Poor State Of Nature Conservation

“The turnover in directors is faster than a jet-propelled plane," Mr. E. Sydney Stephens once said of the state of organization concerning Nature Conservation in the US in 1945. Addressing the 1946 North American Wildlife Conference, Mr. Stephens, Chairman of the Missouri Conservation Commission gave only five states a "passing grade of sixty or better" on efficiency, and pointed to pitiful deficiency in the application of sound practices; to the continuation of outmoded and even detrimental policies; to domination by politics; to lack of education and research activities.

He declared that twenty-one of the states carry on no cooperation with any group or individual. Fourteen make no effort whatever in the field of education, and twenty others do not claim to be more than fifty percent efficient in that vital field; none is more than seventy percent efficient.

He added: “Regulation is essential to conservation; the two are inseparable; to divide them would be like trying to build a savings account and giving a second party a book of blank checks. Tthere are a lot of people interested in more wildlife and better living, and that includes just about everybody—everybody who eats, wears clothes and lives in houses. They can be expected to do something once they are aroused." The responsibility of arousing the people rests, he went on, upon the outdoor writers, if they will only learn what conservation is.

"The trouble is," Mr. Stephens continued, "that about ninety-eight percent of them apparently don't know what it's all about. They either clip and paste, or they write glowing accounts and publish pictures of what Joe Doakes killed or caught last weekend, which only invites and incites millions of others to go and do likewise. But nary a word about what it takes to put fish in streams or birds in fields. Too often they preach the heresy of re-stocking of fields and streams, and keep alive in the minds of hopeful and greedy nimrods and fake state departments the vain hope of more game from incubators and brooders, and they completely ignore Mother Nature, who can do a vastly better and bigger job. All of us here, it can be assumed, know the stake which wildlife, indeed human life, has in sound conservation, but the rank and file of the people—and especially the 'sportsmen'—don't know it. Here is an inspiring challenge to the outdoor writers of America and a plain and solemn responsibility."

Mr. Stephens has, through this plain talk, shown the responsibility that rests not alone upon administrators and outdoor writers but on everyone interested in wildlife. This is no time for complacency.

By: davidbunch

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