The latest in my series for the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media.
Todd Tanner has an offer for you. Convince him that climate change is not real, and he’ll give you his gun.
The Conservation Hawks is a new group dedicated to harnessing the power of sportsmen to address climate change. Stop. Before you give in to anger, or to the “conservation fatigue” that can fall upon us like a giant wet carpet whenever climate change is mentioned, consider this: If you can convince Conservation Hawks chairman Todd Tanner that he’s wasting his time, that he does not have to worry about climate change, he will present to you his most prized possession: A Beretta Silver Pigeon 12 gauge over/under that was a gift from his wife, and has been a faithful companion on many a Montana bird hunt. I know the gun, and I’ve hunted and fished with Todd for years. He’s not kidding. You convince him, he’ll give you the gun.
Conservation Hawks has an all-star board of directors, including my friends Bill Geer and Katie McKalip, who both work for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and have a deep understanding of the issues we face as sportsmen. I talked with Todd Tanner recently about what the Conservation Hawks hope to accomplish.
Hal Herring: First, are you serious about the Beretta?
Todd Tanner: I am serious. If somebody can convince me that I don’t have to worry about climate change, I’ll give it them. Or I’ll auction it off and donate the proceeds to the charity of their choice. But it will have to be a real argument, with real facts. I don’t think that argument exists, but I’m willing to be surprised.
HH: Why the Conservation Hawks?
TT: Let’s say you are walking down a trail in the wilderness with your wife and kids, and you come upon a grizzly sow, standing on a carcass. She charges, flat out. You’re in front of your family. What do you do? Just give up? Pretend it’s not happening? Let her maul you and everything your care about? Of course you don’t. You take action. That is how I see climate change. It’s real, it’s threatening everything we love. Not taking action is not an option.
HH: Why now?
TT: This is the point where we can still stand up and have an effect. Maybe it’s the last point. I want that freedom we’ve enjoyed to fish and hunt to continue. Maybe most important, I have a son. I cannot be complicit in surrendering all this that I’ve had and loved for my whole life—just say, sorry, I gave up and let it be taken from him. When I knew the science, and the facts.
HH: What percentage of sportsmen do you think really care anything about this issue?
TT: I’d say maybe 50 percent. But that’s a tricky question. Bill Geer spent a lot of time giving presentations about the effects of climate change to sportsmen’s groups around Montana. He was in Eureka, talking to a group of guys that really didn’t believe the conventional take on climate change. Bill just said, “No problem, what I’m more interested in anyway is what changes have you guys witnessed, firsthand, in your lifetimes.” Well, that set off the conversation, then. Everybody had a story about that. And everybody I know does, too. Because these days, it’s fishermen and hunters who are the ones who notice these things. It used to be that so many more people were outdoors, nowadays it is just us. And it seems like we should be the ones to take the lead on this. We have the most at stake.
HH: What about those sportsmen who will say that this is just not a problem, or not a problem that we can do anything about?
I had several lengthy conversations with Todd about the hunting and angling community’s reaction to climate change. First of all, the idea that the sporting community does not get climate change is flat out wrong. This group includes some of the world’s keenest and most observant naturalists, as Field and Stream columnist Bob Marshall recently pointed out to me. Marshall has been observing rapid changes due to environmental pressure and sea level rise on his beloved Mississippi delta marsh lands for decades, and that, plus the science, has made him outspoken on the issue – for which he regularly draws the wrath of climate denying trolls for his online columns.
I interviewed these men, along with Montana outdoor writer Ken Barrett, for this video, which looks at how Americans who carry traditional knowledge of nature and its creatures view onrushing environmental changes.
Another fabulous post! Keep them coming.
Odd, you would think that in addition to signs of climate change, hunters and other people who spend time in the woods would realize the trees are dying from air pollution. They are dying in areas that have become wetter, as opposed to drier, from climate change – so it isn’t drought that is causing the rampant attacks from insects, disease and fungus. Trees are weakened from constantly absorbing tropospheric ozone, because the pervasive, constant background level is inexorably rising.
Witness the millions of trees that fell during Sandy, and caused weeks of power loss. Many were visibly already rotting on the inside, and not just old trees, young trees too.
All you have to do is look at them so see their branches are breaking, they have holes all over and their bark is splitting and cracking. Not too surprisingly, animals that rely on vegetation are dying off too – everything from moose to birds.
See: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/01/29/whispers-from-the-ghosting-trees/
Excellent, excellent job.
Excellent show. It’s overdue that all this climate change denial is becoming a thing of the past. Fighting anthropogenic global warming is actually self-defense.
People that are outdoors can’t help but notice. Just heard from a friend who works for the US government is various environmental roles, and he send this note:
“Here in Texas (about 25 miles SE of Austin) the frogs and toads began to chorus in January which is unheard of. Tadpoles are a full 8 weeks ahead of schedule. With this and other insect hatches, just think what this does to the bird migration pattern which relies on photo-period not temperature. Birds have timed arrival and departure times to coincide with food supply and guess what? Not good.”
This is one way in which ecosystem collapse begins. Tadpoles – 8 weeks early!
Many hunters don’t believe in climate change because that view comes hand in hand with their right-wing politics – very often driven by one issue – gun control. They hate the idea of climate change not because they don’t like habitat, but because it is an issue championed by Democrats, who they despise because they have been conditioned to have a conspiracy mentality by the NRA.
This is why it drives me absolutely nuts when every liberal blogger on the planet wrote post after post about Sandy Hook delivering a mandate for banning of guns, gun registration, etc – despite the fact that many of their fervent proposals were blatantly unconstitutional under the two recent Supreme court decisions which explicitly expressed an individual’s right to gun ownership.
The Democratic party – if it had any sense of proportion and a real desire to solve climate change – would put an absolute end to calls for more gun control. It simply gets too many right wing yahoos elected an we can’t afford that now. Only a tiny fraction of people in the states get killed by gun-toting murderers on a rampage, and there is no evidence that more restrictive gun laws would change that one iota. Billions are at high risk to perish from climate changes world-wide.
I was wondering, Roger, when someone would make this point. It was, after all, a rather large “elephant in the room”. More than perhaps any other social group, lovers of blood sports must suffer from cognitive dissonance… They are continually confronted with evidence of something that runs completely contrary to their laissez-faire libertarianism and their utilitarian (as opposed to egalitarian) attitude to the environment… I am therefore extremely impressed by the fact that people like Todd Tannner exist at all.
Well, I am a hunter and gun owner.
I don’t think you have the correct idea about how most hunters view the land and habitat. They revere it. They proudly subsidize its conservation with millions of dollars in equipment and licensing fees.
They, more than any other type of sportsmen, are out in that habitat all the time. They do not want to see it disappear. Their hearts are in the right place. They want their grandchildren’s grandchildren to be able to enjoy the outdoors the same way that they do.
But their brains do get coopted by the NRA around voting time. That is where I see the cognitive dissonance issues. How people can vote Republican and yet be hunters is beyond my comprehension.
This is a big lost opportunity for Democrats, in my opinion.
True. I got a little education this year when I went for the 2nd time to the annual snow goose migratory stop at a reservoir in nowhereville, PA. At first I was a little nonplussed by all the hunters lying await in the fields. But then I went into the visitors’ center (which was closed last year) and read about the preserve. It was hunters who created it, and hunters who created the fish & wildlife servic over 100 yrs ago (if I recall), for the purpose of preserving habitat (okay, so they could hunt) – as a result of overhunting that was driving species to extinction. In fact people were so furious about having quotas and licenses required that employees of the F&W service were routinely shot at and more than one of them killed.
So for many places that haven’t been paved over, we can thank hunters.
pix here: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2013/03/sno-goose.html
Thanks for such an considered response, Roger. I am sorry if mine was not so well considered but, with regret, I suspect (as does TT) that you represent mo more than 50% of the hunting community. However, I agree with everything else you said.
To your point, there are those who don’t want to own guns to shoot ducks – and they are not all that into the environment.
http://www.ammoland.com/2013/03/climategate-leaker-our-civilization-is-being-killed-by-lying-science-elitists/#axzz2Oo6SzDHo
Peter,
Let me take exception to your spin on coastal Louisiana. I do not accept that climate change is the major driver of the loss of land there. This is a complex environment, but the two main drivers of the loss of wetlands in southern Louisiana are 1) the opening up of the coastal marshland for oil & gas development for the past 80 years and 2) the misguided USACE policy of forcing the silts of the Midwest through a system that delivers the soils that used to build the Delta out past the continental shelf.
If I were to put a percentage figure on the loss of land mass in southern Louisiana it would be about 50% due to the channelization of much of the wetlands for oil & gas exploration, about 35% because the Mississippi silts are spilled beyond the bayou, about 17% due to catastrophic storms like Katrina and about 3% due to climate change. Now that’s just a SWAG, of course, but it gives you a feel for what real scientists know and what really knowledgeable locals talk about to smart writers like Mike Tidwell who wrote a highly informative guide to the region called “Bayou Farewell” http://tinyurl.com/cjatoj6
Tidwell is the source of much of my knowledge of the destruction of the bayou.
As well, I cannot recommend too highly the writing of Ivor Van Heerden who is truly one of the greatest martyrs for the cause of saving the bayou to have ever lived:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_van_Heerden
For telling the truth about the bayou, Ivor lost his job at LSU, one of the most shameful episodes in censorship in the service of corporate malfeasance ever witnessed in America.
agree that all those factors are at work.