This article, produced by Orion, originally appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.

BY TODD TANNER

I grew up hunting and fishing.

One of my earliest memories is of following my father through the autumn woods, the forest floor littered with a carpet of yellow, scarlet and burnt orange leaves. I walked as quietly as a 5-year-old boy in a heavy coat and boots could manage, doing my best to avoid the twigs and branches that always seemed underfoot.

We ended up climbing onto a low, lichen-covered boulder where my dad, gun in hand, faced one way and I another. I was entrusted with the responsibility of watching my share of the surrounding forest for a deer that, as luck would have it, never did arrive.

You wouldn’t think that a walk through the woods with my father – or watching my grandfather cleaning his shotgun at his kitchen table, or dunking worms in the brook that ran by my folks’ house – would prove so compelling that the memories would survive the decades that followed. Yet now, more than 50 years later, those formative images remain.

It was a different era, of course, and we lived closer to the land back then. I was fishing on my own, and exploring the surrounding woods and waters, by the time I was 7. My dad showed me how to run a trap line when I was 10. I started bird hunting and deer hunting as soon as I reached the legal age, and I wasn’t the only one. Fishing and hunting fit seamlessly alongside schoolwork and sports for a fair number of my friends. It was even a local tradition to skip class on the first day of deer season.

And in retrospect, the fact that my family had only one phone – an old rotary model attached to the kitchen wall – proved more of a blessing than a curse.

There’s another way to look at ethics, though, and that’s from a broader perspective. Can we follow the letter of the law and yet still fall short as hunters and anglers?

Looking back, I’m convinced that our early years shape our lives in ways we never actually realize at the time. That’s particularly true with regard to ethics and morality. As hunters and anglers, we have to decide if we’re willing to abide by society’s ethical constraints. My parents spent a fair amount of time explaining the difference between right and wrong. So did the pages of Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and Sports Afield; I used to stay up late and read all three magazines under the covers with a flashlight – and I like to think that my moral and ethical foundation has served me well over the intervening decades.

Of course, most of us view hunting and angling ethics from an individual perspective. We ask ourselves if we’re following the regulations when we’re afield, or if we’re abiding by the principles of fair chase, or whether we’re treating our landscapes and waters with the respect they deserve. Hopefully we can all feel good about the person staring back from the mirror.

There’s another way to look at ethics, though, and that’s from a broader perspective. Can we follow the letter of the law and yet still fall short as hunters and anglers?

Take public lands. Is it enough to wander our lands with some measure of reverence and respect, leaving the landscape as we found it? Or do we also have a moral responsibility to stand up for those lands and ensure that they’re well managed, well cared for and neither sold off nor given away to someone who would turn around and lock us out?

Or take climate change. We’ve all heard the phrase “climate change” countless times, yet we each view it through our own unique lens. Some of us take the science seriously and raise our voices about the existential threat it poses to our hunting and fishing. Others claim it’s a natural phenomenon that we’ll never be able to control. Still others dismiss climate change as a hoax, or as an attempt to curtail our freedoms, and are offended that anyone would raise the issue in outdoor magazines or social media posts.

How do we wrap our heads around the ethics, as well as the moral fabric, of an issue like climate? Not only do our opinions differ widely, but our concerns are less about the actions of one person and more about whether hunting and angling will still exist for future generations. Will we eventually agree on climate, or is the subject simply too big, and too complicated, for us to forge a consensus?

From where I sit, climate is perhaps less an ethical matter than a moral one. My web dictionary states that “morals refer mainly to guiding principles, and ethics refer to specific rules and actions, or behaviors.” Put another way, ethics focus on whether I follow the rules – perhaps even the spirit of the rules – while morality is a matter of right and wrong.

As a longtime hunter and angler, as well as an outdoor writer, my moral compass tells me that I have to take threats to our landscapes and waters, and to our fish and game populations, seriously. It would be wrong for me to dismiss a warning from our scientists without first learning enough to form an educated opinion.

In my mind, it’s our responsibility to act as stewards and caretakers and to make sure that future generations can trace our footsteps in much the same way I followed my dad through the hardwoods all those years ago. I simply can’t accept a philosophy that trashes the Golden Rule or that says, “Sorry, I got mine. You’re on your own.”

Furthermore, I believe we have an obligation to ensure our kids and grandkids can experience the same incredible outdoor opportunities that we’ve all enjoyed. If my 16-year-old son chooses to follow in my footsteps, he should have the option of fishing the cold, clean waters of the Henrys Fork, or tracking a late-season bull elk through knee-deep snow, or thrilling to a flush amidst a sea of native prairie grass.

In my mind, it’s our responsibility to act as stewards and caretakers and to make sure that future generations can trace our footsteps in much the same way I followed my dad through the hardwoods all those years ago. I simply can’t accept a philosophy that trashes the Golden Rule or that says, “Sorry, I got mine. You’re on your own.”

This is why I’ve put a huge amount of time – thousands of hours – into researching climate change. I wanted to know what the scientific experts were saying, whether the science matched what I was seeing on the landscape near my Montana home and whether the prognosis was really as dire as I’d been led to believe. More than anything else, I wanted to know whether the threat warranted my concern and my actions.

It turns out that it does.

My goal, though, is not to convince you that I’m right and others are wrong. I could cite scientific studies until the cows come home, or wield facts and logic like a cudgel, or belittle those who disagree with me. Yet we’ve all armored ourselves against those approaches, and I’m not likely to sway many people with science or facts or logic. That’s not how it works.

Instead, I’ll simply point out that anyone who spends time outdoors is seeing the damage whether they realize it or not.
I’ll close with a few heartfelt words: I believe that anglers and hunters should aspire to stewardship. We should commit to protecting America’s landscapes and waters for our kids and grandkids, and for future generations. To my mind, it’s a moral imperative for everyone who loves the outdoors.

Todd Tanner is a lifelong hunter and angler, an outdoor writer, head of the School of Trout and president of Conservation Hawks. His essays and stories have been published by a number of media outlets, including Sporting Classics, Field & Stream, Sports Afield, Hatch, Fly Fisherman, Forbes, Newsweek, Men’s Journal and the NY Times. Todd also helped create the short Conservation Hawks films Cold Waters, Chrome, Convergence and In The Heart Of The Rockies.

This department is brought to you by Orion - The Hunter’s Institute, a nonprofit and BHA partner dedicated to advancing hunting ethics and wildlife conservation. Find other installments of this column at www.backcountryhunters.org/fair_chase