I’m ten years old, lying in the bed of my old man’s ’89 maroon Ranger, surrounded by the familiar mugginess of an Indiana August dusk, staring up at the marshland canopy whizzing by above me.  I can close my eyes now, twenty-five years later, and conjure back the stew of senses. See the histamine and particulate matter suspended in dense moist air, sun disappearing behind head high corn.   The “earthy nose” of turned soil on the banks of the Kankakee River far superior to any high end California red. Deafening wind, muted slightly by getting right up against the cab and staying low.

My great aunt Delores owned 84 acres in Newton County, Indiana. The glacial recession that took place roughly 16,000 years ago on her property, carved out the landscape of sand dunes, woodland habitat, marsh and creek bottom that would become the backdrop for many of my most transformational childhood moments. We’d travel the same back road route a few dozen times between the farm and home every summer in preparation for the upcoming hunting season. Forty-five minutes and a Marge’s cheese dog with onions by pick-up, four hours, two cans of Mountain Dew and a Zebra cake by tractor and bush hog. We’d bounce and rattle that same borrowed hog to several properties closer to home to cut trails, and by the time the Indiana bow opener rolled around on October 1^st, we’d have around six different properties and 1,000 acres give or take, to choose from. One property was close enough to home for me to strap my Bear Kodiak Magnum to the handlebars, shoulder my pack, and peddle. I had it made.

In 2009 we – my wife, two little girls and me – moved back to Indiana.

My aunt’s farm was now owned by some prick (I met him and he’s the genuine article), who erected an eyesore of a pole barn where my great uncle’s shop once stood, and turned the farm into a dirt bike track for his kids. One late afternoon in November I decided to take back roads home from a business trip to St. Louis. I hadn’t been past the farm in years and figured I could catch sunset and reminisce. It just pissed me off. It breaks my heart that I can’t take my girls there in the summer to dig in the old dump piles behind the barns, catch tadpoles in the creek and chase bull snakes through the dune grass. The stuff I did.

Onda’s, the swampy bottoms, unchecked brush, and rotating crop fields to which I used to ride my bike, was now a subdivision.  Charlie’s place, where I arrowed my first deer, a button buck, also a subdivision. Sourman’s, a subdivision.  There was a property with a small barn that we rented to keep the horses. One night out on the back forty, I built a makeshift ground blind and rattled in a naïve young 8-pointer.  I was probably thirteen. He skidded to a stop within slapping distance of my hidey-hole, eyes bulging in the realization that I had duped him.  He turned on his haunches and blew a frantic retreat before I could draw my bow.  So cool.  That property?  Also a damned subdivision!

My aunt and uncle built a beautiful new home on a quiet man made lake.  We took their pontoon out for a quick tour one June evening. It was dark and portended rain.  Surveying the landscape I noted that we were puttering over a familiar spot.  My Dad and I, one December dusk, crawled deliberately up to the edge of a small rise in the cut cornfield.  He laid his old iron sighted T/C Hawken 54 cal. Percussion cap across his backpack and killed a young doe for sausage and sticks.  We gutted it by the square headlight beam of his red Jimmy.  A great memory.  The soil we hunted that night was dug out to make the lake.

The boat ride took place maybe fifteen years after the hunt.  I couldn’t hunt a single acre I could as a young man.  Not a one.

What about public land?  Well first, there isn’t much public land in Indiana. Roughly 2.2% of the state acreage is opened to hunting.  This includes federally managed public lands and State Trust Lands, which are not public lands, and those acres could disappear via sale or lease at any time. There were a few parcels of open land close enough to me during my last stint as a resident, where on a weekday I might be able to hike, bike or float far enough from a public access point to make it through a hunt without encountering another hunter.  Weekends during the firearm season I wouldn’t step foot on most publicly accessible land, especially in the northwest part of the state. Every Tom, Dick and Harry was out, and many of them had no business in the woods with a loaded weapon.  No thanks.  I mean I love venison but not enough to take a slug for it.

Gone are the days of helping a farmer during the summer in exchange for access during deer season.  Today, those lands are developed or leased for real money.  If you don’t own huntable land, or can afford a lease in the neighborhood of $5,000 a year for 80 good acres, you’re left fighting it out on crowded publicly accessible acreage or searching desperately for alternatives.  Let’s say you are lucky enough to score permission on land with controlled access.  Prepare to encounter trespassers, thieves and poachers.  Thanks to the graciousness of an old family friend, I secured permission to hunt a foundation owned property that was at the onset of a multi-year wetland restoration project.  It was the lowest point in the county and when it rained I needed a boat or chest waders to get to most stands.  I made a lot of meat on that property but easily spent as much time running trespassers as I did hunting whitetails and several stands went missing.

Stories like mine are all too common across the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. and the public access landscape there continues to deteriorate.

Can we work together to increase public access in the East and Midwest?  I think we can. Emulating great private land access programs like Montana’s Block Management program would be a good place to start.  Tax incentives to private landowners and access for people who want to hunt or fish.  Win-win.  Another tactic could be new state legislation that would reward national organizations like the Nature Conservancy, or in Indiana, Niche’s Land Trust and others, to provide public access to hunters and anglers.  Some conservancy properties are hunted but typically not by the general public.  They often become private hunt clubs during the fall.  Yet another suggestion would be for non-profits and concerned citizens to work directly with private land owners to help them understand the benefits and take advantage of private land conservation programs available via the Farm Bill.

I think there are important lessons here to be gleaned by Western U.S. hunters, too. Remember those “this is your brain on drugs” commercials with the frying egg?  Well, this is your land on private ownership.  Don’t think this will happen to your home state? Maybe it won’t. Maybe we will successfully stifle the most recent incarnation of public land grabbers.  That might not matter though.  Responsive Management, working on behalf of state and federal agencies, regularly conducts research around hunting, surveying hunters and non-hunters on a variety of topics.  Their research has found that a primary reason hunters stop hunting is loss of access.

Population densities are higher in the East.  Washington is in the East.  If hunting culture largely dies East of the Rockies, and our societies’ disconnection to its food and our place in the food chain continues unfettered, it will impact western public land management policy in an increasingly tone-deaf manner.  We’re already seeing the implications.  In the last few weeks alone back in my home state of Indiana, the state legislature, misled by Governor Mike Pence, ignored state Game and Fish, and hunter and voter opposition, and passed what I consider to be two terrible laws, legalizing game farms and high caliber rifles for hunting on private land.  Regardless of how you feel about either piece of legislation, the bigger issue at hand is that the state legislature, led by Gov. Pence, circumvented the process.  They reached over game and fish, hunters, conservation organizations, and most importantly, voters, to pass both pieces of legislation in spite of overwhelming opposition.

We’re being ignored by uniformed politicians who are penning our future for us. We’re not loud enough cumulatively.  We’re often not engaged in the process.  Each issue taken on it’s own might seem like, “well that sucks but it’s not a deal breaker”, but we seem to be in the middle of a death by a thousand cuts.  Fighting back will require getting into the arenas where the fights are taking place.  The idea of getting involved in the political process induces a gag reflex in most of us, myself included.  Though if we sit on the sidelines, offering objection and opinion only after the ink has dried, what will that get us?

I can’t give my girls what I had as a kid, but I’m hopeful that they can give something resembling what they have today, to their kids.

I spent a little over a year as a Colorado resident and continue to hunt there most every fall. My first elk hunt took place in the Weminuche Wilderness.

Colorado is a special place to me, but the “colorful” state has a dark pseudo-secret. I say pseudo-secret because it isn’t really a secret at all. This info is public domain but many have no idea. Despite being a utopian mecca for hunters, anglers, mountain bikers, skiers and hikers, its state trust land public access is among the very worst in the West. Historically, state trust land was largely off limits to public access, but as population boomed and access elsewhere declined, citizenry demand for multiple use management and access on state trust land grew. Brought to the table largely by efforts of hunters and anglers, in 1992 the State Land Board struck a deal, agreeing to provide public access to, and manage for multiple use, 50% of Colorado’s state trust lands (~1.5 million acres). However, private interest driven opposition has stuck the truck the mud, and they’re in 2-wheel drive, gunning it.

Twenty-four years later, a bit less than 20 percent (~485,000 acres) of Colorado’s state trust lands are open to the general public, via a lease funded by hunter and angler license fees. Outfitters, clubs and individuals control recreational access on 5% of the remaining 80%. Agricultural interests lease the majority of the remaining 75%.

Fun fact: These for-profit leases are not exclusive to for-profit business endeavors. These entities control recreation on these lands as well! Hundreds of thousands of acres of state owned, prime hunting and fishing habitat under the lock and key of private business interests. Coloradans can drive by these “closed to recreation” leased lands and watch the key holders, or the people they sold access to, hunting, fishing and biking!

Another fun fact: Many of the “closed” lands are not clearly marked as such, so well meaning folks can very easily be misled to believe that these are open to the public – an understandable assumption considering state lands are open to the public in every other Western state. If someone were to make this mistake, and he is found on these lands, he may be ticketed for “trespassing on private land” and face thousands of dollars in fines and loss of hunting and fishing privileges.

On March 9^th at 9 a.m. the Colorado State Land Board held an open meeting to discuss its various lease programs, including the future of “Public Access Program.” What a dumpster fire. Board Vice Chairman Buck Blessing called for a reduction in leased lands, calling them “impaired,” further advocating for “exclusive” use, by – you guessed it – agricultural interests. Fellow board member Robert Bledsoe is a rancher and farmer. Profiles of the full board can be found here. No one on the board lists “hunter” or “angler” in their bio.

I’m pro rancher and pro small business. I’m a small business owner and buy all of my cow, pig and chicken from a local ranch. I understand the local economic benefit. I also understand the economic benefit the state of Colorado enjoys from outdoor recreation, but it doesn’t appear that we, or any of the non-hunting users, have someone who is part of the good ol’ boys club.

Want to give yourself nightmares? Imagine that millions of acres of our public land are given to the state of Colorado to manage. When land is controlled by the state of Colorado the public loses. We lose access. We lose our voice in habitat and wildlife management. We lose our public land heritage. We lose our identity.

Pro-land transfer = No Vote.

Opportunity #1 for the outdoor industry to step up is a self-imposed excise tax modeled after Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson. Mountain bikes, camping gear, ski equipment – tax it all at the same Pittman-Robertson mandated 11% and redistribute to the states in a similar manner.  Imagine the conservation resources this would create.

Opportunity #2 is for outdoor industry businesses to engage on the issue of public lands transfer. Outdoor industry businesses have been conspicuously absent from the public land transfer conversation and have done very little to apply meaningful pressure to state and national politicians to walk back pro-land transfer rhetoric or proposed transfer legislation.

State based conservation is funded almost entirely by hunters and anglers, and we are the only group paying excise tax on equipment.  Those are facts. Pittman-Robertson is a self-imposed excise tax on firearms, ammunition and archery equipment. The funds are collected federally and redistributed to the states based on a hunter participation driven formula. Dingell-Johnson is the fishing equivalent. I realize that today not all Pittman-Robertson funds are generated by hunters, but back in 1937, in the shadow of the great depression, hunters had the foresight and backbone to step up and bring the legislation to fruition. Hunters and anglers buy licenses and bird stamps as well and have traditionally funded roughly 90% of state fish and wildlife agency budgets through their license spending.  We all pay federal taxes and pennies on the dollar are used to fund federal agency efforts, but what I’m talking about here is incremental, use specific taxation and for-profit industry contribution. This kind of self-imposed taxation does not exist for any other outdoor recreational categories.

Many “non-consumptive” users – mountain bikers, hikers, bird watchers, et al. – marginalize and dismiss us as beer guzzling, billhillies.  They enjoy the fruits of our labor while looking down their noses at us. In fairness, many non-hunting, not-for-profit organizations are doing great habitat work, and a few of them have been meaningfully active on public lands transfer issues. Likewise, many non-hunting users of public land contribute significant time and money to these organizations. But the current effort being put forth isn’t going to cut it.  As a community of hunters and anglers, we’ve also not done enough to educate the general public, and that’s on us.

Last fall, while gearing up at the trailhead for a multi-day bomb back into the Colorado backcountry to chase elk, I was confronted by a father and his young son. The son says bluntly, “You can’t hunt here”. The father, to my surprise, conferred. Politely, but plainly, I explained to them that hunters and anglers fund a majority of conservation work, including the trail maintenance and habitat efforts in the area we were all preparing to access. I told them that they should thank hunters and fisherman for helping underwrite their public land recreation. I went on loading my pack. The father questioned my logic. I pressed a bit further by asking him how much his family hike into the wilderness was costing him?  I also asked him if he donated time or money to conservation. Gas and food was his investment.  I think my point soaked in when I rattled off the costs, and benefits to the local economy and conservation efforts, of my trip, and elaborated a bit on the amount of time and money I dedicate to conservation outside of my annual gun, ammo and gear purchases.

This is one frustrating interaction, but also a microcosm of the larger problem we face with our “non-consumptive” brethren.

During the previous month three bills were introduced in the House. A succinct breakdown of the proposed legislation can be found here: Bundy Copycat Bills.   Several similar bills have been proposed during recent state legislative sessions throughout the country and I urge you to research what is going on in your state.  A number of presidential candidates have made land transfer part of their official platform.  The Malheur Refuge occupation was well covered and doesn’t bear another dredging here. Please see previous blog posts for detailed overviews of the land grab movement and the Oregon occupation.  The gist is that the land grab movement is a well-funded, organized effort to fleece the American public of our public lands, and one not to be taken lightly. And, it’s not going away.

Hunting and fishing non-profits, like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, have stepped up their game and are confronting the land grab movement head on. Hunting and fishing industry companies have stepped up as well, both through corporate partnership spending with non-profits engaging on public lands issues, and in-house programs.  First Lite, premium hunting clothing and gear manufacturer, is one company taking the bull by the horns.  Their Round up for Conservation program is raising thousands of dollars for conservation work by allowing customers to round up their purchase and choose a recipient organization. First Lite has been recognized for their efforts with the 2016 ‘Open Country’ award by Outdoor Life Magazine and the 2015 ‘Larry Fischer Award’ by Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Prominent voices in the hunting community are providing needed leadership as well, with guys like Steve Rinella and Randy Newberg out in front.  Their shows, podcasts, forums, and willingness to call a spade a spade, have helped bring the land grab movement to the front of hunters’ collective consciousness.  Meanwhile, for-profit outdoor recreation companies, with their considerable clout as job producing, tax paying members of communities, stand in large part idle on the sidelines. Likewise with their industry alliances and visible spokespeople.  This is unacceptable. Groups like Outdoor Alliance have engaged on public lands transfer issues but it’s time for the outdoor recreation industry as a whole to double down.

This year the Outdoor Retailer, title sponsored in the past by the Outdoor Industry Association, will again host their major events in Salt Lake City, UT, the epicenter of the land grab movement. Right now in Utah, there are no less than five active pro-transfer bills in various stages of the legislative process. The American’s Land Council calls Utah home. A few weeks back the Utah Supreme Court closed public access to 2,700 miles of rivers and streams. Yet OR and their sponsors choose to stay in Utah, sending a clear message, and through their indifference, enabling pro-transfer politicians.

It’s high time for the outdoor recreation industry and non-hunting public land users to step up.

Pay your own way. The moniker “non-consumptive user” is inaccurate. Bikers, hikers, boaters – their land and water uses require significant public investment and state game and fish resources. They also derive enjoyment and benefit from their public lands and it’s time for them to volunteer to pay a self-imposed excise tax.  Hire some lawyers, draw up legislation and get it done.

Put on some gloves and get in the ring with us on public lands. Your businesses and lifestyles require public ownership of public lands to be generationally sustainable. No land = no one buying equipment.  A few social media posts aren’t going to cut it.  This is your fight, too.