As accrued wisdom is ignored, our previous wildlife, water, forests and public spaces are being depleted and damaged
Part 1 of 2
By contemporary standards, many of us aging outdoorsmen have not yet reached the chronology of some “old people” who unfortunately suffer from the onset of Alzheimer’s or dementia or who have become unworthy of relating to the history, principles, ethics and values of the outdoor heritage of South Dakota (represented above in a public domain photo of the Dakota Prairie National Grasslands posted on wikimedia commons).
It does appear, however, that many of us heritage-minded traditionalists have reached a point in adulthood (not unlike Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell) where a segment of the modern outdoor culture, under the apparent influence of politically motivated thoughts and theories, openly regard folks our age, background and experience as decayed, irrelevant, impractical, change-resistant and unwilling to accept new-age reasoning as it applies to the stewardship of our collective natural resource heritage.
This critical disregard even seems to extend to the trusted standards of reliance on science, careful experimentation, engineering, logic, respect for and trust of historical record-keeping. Not in dissimilarity to the pronouncements of “anti-vaxxers,” academic critics, self-made virologists or biologists, conspiracy theorists, science deniers, climate-change opponents, etc.
The obvious result of all the contrarianism is an alarming depletion of our wildlife, degradation and pollution of our water, destruction of forests (both public and private) desecration of once-productive open space, over-exploitation of public assets, environmental disrespect and careless attempts to retrofit a new version of quality of life. Not just in South Dakota but all across the Central and Western United States.
We seem to have developed this absurd notion that all things within the ward of the Public Trust Doctrine belong in the stream of commerce rather than in the historic care and stewardship of public organization first recognized and ingrained into American vision, law and history by Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States.
Considering that Roosevelt had already surpassed the average life expectancy of Americans by almost 10 years in 1916 when he wrote one of his many books on natural resource public policy, we geezers should have no reservations, about defending the outdoor ethics, traditional stewardship, and natural resource values established by the conservation president at our present age and mental vigor.
In “A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open,” Roosevelt wrote: “Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things, sometimes seek to champion them by saying that ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So, it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people.
“The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time. Compared to those now alive form but insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose and method.”
The democracy once enshrined in our stewardship of wildlife and natural resources has long since been displaced by authoritarianism, political favoritism and despotic control by the elite business and political classes. What was once a sacred ward of the commoner has rapidly become the idol of commerce and vampire capitalism. It can be further suggested that some of those minorities, whose charge it has been since Roosevelt’s time to care for, conserve and protect wildlife, have become nearly as self-centered, unprincipled and negligent as a manufacturer pouring industrial waste into a river.
To further recall Roosevelt’s outdoor morals, he noted in his April 15, 1907, letter to the school children of the United States, “We of an older generation (you and me) can get along with what we have though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood, you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted. So any nation, which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could, with difficulty, find him the bare means of life.”
The times have changed. The tenets, principles and requirements for resource survival, growth and sustainability have not! The human element is flexible and adaptable, the resources are not! So here we are, in the 21st century, behind the learning curve, spending millions and needing many more millions to recover the things that would actually be recoverable and sustainable had we kept Roosevelt’s legacy close to the heart.
Roosevelt inspired Gifford Pinchot, our first professional forester, John Muir, the father of the National Parks, and Bob Marshall, the father of the wilderness preservation movement, among others.
And not long after those giants came Aldo Leopold, seemingly known to only a few remaining wildlife enthusiasts today as the Father of North American Wildlife Ecology and Management. His first book was and continues to be an overshadowing collection of scientific and anecdotal principles that successfully guided and directed wildlife ecology, conservation, management and preservation from 1949 forward.
“A Sand County Almanac” was, apparently until the beginning of the 21st century, required reading for wildlife management educators, students, hunters, and a broad collection of outdoor and wildlife enthusiasts across the globe.
Leopold, along with Charles Elton, Rachael Carson, John Harper and Sir Arthur Tansley, among many others, were the fulcrum for development of the professional wildlife research, management and ecology professions that continue to train professionals in colleges, universities and trade schools across the North American continent and beyond.
The discipline is preserved in innumerable organizations and societies worldwide; not the least of which is The Wildlife Society, which preserves the largest library of wildlife science in the United States. Sadly, in this author’s professional opinion, all of that history, professional endeavor and applicable research and academic achievement suffocates in the grip of contemporary socio-economic and poisonous political idealism.
The application of all that accumulated wildlife wisdom and management expertise is stifled and impugned by some in the outdoor community aligned with political and government machinery that by law and constitutional authority, is supposed to conserve, enhance and preserve the Public Trust for the Commons.
Seemingly, South Dakota and many other parts of the nation have returned, at least in no small measure, to the 19th century philosophy of exploitation and excessive demand from resources that are less capable of positive sustainability today than they were during the days of market hunting, timbering, landscape conversion and so on. And we most certainly are not following the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation which every state and federal wildlife agency in the United States and Canada have embraced and adopted.
Current examples of this apparent attitude are readily visible in the machinations of politicians, state and even the federal government.
Close to home, we have a bevy of politicians and grifted business sources demanding more timber production from a national forest that is already one of the most abused, environmentally degraded and compromised in the nation. Professional forest ecology and silviculture has declared, from thorough scientific analysis, that current logging and timbering is completely unsustainable and must be dramatically curtailed yet we have bills showing up in our state and federal legislatures requiring that we sustain unsustainable business rather than the forest. There has seldom been a better example of cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Without mentioning of course, the amount of soil erosion, weed encroachment, vegetation damage, land type converting road construction, erosion and degraded water quality that adds to the unsustainability and costs millions to repair. Every major stream and river in eastern South Dakota is severely impaired, thereby threatening fisheries, waterfowl and domestic water while drain tiling exacerbates the problems.
Black Hills streams and watersheds are threatened by mining, cattle overgrazing, logging machinery and management neglect as we continually fail to revise mining and grazing regulations that have permitted the over-exploitation for a century or more. The sordid history of contemporary public policy has steadily moved the public ward from the public’s control and vested it in private enterprise and interstate commerce where it is privatized and unapologetically depleted.
In our Public Trust history, we would never find the gross expenditure of $15 million of basic wildlife conservation money on an elaborate shooting range designed exclusively for shooting sport tourism that less than 1% of South Dakotans will ever see much less use; nor will any range ever achieve even the most remote nexus with land and wildlife stewardship.
In continuance of the aforementioned, we can observe how these slow and scarcely perceptible trends develop with other resources witnessed in current and past South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks proposals held out to be resource “management actions.”
In the past five years, GFP acknowledges, albeit anecdotally, that some public wildlife resources are in long-term decline, yet the news portrays new policy proposals monthly that either further degrade resources or elevate the potential for doing so, all the while grifting the minority special interest that is approaches gluttony.
As an example: In a 2024 legislative hearing, Department of Game, Fish and Parks Secretary Kevin Robling was asked, point-blank, if there was any verifiable data to confirm benefits to pheasant nesting success, chick survival and recruitment from the five-year Nest Predator Bounty Program. He stated there was none to justify the program.
A reasonable inference is that the program likely can not contribute to a positive population trajectory — after five years and expenditures exceeding $3.5 million paid to juveniles to butcher sentient small mammals and sell their tails to the government!
He further stated that it was not possible to collect relevant information or data to determine the program’s effects on pheasant or waterfowl populations. One must keep in mind that there is research available to suggest, at least, that such programs are not effective, particularly employing amateur children in their leisure.
One must also keep in mind the only information GFP held up to suggest the program was viable was a two-year investigation, conducted mostly in Codington County, wherein the most frequent and efficient pheasant and duck chick predators were domestic and feral cats! Fox and opossums didn’t even make honorable mention. The investigation was inconclusive.
Not only is our natural resource leadership wrong but their responses raise the more serious question, “Why are they spending millions supporting and conducting a program if they don’t have in place a comprehensive series of metrics to measure success or failure and cost to benefit? Isn’t that what good businessmen do to assure the future of their business and protect their assets? Why are they wrong?
This state no longer measures pheasant population parameters and hasn’t since 2019. It has never measured partridge populations! It has been decades since any investigation or measurement of quail populations or even ruffed grouse populations in the Black Hills.
The department relies on a single individual to monitor a highly threatened population of Sage grouse over the landscape in two remote counties only because that population is officially listed as threatened and multi-state agreement demands it. Sharptail grouse and prairie chicken monitoring yields virtually meaningless trend information due entirely to unit of effort, statistically unviable numbers and size of the sample frame.
A loose distribution map is available but trend densities and actual number of estimates are absent. And the map is not produced to inform but rather guide the would-be hunter on where to go.
As citizens, our dedicated wildlife steward can’t tell us, honestly, what we have, where it is, what its status is or even provide a responsible estimate of population density. And in spite of that background, GFP and its citizen advisory commission currently propose to add season length and de facto population mortality to all grouse species, Hungarian partridge and quail in a measure that cannot possibly be determined to be beneficial, compensatory harvest.
Is that responsible?
This season proposal includes ruffed grouse in the Black Hills that some of us know is, from long-term anecdotal experience, unquestionably scarce and sensitive to additive mortality rendered through hunting. There is already too much traffic, disturbance, stress and habitat alteration in the Black Hills without adding more stress during the most difficult season of any year.
The only justification offered to lengthen these seasons states it is necessary to better administratively align them with the already extended pheasant season of 2023. This is just the government doing something for appearances!
John Wrede is a retired South Dakota Conservation Officer. He retired from SDGF&P in February of 2007 with 31 years of service to the State of South Dakota.
