Shooting in the Refuge

The other day I saw something that amazed me: a father and his two children at a playground near Evansburg State Park in a distant suburb of Philadelphia dressed head to toe in bright "don't shoot me!" orange. I had been driving around the area, admiring the still somewhat rural country, looking for reasons to be enthusiastic about a possible move from Boston, my home for the last eight years, back to my old stomping grounds -- the Skippack Creek area of Montgomery County, PA. Driving down one slow, winding road after another, it seemed like every time I looked out into the fields that tumbled into the distance, that were separated by groves of trees or thick brush corridors, I saw orange men in groups of two or three fanning out across them, or sometimes crouching still near wood's edge as though they expected to surprise an animal. I even stopped the car to watch one group as they ran awkwardly through a two-acre plot of woods. Was hunting in suburbia simply a matter of flushing helpless animals out of their last hiding places? As I accelerated out of there, I was straddling the fence between the happiness I felt having seen only three new, sprawling sub-divisions in the last five miles and the unease brought on by having seen a good fifty or so hunters in that stretch. They were crowded in like Christmas shoppers.

It reminded me of a day-trip I recently took to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island in Massachusetts. Plum Island is a well-known stop-over for migratory birds, some of which are rarely seen in the US. The single two-lane road that meanders to the tip of the island is often lined with the parked cars, especially near small, salty ponds called "salt pans", of bird enthusiasts eager to notch a glimpse of a "lifebird" or simply to appreciate birds in their relatively pristine environment. As I stood there, soulfully appreciating the diversity of bird species -- Grasshopper Sparrow, Oriole, Bluebird, Hooded Merganser, Lesser Scaup, etc -- I was distracted by the quick, repeating crack-crack of what I assumed was some kind of epic road construction miles off. The sound returned and returned again, rousing me from my thrall (a pair of Snowy Egrets had arrived!). I was soon informed that the sporadic repeat I heard in the distance was in fact gunfire. It turns out that this wildlife sanctuary doubled, a little further down the road, as a reserve for bird hunters. It seems that at Parker River, they have created a nice refuge for wildlife to have lunch and mingle before they face the firing squad.

Back in PA, at my brother's house sitting around with some old friends, I was told by one of them that he was thinking of getting his license to hunt deer for the following season in Bucks County. He'd never hunted before, but had been turned on to the good taste of venison and its many culinary uses by a friend of his. He was particularly fond of venison sausage. He told me about the over-abundance of deer in the area; how they were eating everyone's lettuce and shrubs and damaging too many fenders. It was a shame, but we had done away with their natural predators, he said, and someone had to fill that void. Yes, there were armed fops out there, some of whom disdain regulation and collect rifles for the dip-shit revolution and to shoot pheasants with, but there were many more who respected the laws of the land, who took their alotted share of game with reverance for their prey and left, thankful for the abundance of good, free-range meat. He'd done some thinking. And, although in the past he was in no hurry to fire a gun, much less try to kill a wild animal in full stride, he thought he'd give it a go.

No problem. Is it a problem? It's hard to say. As a personal matter, short of the necessity of my or my family's needing to kill our meat for our survival, I wouldn't think to shoot a wild animal. I tend to see them as gifts, as revelations of nature's grandeur, not as irksome pests -- even as they do crazy things like cross a highway in the middle of traffic (for the love of God, look both ways!). But that's my personal stance because I'm not sure where the line between our managing nature and our destroying it really is. And I'm not a farmer whose harvest and livelihood are threatened by a cascading deer population (for being so numerous they're still remarkably difficult to see). And I'm not one of those who bonded with their father or brother or scout-leader many cold mornings, sipping hot-chocolate in a raised look-out, exhilarated with anticipation and fear and the comfort of his guidance. I'm not any of that. I don't relate to it, yet I've come to understand hunting as a way of life for some people, as a vanishing refuge from or antidote for the impotence one may feel having to always depend on others for the essential provision of food. Or from having to abide in a society whose laws, for the most part, frown on aggression. It's hard.

And I'm intrigued by the idea that hunters and environmentalists, traditionally on opposite sides of the political fence, are at least like-minded in their zest for preserving the land from over-development. Of course, hunters and their organizations crave access to this undeveloped land. If the historical plight of wildlife in America shows us anything, it shows us that on those wild lands where hunters have had total access, most wildlife populations, particularly predators, suffer. Which begs another question. Are hunters looking to bond with nature in ceremony of reverance and harvest, or are they looking for the biggest thrill and kill yet possible short of joining the armed forces and packing for Fallujah. Let me be clear. I'm not against thrill-seeking! But should ecosystems be preserved so men can entertain themselves with blood-sport or should they be preserved so wildlife can be guarenteed survival in their native habitat? Both equally, perhaps? Perhaps I'm denigrating hunters. But someone needs to stand up for deer and waterfowl!

As I try to muster enthusiasm for a potential move to an area that is so well endowed with the kind of American beauty I see whenever I close my eyes: rolling hills for miles, flat or sloping wood-covered and plowed ground, with small streams running slowly through and old farms pushing wood-smoke into the pale evening sky -- I find I am frightened by visions of impending sub-divisions and ruminations of a kind of deep, rural provincialism mingled with a narrow suburban utopianism. I look ahead and wonder anew at our disregard for all that is non-human. I wonder that we just won't give way for all that was here so long before us, everything and everyone that had first claim to the land. And if some group of "nature-lovers" (insert your own somehow derogatory term) comes along, purchases the land and sets it aside, not for developers or hunters or even farmers, but for biodiversity, for the ensured future health of our planet, I wonder why there is so much opposition.

Like Wendell Berry, I believe that humans are a fundamental part of nature's web of life and that land set away from humans is land that has been, in a sense, taken from us (my words); that we, as natural beings, belong to it and it to us. But I also see that we have proven ourselves awesomely negligent stewards of the land we've been given. We, through fear of competition, a need for safety, naked arrogance, or just a bad reading of ancient religious texts, have extricated ourselves from that web and have commenced to pull it down. To me, it seems clear now that some ecosystems must be completely protected from human exploitation in order to ensure their pristine existence -- it's only a matter of which ones and where.

Thinking about the tension between human and animal, civilized and wild, hunter and environmentalist, conservationist and conservationist-with-rights-to-game, I am excited about where we can go from here. Many now share the sense that something is being stolen from us, that a fraction of our core, perhaps what's most wild within us, is vanishing. We need to have wilderness around us -- we are nature, we need space. That we want to participate in that wildnerness in different ways, some active, some passive, some more or less violent, maybe shouldn't be all that surprising. What's most important for land not yet cultivated or lost to strip-malls or the next big development, is that much of it stay that way.

So when that father must dress his children in orange at the swingset, or when that Lesser Scaup, after having stopped to rest and eat in the salt pan on the way to its southern destination, must dodge rifle-fire on its way back out, perhaps it's just as well. It's the way things are; and with passionate effort, steady debate, and renewed empathy, it will only get better from here.