AR-News: NRA spurns Sierra Club's offer, alienating other groups

[jim robertson]

NRA spurns Sierra Club's offer, alienating other groups
Sunday, June 27, 2004
SPOKANE F ireworks erupted this week as the National Rifle Association 
rejected a Sierra Club suggestion to join forces and claimed the high ground 
on appealing to the hunting community.


By going after wilderness.

Kayne Robinson, president of the NRA, bluntly spurned a Sierra Club proposal 
to create a coalition of national hunting and fishing organizations to 
protect fish and wildlife on public lands. He said the environmental group 
supports candidates who want to ban guns and has closed millions of acres of 
public land to access.

Robinson told the annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of 
America that the NRA will launch its own efforts to improve hunting 
conditions for average Americans and expand access by roads for hunting. 
Hunters make up 50 percent of the NRA rolls, he said.

Sierra Club members earlier in the week had offered either to join or help 
create a coalition of groups to improve hunting, among other outdoor 
pursuits. Club spokesmen said 20 percent of members are hunters.

Robinson said the NRA, like many outdoor-oriented organizations, wants to 
reverse a gradual decline in the number of hunters because so many of its 
hunting members also support gun ownership. A decline in hunting, he said, 
"will kill us."

Robinson said his approach will include fighting restrictions on road 
building in roadless areas and attempts to reverse Clinton administration 
rules closing roads.

That settles the NRA once again square in the sights of not only the Sierra 
Club, but also other, less-strident conservation groups such as Trout 
Unlimited, who also are keen on preserving wilderness areas.

Trout Unlimited representatives, for example, unveiled the second in a 
series of booklets mapping wilderness areas, "Where the Wild Lands Are: 
Oregon," which details the location of 2.1 million acres of congressionally 
mandated wilderness across Oregon's 62.1 million-acre landscape.

Many of the state's un-roaded areas are key habitat for threatened and 
endangered fish, said Chris Wood, Trout Unlimited's conservation director.

A similar review of Idaho lands, published earlier this year by Trout 
Unlimited, shows that wilderness areas without roads produce the state's 
best hunting, yielding the most and largest buck deer and bull elk.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife doesn't keep records the same way 
as Idaho, and the wilderness review by Trout Unlimited doesn't assess the 
same hunting relationship.

The wilderness reviews drew praise from Mike Dombeck, former chief of the 
U.S. Forest Service, a wilderness advocate and now a professor at the 
University of Wisconsin. Trout Unlimited will release reviews this summer of 
Alaska's Tongass and Chugach national forests, then work on the rest of the 
western United States.

"Information like this allows the public to coalesce around the same 
scientific data as land managers," Dombeck said.

There was little tolerance from Robinson for views other than the NRA's. In 
pointed language, he faulted the Sierra Club for participating in the 
anti-hunting movement.

Pressed after his speech for details, Robinson offered none, referring 
questions to "my staff."

His attitude and sharp words were met with disappointment from most of the 
nation's writers, many of them either NRA members or persons paid to write 
free-lance articles for NRA publications.

"It was rude of him and not based on anything factual," said Pat Wray of 
Corvallis, a member of the association's board of directors.

Ducks down? U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists still are adding 
numbers, but cautioned hunters about breeding conditions in Canada that 
drive hunting season lengths and bag limits.

Odds are on the side of a shorter season this fall for Oregon hunters -- 86 
days, compared with 107 last fall and winter -- as well as across the 
continent. A daily bag limit of seven birds might not change, though.

Parts of Alberta are at their driest in decades, and rains across the 
Dakotas were too late to help the continent's mallards.

"I can't tell you that we're going to make some changes this fall because 
the numbers are still coming in," said Paul Schmidt, the service's assistant 
director for migratory birds. "But you should be prepared for some 
conservative measures."

Global galloping: Nate Mantua, a climate researcher scientist at the 
University of Washington, told writers that global warming no longer is a 
scientific debate, that it is instead human-caused, not a natural earth 
cycle and is happening faster than anyone thought it would.

Native Alaskans on the North Slope are seeing open water for the first time 
in even their elders' memories, he said.

"They're the human canaries," Mantua said of Alaskans. "And up and down the 
coast we're seeing glaciers galloping uphill, not receding. Some in the past 
four to six years have lost 4,000 to 6,000 years of ice."

Mantua said the Northwest will warm (he called the fast-freeze scenes in the 
film "The Day After Tomorrow" "way out there"), with wetter winters and 
higher snowpacks. That, he said, will present severe problems to inland 
salmon runs.

Quote of the week: From Steve Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife Service, in describing the snakehead, an ugly, toothy predatory 
fish that has invaded North America and recently was discovered in and 
around the Potomac River.

"It eats everything in a pond, then crawls across the land to another pond 
and eats everything in that pond," Williams said. "I suppose it's 
appropriate it first showed up in Washington, D.C."

Bill Monroe: 503-221-8231; billmonroe at news.oregonian.com







I would sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener than expect humans to 
become responsible stewards of the Earth. --
James Lovelock


It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the 
existence of Man. --
Rabbi Moses ben Maimon  1135-1204