Beyond the rhetoric of many of the so called conservationists (I am not referring to anyone on this board), there have been very few suggestions made as to how these problems should be addressed. Over the years many have offered solutions that they thought should be obvious. Population control has been expounded ad nausium for the past forty years, nearly always aimed at the poor in third world areas such as India and Pakistan or in China. Here in the U.S. population control has in fact worked, our birth rate has fallen to a point where we are actually below the replacement level. Our population continues to grow due in large part to immigration, both legal and illegal.
Governments the world over have in one form or another "Encouraged" people to concentrate their presence into cities, it makes for easier control that way. Those same governments have failed miserably in providing even the most rudimentary forms of sanitation available to those that they "encourage" to move into these havens.
The Kyoto accord wants those of us in the more developed nations to join those in the thirld world in their poverty, instead of calling on the governments of the areas where poverty, over population and crowded conditions make things bad to correct their many mistakes, they want the rest of us to come down to their level.
A huge percentage of our fishing fleet lies idle, fishermen out of work and the hulls rusting in order for us to comply with agreements we have made in the international community while nations such as Chile and Peru continue to harvest catches in waters already depleted of many stocks of fish.
Our farmers, the most productive in the world, are encouraged not to grow crops to their full potential. We are discouraged from using the best means of insect and weed control for fear of adding polutants to an already overtaxed ecosystem, yet nobody cares to offer an alternative.
Children and adults die by the ten of thousands each year due to malaria and other insect borne diseases, yet the most effective pesticide of all time (DDT) is banned due to early misuse and ill advised strictures placed upon it by those not wanting to understand that it can be used safely.
Those that own property would prefer that those that don't continue to be in that category, especially if it should infringe on their property boundaries.
So, here we sit with all of our smarts and a mouth full of teeth, just what productive suggestions does anybody here have of fixing this mess? I, for one, admit that I have none.

Well thank you have gun for doing your job & the 100,s of thousands of others also there who did too. You know i dont care for our land - for nature& our lands how? I question your reading materal & your presumtions i & other hunters dont know about anything but hunting in nature & YOU get offended? lol
Ill say it again you need a book on nature or bj to tell you these things?
Oh thatsright i didnt read the book so somehow i could never understand about nature& its gifts.( or the losses) You get pretty easly offended there bud.? pressume,assume?

But if somehow my words have offended anyone im sorry.
Im sure my actions as ahunter ,wood user, liver in a house tha was once wild mtn& high desert plains etc. could be objectionable too some.
My use of fossil fuels to stay warm& run my 25 yr ol truck.

Hope you& all yours have some nice holidays Have gun will travel.
Paladin?

I thought you were a bit presumtuous One Eyed Fish, my military reference was my way of saying I'm no hippy, my praise of the book "Sand County Almanac" was because I could relate to much of it, so I haven't come down in the last shower, like you would like to think. Maybe your right and there are no answers, the problems are to overwhelming and the suggestions offered up are just bandaids, but were all looking for something that will work, somethings do.
Have Gun Will Travel, liked that show, but it seems I have to travel further to get to the game as time goes by.
Seasons Greetings to you and no hard feelings! My trucks only 20 years old.

Theres no doubt that the earths population has increased over the last couple centuries or so. Consequently, the demand for living space has increased as well. Fortunately, we humble humans have recognized the problems and are doing the best we can to accomodate the stresses put on the very land we live on. Its gonna take a bit of razzle dazzle to make things perfectly right, to make an environment that accepts both human and animal life in the perfect harmony we think is possible. And if you haven't noticed, many animal populations are not only surviving, but are thriving under our tenure. Deer and yotes are classic examples of animals that have learned to adapt. So, it doesn't bother me one bit to sit on my roof with the .280 Christmas night and thin the reinbeer herd.
Merry Christmas Gang.........

I haven't bothered to do the math because I'm just too darn lazy, but I saw an article some time ago that stated that every person in the world today could be moved to the state of Texas and given a 1/8 acre plot to live on and there would still be a bit of room left over. That being the case, we would still have quite a few problems. I had a home in NY once that sat on 1/8 acre, I still had too D@#$ much grass to mow and hedges to clip and enough space left over for a small garden. I guess what I'm getting at is, with proper management and "Conservation" this old world still has more than a fighting chance. But just try to convince the politicians of that.

1/8 a acre per person? and to much yard work?lol
Yall make some great points minn fin,coasite sawebill etc..

I dont think the sky is falling& or we our on our last legs etc either.

My house is on a acre i do very lill yard work, moslty for fire supression, sometimes i grow a few tomatos etc or the mate flowers a few bushes. we grow no grass etc.
there is a great view outback no houses for 3 miles till you hit the mtns a lot of antalopes, deer & other critters running round. esp when ppl control thre dogs etc, there are otehr houses around 3 sides)
some of the forests here are infested with pine bark beatles , i have some im burning/ otherwise they could go up in flames like those in cal did.
we also own a few tiny pieces of land(40acres X ), where there are many othr plots of land, they where divided up by a devolpemt coperation.
Not much is there right now - im sure thinngs will change / developent etc

I dont plan on having a person live on each 1/8 acre tho lol or drill it for natural gas e etc( but who knows tho i could be a millionair& not even know)

I dont have it posted aginst hunters( im sure they use it at times its ok) or anyone else or fences -( yet)

I will live on it someday soon i hope( prob in not much of a house/ more a shack?) & maybe shoot my own critters from the back porch( those legal & in season etc)( i could be getting to old for the full pionner life[>:])

Anybody have any better plans? It has cost me much to live here dollarwise. But you know what they say money isnt everything, But it will buy you 20,000 acres of intresting lands etc.
The frence,english etc own many mines,lands hereor lease or

The bad thing about land is, that they aren't making any more of it.

That being said one of the biggest problems that I see here in Oregon is that game management and forest practices are now controlled by public opinion.

Since I am not a mechanic there is no reason for me to stand over my mechanic and tell him how to do his job. Yet forest managers here are handcuffed by public opinion. The main objective is no longer to do what is right, but to do what will ruffel the least ammount of feathers.

The problem with hunters is that they don't thrive on conflict, as a whole they are solitary creatures that would rather listen to a squirrel scolding them on a fall morning than spend 5 minutes in the company of politicians.

The reason that urban sprawl is so prevelant is high density areas being able to sway the vote in their favor without actually knowing the consequences.

Large farmers and ranchers have become evil in the eyes of the general public. Loggers are nothing more than tree hacking neanderthals. Yet no one will stop to think where their food and homes come from.

The majority of people in this country today are so far removed from where their goods and services come from that they think steaks are grown in the supermarket and lumber just materalizes at the hardware store.

BJ I dont have any answers but I do believe that the true hunters are conservationists, I mean the true hunters the ones that are willing to not only carry out the garbage that they take in but will carry out the garbage that others have left behind, the hunters who are willing to trek to the top of a ridge instead of chainsawing a 4-wheeler trail there.

I would hope that truely wild areas will always exsist where there are sometimes doubts on wether man is really at the top of the food chain or not, because it will be a pathetic exsistance without them.

To the "Ludites" who think that man is the cause of all "environmental problems", either real or imagined, I ask you to live like you expecting others to first, before demanding drastic changes of lives of others to suit you latest environmental whims.

Start by doing without your pickup or any vehicle powered by carbon based energy. Get rid of your heating/cooling powered by convenient gas, oil and electric energy. Do without wood products and products from mining and other activities you so strenuously object to. You have to get rid of your PC, electricity, running water, flush toilets, food that is raised and grown on modern farms. If your serious about trying to make others “do without“, because you think modern life is hurting the environment, then start living like you're demanding others to and get rid of your modern, conveniences and things that depend upon gas, petroleum, metals, wood, electricity, medicines, etc., etc.

Live like the "Ludites" you're trying to make the reset of the country and world live like for a few decades. Then come back and tell us after you grand "experiment" how life is in your utopian world, if you make it through.

Well guess what! The utopians of the 20th century ended up following the Marxist pied pipers who promised perfection into the prison camps and gulags and most of those millions neither came out alive.

Conservation in principal is a good thing. Most people support reasonable laws and efforts to prevent pollution and conserve resources. But beware of those who promise to "end all the world's environmental problems by handing controls over to unelected and unaccountable federal and international bodies" we have no control over. That’s a recipe for a far more terrible disaster.

Well, this seems to have died down over the past week and after nearly 2 pages of posts, there are still no answers as to why hunters don't care to conserve. I personally believe hunters care about true conservation as much or more than the rest of the world.
BJ: why don't you, as the one that started this whole thing, list a specific group of things you would like to see Hunters get behind. State why you think these things are pertinent and how we as individuals,and hunters specifically, can change things for the better. No finger pointing, no recriminations, just solid projects and the reasoning behind them based on fact rather than conjecture.

You mean asides land trusts, conservation easements, purchased development rights, forest thinning, and pistol whipping real estate agents (oops, I reckin' I ain't mentioned thet one yet)?