Jim Posewitz founded Orion-The Hunters’ Institute in 1993 after 32 years with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Jim saw the big picture and had the fortitude to tell the truth. The Humane Society of the United States quotes him almost as much as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Nearly every one of the 70,000 hunter education instructors in North America has read his book, Beyond Fair Chase, along with more than 500,000 other folks.

The following comes from a June 13, 2010 article in the Missoulian newspaper:

Posewitz first started changing things back in the summer of 1955, when he went to work up in the Flathead Valley as a seasonal fisheries biologist. He went full time with Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks in 1961, working in Great Falls and then Glasgow, and quickly found himself - as regional fisheries manager - at the center of a proposal to dam the Missouri upstream of Fort Peck.

"It was pure pork-barrel dam building," Posewitz said, and FWP fought it on behalf of the river and the fish. Today, a landscape that would have been inundated is treasured as a national monument.

"The state was an advocate," Posewitz recalled. "Back then, at Fish and Wildlife, we actually advocated for fish and wildlife."

During his years at FWP, Posewitz found himself working at a conservation crossroads - the place where a new land ethic met old land uses. Environmentalism came of age just as he was named chief of FWP's environmental resources division.

Posewitz calls the time from 1969 to 1974 Montana's "conservation Camelot," a time when the public - with bipartisan support - rewrote its laws governing water, air and mining, constitutionally guaranteeing a "clean and healthful environment" for future generations.

"It was a real coalition," Posewitz said, "of hunters, anglers, enviros, ranchers, horsemen, farmers, you name it. ... We were all in it together."

Eventually, the cooperation cracked and conservation became political as special interests clashed with the public interest.

"Since then," Posewitz said, "the non-governmental enviros have been hanging onto the pieces put together by that early coalition."

He bridged the government and the new nonprofits by supplementing his FWP work with a directorship at Cinnabar, which was doling out small grants to local causes.

"It was a good balance," he said. "We were working for sportsmen on both ends."

And then, he took on a third.

Two stories came out of Yellowstone National Park in 1988. One was a tale of conflagration, the other a dismal account of some 500 buffalo killed for wandering beyond park borders.

"It was a liquidation," Posewitz said. "We started to see public outrage, and hunting was vilified."

In 1992, a governor's symposium on hunting suggested two strategies: first, clean up hunting's image with an emphasis on fair-chase ethics; and second, put hunters back into the lead in terms of the nation's conservation ethic.

A year later, in 1993, Posewitz left FWP to create Orion - The Hunter's Institute, to pursue those two goals. After nearly 40 years with FWP it was time, he said, to "re-tire" - to take off the old tires and put on some new tires for the long road ahead.

He wrote a book - "Beyond Fair Chase" - and began the work of re-energizing hunting and its conservation heritage. From 1993 until this last January, Posewitz served as executive director of Orion.

"I wanted people to know what a great privilege hunting is, and how much work it took to restore America's broken wildlife system," he said. "By the time I was born, we had cleaned this place out of wildlife. Now we have urban deer, bears in orchards and goose poop on every golf shoe in Montana. That's no accident. It was a choice people made."
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Critics say his style of conservation - and Montana's conservation history in general - is too closely tied to fishing, hunting and the preservation of game species, but he insists that "if we hadn't advocated on behalf of deer and elk, there'd be nothing for today's wolves to eat."

It doesn't bother Posewitz that agency advocacy has long since given way to nonprofit advocacy, because the shift signals that "the people themselves now own the conservation ethic. Conservation was introduced from the top down, from people like Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but now it's tricked down and it's embedded in the people."

It's trickled like a headwaters stream, winding and coursing around giant boulders, even as it wears those boulders away, bit by bit.

"The people themselves have taken ownership," Posewitz said. "They've said, 'No way, we're not going to let this conservation ethic die.' "

Hunter-conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Jay "D'ing" Darling, and Jim Posewitz and the organization he founded, have kept the flame of the conservation ethic alive in the public's mind.

In 2010 at age 75, Jim handed the flame over to Eric Nuse and the main office moved to Vermont. Jim agreed to stay on the board and be an active member. The mission will stay focused on educating hunters, and fish and wildlife professionals directly through the web, books and articles and indirectly through hunter education instructors and Orion's many projects.