, Democrats and business operators. Then, said Gowdey, along came the great conservation organizations, Ducks Unlimited, the Izaak Walton League, the Audubon Society and a host of others.
“What puzzles me,” he wonders, “is when did so many hunters become so anti-environmental? When did we start putting the profit of ranchers, timber interests, mining companies and developers above the conservation of public lands? When did we start calling our colleagues in the environmental movement, fighting for the same things we want, tree huggers? When did we start to think Rush Limbaugh knew more about conservation and game management than Aldo Leopold? When did we come to believe that fighting for the Second Amendment was incompatible with fighting for the environment?”
Gowdey added, “it appears that one of the greatest con jobs in history has been perpetrated on hunters. We have been scared into thinking everyone on the left wants to take away our guns, and because environmentalists are on the left, they must be enemies as well. We’ve been put into a great paranoia, without noting the fact that the folks who tell us the most loudly and persistently that the left wants our guns belong to the party of big business…those who profit most if hunters leave the environment coalition. This is ironic because every major mainstream environmental organization is either pro-hunting or neutral on the subject.”
A few weeks ago, I hunted ducks with Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson, who over the past few years, has been the recipient of a few jabs from this writer. But for this one weekend, we were hunters and though the conversation centered mostly on mallards, it often turned to politics, and there, it focused on what’s best for fishermen, hunters, wildlife and farmers. As one of the leaders in the Congressional Sportsman’s Caucus, Congressman Peterson is in a unique position to supply some badly needed conservation leadership. That’s important because good public policy isn’t made amidst paranoia and ranting from the right or left. The weekend left me with the belief that while we may occasionally disagree on the how, our wants are the same.
So it also is with Peter Carrels. I share his frustration that no fishermen thought it important enough to come to a Corps hearing that will have more bearing on the quality of the fishing in the Missouri River reservoirs than almost anything else. I've hunted and fished my entire life and my Dad did his best to point his North Dakota farm boy son in the right directions. I’d like to think I’ve met some of his expectations, especially when it comes to sorting things out. And I’d like to think that one of these days, fishermen and hunters will go beyond visceral thinking and realize there’s a lot of gray in what the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum tell us is a world of black and white. I hope my fellow fishermen and hunters will lift some covers to see who or what’s under them. I hope they become skeptical and do some research, digging deep enough to discover who their real enemies are. To quote my friend, Rich Landers, any fisherman or hunter, who isn’t an environmentalist, is a damned fool.
