Dear HCN,
In your issue devoted to
the sadly divisive but, I fear, century-old conflict between
conservationists and environmentalists – preservationist John Muir
couldn’t stand conservationist John Burroughs, and vice versa – Ted
Williams quoted one of my cultural heroes, Roderick Haig-Brown, who
described the faults of the outdoor press as timidity and
conformity: “It dare not shock or extend its readers, it must not
frighten them with abstract or deeply considered ideas’ (HCN,
3/3/97). Writer David Peterson then characterized my conservation
coverage as hostile to professional wildlife management and
strenuous wildlife law enforcement; as “myopic, misguided,
self-serving, and – well, scary.”
In the light
of Haig-Brown’s call for deeply considered and frightening ideas,
I’m flattered by Mr. Peterson’s description of my work. If it’s
scary to write skeptically about the truly self-serving propaganda
pumped out by state and federal resource agencies and their
non-governmental allies, I’m glad to be scary. When the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service lies consistently about the status of North
American waterfowl and concocts management theories to justify the
continued overshooting of ducks, I’ll gladly plead guilty to
hostility to “professional wildlife management.” When the Service
also gives free rein to its law enforcement division to run an
illegal, multimillion-dollar entrapment of falconers whose only
proven crime appears to have been sloppy bookkeeping, I’m proud to
have exposed that truly frightening example of “strenuous wildlife
law enforcement” to Field & Stream’s
readers.
The majority of my colleagues merely
rewrite governmental press releases and call it journalism.
However, when the emperor has no clothes – or is shabbily dressed,
as in the case of the currently fashionable Conservation Reserve
Program – I feel a duty to point that out, no matter how scary such
exposure might be to timid and conformist minds. Finally, so far as
some federal laws are concerned – e.g., Endangered Species Act – I
have not just a journalistic right to point out their shortcomings,
but an obligation since I either helped write those laws or get
them passed. If human nature doesn’t always live up to the high
hopes we had in creating a law, it’s more sensible to modify it so
it works as intended rather than go on senselessly insisting that
we modify human nature instead.
So, thank you,
David Peterson, for describing my work as “scary.” The scarier it
is, the more effective my role will be as conservation’s
ombudsman.
George
Reiger
Locustville,
Virginia
The writer is
conservation editor for Field & Stream
magazine.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline When scary is a compliment.
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