This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   Outwardly, Braiding Sweetgrass appears to be a book about plants, viewed through Dr. Kimmerer’s own tandem lens of her degree in botany and Anishinaabe traditional environmental knowledge. Indeed, she weaves these different ways of seeing the world together as tenderly as she describes the eponymous braiding of sweetgrass, but I’d be doing us all a disservice to imply this book is just a ...

  By Gabriela Zaldumbide   One of the reasons why I became a hunter was so I could source my own food. In the last two and a half years, I’ve had the pleasure of hosting many wild game dinners, adoring the opportunities to share my elk, venison or small game with friends. Unsurprisingly, after attending some of these “family dinners,” my friend Anna became interested in harvesting an animal herself. She had harvested a whitetail doe with her dad before in Alabama, but that was long ago. She ...

This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists   North Americans unfortunately have a long history of ecological harm. We also have the great propensity to recognize mistakes and work to fix them. Dan Egan's “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” takes us on one such journey. The story of the Great Lakes is a rollercoaster ride of disastrous mistakes and our attempts to fix them.The Great Lakes are a resource unmatched anywhere else on ...

  By Christine Peterson   Bill Andree always had a chance at an elk. It might come suddenly in thick spruce or a steep aspen grove, but it was a chance, and he killed his share. That was in the early 80s, when the elk herd roamed the hills and valleys around Vail, Colorado, in groups of a couple hundred. By the early 2010s, he stopped hunting the area altogether. The longtime Eagle Valley biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife who retired in 2018 rarely saw any elk, and he didn’t feel it ...

Image by Joel Caldwell For nearly 70 years, Tony Schoonen was above all else a bare-fisted brawler for wild country and his bone-deep conviction that “blue-collar people should be able to hunt and fish.”   BY DAN CROCKETT   Tony Schoonen cat-footed within 80 yards of his last bull, a solid six-point, four years ago. That was back when he was 85. Tony was alone on that hunt, but he did get some help packing it out. He shot his final elk two years later. When I asked him how many he’d killed ...