| Conclusion of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation |
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A Century of Challenges have been brought before this Association. When you were new the wildlife resources of this continent lay in ruins, perched on the edge of oblivion. Our predecessors and the people, primarily hunters and anglers, responded. When economic depression and the brutal drought characterized the dirty thirties our predecessors embraced the challenge. Aldo Leopold, Jay Norwood ‘Ding' Darling, Ernie Swift and a legion of others of that era saw the hard times as a worthy adversary. These hunters, each of them once part of this Association, gave birth to public and private programs that fueled a continental wildlife Renaissance. They made us the promise that, out of the ashes of the commercial liquidation, wildlife would be restored for us all. This promise kept was brought through an industrial revolution, a crushing economic depression, a continental drought, two world wars, dawning of an atomic era, the birth of the space age and perhaps even the collapse of the dot-com bubble. The promise was kept, because the values that defined the promise were maintained. The loss of social and cultural values being trashed and mocked inside the commercial shooting grounds of today will be infinitely more fatal to our wildlife conservation ethic than the pathogens that also demand our attention. The values placed on wild things and wild places are conservation's capital, values embraced by the vast majority of our people. When our wildlife becomes little more than stray ‘alternative livestock' our odyssey to preserve the hunt for generations unborn will have died. Should we be incapable of living up to the expectations carried to this convention as part of the promises fulfilled by this Association, we will be left with one final ritual. As always, there is historical precedent. When Theodore Roosevelt left the Presidency he entrusted his reforms to his friend and hand picked successor, William Howard Taft. While ex-president Roosevelt was hunting in the Congo a native runner brought word to him that President Taft had fired Gifford Pinchot in a political abandonment of conservation principle. Taft lacked the courage to stand against the special interests. In January of 1919 when Roosevelt was buried on Sagamore Hill, one person remained behind when the ceremony ended. Alone, at a grave site on cold January evening, Taft, standing alone, wept over the grave of his friend - knowing that he had failed him. We are also chosen successors. We preside over a legacy passed into our custody through a century of successful practice. The question now, as so often before, is do we have what it takes to preserve the values in our custody, or are we like Taft, just not up to it? The choice seems reasonably clear: either we preserve the wild nature of game, and the ‘sturdy pleasure of the chase' for all the people; or, like Taft be resigned to weep over the grave of the most successful conservation legacy in human history. "The chase is among the best of all national pastimes: it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone." "There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy." "When one unclean hand touches the management of this experiment, then it fails. When one commercialized motive comes into its thought, then it fails. When it becomes the organ of any man's vanity, the tool of any man's selfishness, then it fails." References Cited: - Public Broadcast System. The Presidents Collection, Theodore Roosevelt, Turner Home Entertainment, Inc., 1997. |
