What is Past is Prologue - the necessity for laws and regulations to protect the nation's natural resources - Brief Article

In a quiet moment of reflection and contemplation, take yourself back a hundred years. Place yourself sitting upon a stump in a pine forest of upstate Pennsylvania, or peering through an aspen stand into a high mountain meadow of Colorado, or standing in the cold shallows of a California river rushing to the Pacific. You are eager to shoot a trophy deer, elk, or catch a plentiful supply of salmon.

Your thoughts are framed by a powerful sense of the frontier spirit and apparent boundlessness of our natural resources. Your individual liberty and freedom is quintessential, and dwarfs any sense of nationalism. The wilderness right beyond your standing is scary to you, yet there for the taming and taking. These new federal concepts of conservation and national commons don't make a lot of sense to you. You can't recollect hearing the names of Moran, Bierstadt, Thoreau, Pinchot, or Muir. And you have never heard of a national park, wildlife refuge, or national forest.

Then, from a distance, a person approaches. He is volunteer deputy game protector who gets paid by half of the fines he collects. In a gruff and non-negotiable manner, he informs you that you are no longer allowed to fish and hunt. He may tell you you need a license, need to pay a $10 fee before hunting, can only hunt from September to November, can only take one buck, cannot hunt on Sunday, cannot hunt with large groups of hunters, can only fish upstream from your neighbor, or that you can only use hook and line.

Imagine, 100 years ago, the gall of this government person infringing on your recreational rights and freedoms. Imagine your outrage that the government would temper your recreational use of public resources.

What was happening? We began to realize that restraints on our recreational freedoms were the price to pay for sustaining our public resources, and the quality opportunities they afforded. A new land era was being ushered in with the realization that our frontier ideology and imagery, combined with an insatiable appetite for natural resources, was leading to resource depletion. By the turn of the 19th century, the scarcity of many fish and game species had been well chronicled--from eastern deer and turkey, to Rocky Mountain elk and bison, and to California's salmon, mackerel, oysters, and sea otters.

The management of sport hunters last century may be the prologue for the management of visitors to our local, state, and national parks in the 21st century. It is no coincidence that the ecologic, social, and economic success of state wildlife agencies is in part attributed to sport hunting being the most regulated outdoor recreation activity in America.

State agencies annually establish big game population/harvest targets and adjust their management program and hunter licenses towards this end. They annually project a desired future condition for their wildlife populations and revenue streams, then make a variety of reasoned capacity-related decisions as to when, where, who, how, why, or what type. These decisions are implemented by a variety of management tools and programs shown in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1. MANAGEMENT TOOLS AND PROGRAMS

* limited number of licenses per management unit

* limited number of outfitter and guide permittees per unit

* limited length of hunts

* partial-day and partial-week "no hunt" periods

* advanced random lottery drawings, raffles and auctions
for highly prized hunts

* party size limits

* differential fees

* different types of hunting experiences

* limited mobility impaired licenses

* mandatory check points

* youth only zones

* residency qualifications

* no hunting closures

* land use regulations

* landowner preferences

* preference points

* equipment restrictions

* access limitations

* required hunter education and ethic programs

* extensive public information activities describing available
hunting locations, facilities and opportunities.

The management of sport hunting in the United States has greatly benefitted from 100 years of professional organization and experience, accumulated scientific and historic knowledge, adaptive management, public education, and public acceptance of the fact that restraints on their recreational freedoms are the price we pay for sustaining our wildlife resources and the quality of experience opportunities they afford.

The conditions that shaped sport hunting 100 years ago are present today for many outdoor recreation opportunities: increasing demand, competition, scarcity, degradation, depletion, conflict, powerful special interests, increasing professional and institutional competency, legal mandates, political attention, judicial challenges, and public debate.

Visit your local outdoor store for a set of hunting regulations for the different game and fish species in your state. In a quiet moment of reflection and contemplation, imagine a park law enforcement officer handing a set of similar regulations to a state or national park camper, whitewater canoeist, wilderness backpacker, mountain biker, climber, spelunker, horseback rider, or ATV rider.

What is past is prologue.

Dr. Glenn E. Haas is on sabbatical from Colorado State University and serving as the Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, U.S. Department of the Interior. He is directing the Federal Inter-agency Task Force on Visitor Capacity on Public Lands.

COPYRIGHT 2000 National Recreation and Park Association
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group