By Jim Posewitz
September 4, 2008

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, what is it, where did it come from, and what did it accomplish? Simply put, the North American Model of Fish and Wildlife Conservation is how our society found a way to value, restore, conserve and share the wild resources of a continent. The Model is rooted in: a) our legal system, b) our political system, and c) our cultural will. As 21st Century hunters these A B Cs enable us to enter the wild places on our own and engage in ‘the sturdy pleasure of the chase.

Since none of our nation's founding documents addressed fish and wildlife it was left to the courts to define our relationship with the wild. In a series of decisions dating back to 1842, fish and wildlife have been defined as public resources held in trust by the states - for all the people. In that seminal case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that by virtue of the Declaration of Independence, and the war fought to validate it, the people in our democracy became the sovereign. What that meant in short was, the king's deer became the people's game.

Learning to live with the idea of common ownership of a natural resource was difficult. Throughout the 19th Century commercial interests literally stripped our continent clean of wildlife for markets in everything from meat, to feathers, and ultimately to the bones of slaughtered herds. There were some who protested, but it took the political traction of a president to finally move the nation toward conservation. That president was Theodore Roosevelt, a leader who was moved to conservation while hunting the edges of America's vanishing frontier. When TR left the White House, he left us a public conservation estate enriched by 230 million acres. That was just about ten percent of America retained in public ownership to nurture the natural treasures we valued.

When this top down imposition of conservation faltered, another Roosevelt, Franklin D., challenged the people to take up the cause when he called the First North American Wildlife Conference in 1936. The people responded with the greatest, most successful, wildlife restoration effort in human history. Although things were tough economically and environmentally during those times that we still remembered as the ‘dirty thirties," the people responded. They set aside personal interests and pursued a common interest, the restoration of America's wildlife. The people demonstrated a ‘cultural will' for conservation that was strong enough to restore, to an entire continent, a natural resource held in common- only in America. As a nation among many nations, it was an uncommon course of action, and we pursued it on our own.