Sportsmen, public land advocates say conservation under 'assault'

[Ben Lamb]

During a conference call with Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., last week, a group of sportsmen and public land advocates painted a bleak picture for the future of Montana's wild country.
"It's like an assault on everything that's in conservation," said Bill Geer of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. "Climate, water, land conservation - it's like they don't believe in anything in conservation. It's not hard to imagine there's a bunch of guys getting together and saying, ‘Let's gut everything that gets in the way of business.' "

Read more: http://missoulian.com/news/local/ar...96-001cc4c03286.html?mode=story#ixzz1USnxQnU0

Some more press from the teleconference.

The comments are pretty funny. The radical left and the radical right are both getting pissy about this stuff.

 

[1_pointer]

Unfortunately, public lands agencies and conservation programs are easy targets when it comes to cost cutting, The funny thing is that all of these things combined are a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of the budget. A talk I attended from an Ag Economist from Purdue whom has had a hand in crafting all the Farm Bills since Nixon showed a graph comparing GDP and spending by program. The military, social security, medicare/medicaid alone were enough to create a deficit. The agency and conservation programs, even completely done away with would not balance the budget. But, they are easier targets than the elephants in the room. He was not optomistic about funding for those programs in the short term...