Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Environmentalists, sportsmen are formidible as partners

GEORGE SMITH:
Kennebec Journal
Our greatest disappointment continues to be our inability to win public support and funding for Maine's beleaguered Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. We came to realize that we cannot let the negative members of our respective constituencies ...
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Kennebec Journal

Monday, April 23, 2012

Front is the best of the Last Best Place

By Randy Newberg

Congressman Denny Rehberg has asked Montanans to tell him more about the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act and the remarkable, five-year public process behind the collaborative effort to conserve public lands along the Front. He's holding a listening session in Choteau today at 2:30 p.m. in the Choteau Public Schools auditorium.
He's going to hear two things, loud and clear: Montana sportsmen are committed to conserving the Front, and they will welcome the Congressman's support in keeping this sportsman's paradise just the way it is.
The Front is that expansive, rough country that'll take your breath away every time you drive U.S. Highway 200 south of Great Falls. It's a wellspring of clean, cold water; a place that supports significant livestock grazing; and an important lure for tourists who give a boost to traditional small-town economies.
But more than anything, it's a sportsman's paradise. Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks tallies some 90,000 hunter days along the Front and some $10 million spent by sportsmen in nearby communities each fall. Many more days and dollars from fishing, camping, and hiking.

...This is what Congressman Rehberg will hear: The Front is the best of the Last Best Place — and we want to keep it just the way it is.

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Randy is a board member of Orion and owner of On Your Own Adventures in Bozeman, MT

The Man in the Arena - 102 years ago today

April 23, 1910 - Sorbonne, Paris

The famous quote from the speech
"Citizenship in a Republic"

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Read the entire speech


http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html


Thursday, April 5, 2012

Let's Put a Bounty on Stupid


 
The Range Blog

Ben Long | Apr 04, 2012 12:00 PM
What is more stupid than bailing the ocean? Paying someone to bail the ocean.
Yet it seems the Utah Legislature thinks that’s a good idea. Worse yet, Utah lawmakers are co-opting the state’s sportsmen to pay for this folly. If you are a sportsman anywhere between Alaska and Arizona, watch your wallet. This trend ain’t contained to the Beehive State.
burning money imageA pseudo-conservation group, Sportsmen For Fish and Wildlife, is spearheading biologically bankrupt anti-predator schemes that are guaranteed to waste millions of dollars and undermine legitimate wildlife management.

...
A hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated the idea of good sportsmanship by refusing to kill a bear caught in a Mississippi trap. Roosevelt’s Legacy, called the North American Wildlife Model, has several provisions. Among those, wildlife belongs to everyone, not a privileged class; wildlife management is based in science; wildlife is not squandered wantonly.
Today, SFW is making a mockery of the Roosevelt Legacy, bankrupting America’s wildlife management in more ways than one.

Read the entire post