Posted on 03/18/2004 1:15:29 PM PST by writer33
Conservation no longer a top spending priority, conference attendees told
The lynx are nearly gone, mud snails are heading upstream, frogs are growing extra legs and wildlife management budgets are being cut.
The job of a wildlife biologist has always been a bit like being a firefighter in a bone-dry forest during a lightning storm.
There's never enough help and always too much heat.
But times seem to be getting even more desperate, according to some of the attendees at the nation's top wildlife management conference being held this week in Spokane.
"The agencies are pretty much bare bones. We're really strapped, we're not even putting out all the fires right now," said Tom Franklin, policy director for The Wildlife Society, which represents 8,500 wildlife biologists, mostly in public agencies. "Right now with all the threats to the nation, environmental issues and conservation are not top priorities."
The three-day North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference began yesterday. More than 1,000 scientists, policy-makers and game managers are expected to attend, including U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth and the executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope.
This is the 69th annual conference and the first time it has been held in Washington. The biggest issues of wildlife management are debated and discussed during the event, said Scot Williamson, vice president of the Wildlife Management Institute, which organizes the conference.
"This really is the one place where the leaders of conservation come together once a year to do the business of conservation policy," Williamsom said.
Williamson described it as a "state of the union for conservation." The dominant issues this year are concerns over energy extraction on public lands, the increasing popularity of off-road vehicles and the Bush Administration's Healthy Forest Initiative.
Hanging over everything is the growing concern of shrinking budgets and the loss of experienced scientists, Franklin said.
Hunting and fishing license fees have paid for most conservation programs, but fewer people are hunting and fishing each year, he said. In the next decade, about half of the country's wildlife management professionals are expected to retire and the budget cuts mean many of the positions will stay vacant.
"Some people have described it as the perfect storm in natural resources management," Franklin said.
National Parks Service Director Fran Mainella said partnerships between public agencies and private organizations and landowners will become increasingly critical. The National Park Service has also been forced to make do with less in its 387 parks and historic sites, she said.
Every time the nation goes to a Code Orange terror alert, for example, the National Park Service is forced to spend an extra $55,000 per day on security, Mainella said.
When Mainella took questions from the crowd, a conference attendee from Utah State University stood and asked, "How are we going to manage our resources in the future if this type of budgeting continues?"
The budget cuts have hit nearly every state and agency, wildlife officials say.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has seen its budget drop by $20 million since the latest economic downturn, said Dave Brittell, assistant director of the agency's wildlife program. Among other cutbacks, Eastern Washington lost 9 employees in the state's upland restoration program. These are people who worked to ensure hunter access and helped landowners enhance wildlife habitat, Brittell said.
Brittell is optimistic new funding sources can be developed, such as asking for more help from outdoor enthusiasts who don't buy hunting or fishing licenses. There's also talk of raising cash by developing energy resources on state lands in the Columbia Basin and on the east slope of the Cascades.
One of the more popular sessions at the conference focused on managing cougars, coyotes, grizzly bears and wolves.
A scientist from California described the problem of increased coyote attacks in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The coyotes, he said, are now using storm drains as a "subway system."
A bit of comic relief was provided during a presentation by Ed Bangs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's wolf recovery coordinator. Bangs has led the successful and highly controversial effort to return wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains.
Recently, two wolf packs in southwest Montana were exterminated because they preyed on livestock. Bangs said the action caused him to get phone calls and letters from both the state's senators, the governor, countless journalists and a wolf rescue center in Hawaii.
Bangs said he wasn't fazed by the minor blowup. The emotions involved with wolf management have fueled countless attacks from both sides.
"My two favorite quotes are, `May your putrid corpse rot in hell,' and `Wolves need you like the Jews needed Himmler.' "
Any FReeper firefighers wanna take a shot at this one? Just wondering.
"My two favorite quotes are, `May your putrid corpse rot in hell,' and `Wolves need you like the Jews needed Himmler.' "
I'm not going to comment on this slur other than to say if a Republican had said this, he'd been in deep, deep trouble right now. All of this brought to you by your friendly environmentalists. And they aren't fanatics, huh?
Hawaii???????
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.