Tanner thinks before he acts
Todd Tanner doesn’t enter an arena lightly. He is a quiet man with the courage of his convictions. So when he launched Conservation Hawks this week it got my attention.
Tanner thinks sportsmen and women are ignoring climate change at our peril.
“Here’s the God’s honest truth. This is the single most important issue that any of us will ever face. It’s bigger than any threat to sportsmen that’s come down the pipe, and way, way harder to fix. And now we have to make a choice. Either we stand up for our hunting and fishing, and for our kids and grandkids, or we write off everything we’ve ever cared about. That’s the black & white of it, and if you’re reading this, you need to decide exactly where you stand.”
I think he is right. Were do you stand?
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Thanks, Tom. We truly appreciate you getting the word out. We’ve got a lot of work to do if we’re going to pass along anything approximating a healthy natural world to our kids & grandkids.
Well, this is a complex issue. Based on the preponderance of data, the earth is warming very quickly, and is accelerating due to manmade inputs into the atmosphere. Let’s get past that. “Fixing it” is a damning thing. Fix what? Which part of it? Which symptom? We know that climate change will be bad for brook trout, but will it be bad for ducks? Deer? Rabbits? Pheasants? And seriously how much of it can we fix, as Americans become more fuel efficient and (already have) become the 3rd highest users of oil behind Russia and China, with India possibly surpassing us soon as well. And with none of those countries having any interest whatsoever in curtailing their outputs (think: America, 1950s), what can we reasonably expect to accomplish?
Even in our country, we have industries who refuse to stop polluting, government regulatory agencies who take millions of taxpayer dollars but refuse to enforce pollution, and citizens who are aware of environmental issues, but still don’t act. We’re talking at local, easily visible scales where people are impacted by pollution that they know exists. Not CO2 emissions from China.
I’m a huge environmental advocate. But I’m not confident there’s enough awareness, education, regulatory authority or even money to fill this hole, because it’s a global problem and only about 10% of the globe cares about it, and only half of those people are willing to even pay their share towards abating the impact. I think that the last generation (world wide) had an opportunity to deal with problems of this scale, and of course they didn’t because it would have cost money………and now the horse is out of the barn. I think we are just going to have to curtail our own emissions, barter our economic impact against others’ emissions, and live with the consequences of climate change. It’s happening.
Kirk @ River Mud
I stand next to Todd. Anyone who says climate change isn’t taking place is either delusional or profiting from it. I look forward to more from the Conservation Hawks.