(letters)

Common Cause

I read Ted Williams's “Guns & Greens” [January-February] with great interest. He posits that much good can be done for everybody if environmentalists and sportsmen were to combine forces in their mutual interests. As a member of both the Audubon Society and the National Rifle Association, I support his hypothesis. Still, I was put off by his belittling tone. He seems to voice a view that the “hook-and-bullet” crowd is made up of a bunch of ignoramuses. All I ask is that we stop stereotyping each other and focus on what is important to all of us: the habitat, the birds, and all wild animals.

W. Scott Railton
Great Falls, VA

As a naturalist, outdoor educator, ardent conservationist, and sometime hunter, I care deeply about environmental issues. I am also a Life Member of the National Rifle Association. As such, I was less than enchanted by Ted Williams's characterization of the NRA as “bottom feeders.” Threats to law-abiding citizens' right to keep and bear arms—including traditional hunting arms such as repeating rifles and shotguns—are real, not just a bogeyman invented by the NRA to recruit members and dollars, as Williams seems to imply.

That said, I am in wholehearted agreement with the majority of Williams's article and agree 100 percent with its major thrust: that sportsmen and environmentalists are or should be natural allies on a vast majority of issues that often find them at odds. That fact is both sad and ironic. Sportsmen and environmentalists want basically the same things: Clean air. Clean water. Healthy populations of fish and wildlife. And lots of open space in which to enjoy these blessings. It's time to wake up to the fact that we have more in common than separates us.

Tom Harbold
Westminster, MD

I assume editorial vagueness, not authorial goofiness, led Ted Williams to imply that the effort to create the Channel Islands Marine Protected Area [MPA] began in 2000 with “no outreach to sportsmen.” (It began in 1996, with the recreational-fishing community fully involved in the planning process and conceiving of most of the proposals.) But I will cut him no slack for his characterization of this effort as “inept” (as it succeeded in creating the Channel Islands Marine Protected Area, it would seem we need more such ineptitude), nor for the intellectual dishonesty of statements like “recreational fishing, though hurtful to some species, is on the whole far less damaging than commercial fishing.” Tell it to our rockfish.

Those Channel Islands sport fishers who preferred to be “alienated” and opposed the MPA to the bitter end were of the hapless Don Young/NRA stripe that Williams elsewhere ably describes.

Andrew Christie
Los Osos, CA

Ted Williams responds:

I didn't imply that the effort to create the Channel Islands MPA “began in 2000” or that there was “no outreach to sportsmen.” Nowhere is an MPA more desperately needed for protection of long-lived, slow-reproducing bottom fish. But 200 feet above are thriving populations of highly migratory pelagic species such as yellowtail, tuna, and wahoos. They're in the MPA one minute, out the next. Banning surface trolling and even catch-and-release for these fish has needlessly alienated sportsmen and jeopardized other MPAs.

"Guns & Greens” is the most important piece ever written for your magazine. As a committed environmentalist and avid hunter and fisherman, I have long known the truth of what Williams states. If only the two sides would get together and realize that our common interests are virtually identical, we could become the most potent political force in America. Probably the single most significant roadblock in our way is the almost willful ignorance of the real issues exhibited by much of the grassroots membership of environmental and sportsmen's organizations. Ultimately we can lose our individual battles separately, or, together, win beyond our wildest dreams!

Tom Warner
Castleton, NY

Tip of the Hat

Re your story concerning birds on hats [“Hats Off to Audubon,” November-December 2004]: There must have been many wise observations by children at that time. In 1958, when one of my sons was a toddler, I took him into “big church.” We were a small-town congregation, and there was an obvious city-dweller visitor in the pew in front of us. My son reached to touch the fur of her mink neckpiece. I gave him a “no, no” look, and he whispered, “What is it?” A mink. “Will it bite?” No, it's dead. His exclamation of consternation could be heard by all: “She's got a dead around her neck?!”

S. Glaze
Fort Payne, AL

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© 2005 National Audubon Society

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