Carolyn Mansfield of the Sierra Club recently emailed me about a new website, SierraSportsmen.org, that her organization is launching to reach out to sportsmen in their conservation efforts. The question I have it, should we support them in this effort?

While I am not going to tell my readers what to think, I will tell you what I have found in my research of the Sierra Club so that you may make up your own mind. I also will direct you to the Hog Blog where Phillip has written a great article on this as well as how hunters should use this opportunity if they choose to.

As for the Sierra Club itself, it seems that there is currently a huge battle going on inside and outside of the organization over the use of hunting as a conservation tool. The groups official policy currently supports it.

Sport Hunting and Fishing — Within both modified and natural ecosystems, the Sierra Club believes that acceptable management approaches include regulated periodic hunting and fishing when based on sufficient scientifically valid biological information and when consistent with all other management purposes and when necessary total protection of particular species or populations. Because national parks are set aside for the preservation of natural landscapes and wildlife, the Sierra Club is opposed to sport hunting in national parks and national monuments.

This support for hunting is creating quite a bit of conflict among some of the old supporters as well as within the management. For instance, renowned eco terrorist, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder and Sierra Club board member Paul Watson quit two years ago over the group’s acceptance of hunting as a conservation tool, and particularly over their use of a writing contest “Why I Hunt” where the grand prize was an big game hunt.

On one hand, getting rid of a eco terrorist and anti-hunting activist like Watson seems to be a huge step in the right direction for the Sierra Club if it truly wishes to represent hunters. And when you consider that the powerful conservation group has over 1 million members, it is definitely a huge gain for all sportsmen. However one has to ask why he had to quit when he should have never been in such a position to begin with.

You can also see the battle over hunting as a conservation tool going on right now in the Sierra Club’s Florida chapter where the entire board was just terminated and the entire chapter suspended. The club says that this was to end the infighting amongst the state group over the state chapter’s refusal to go along with the Sierra Club’s partnership with Clorox. But I have found other articles that refer to the state chapter advocating and adopting a vegan lifestyle while completely refusing to support hunting as a conservation tool which created a huge rift between the state board, its members and the national board even before this deal with Clorox.

Again, this looks like a positive step in the right direction for sportsmen. However you can still find plenty of current instances where the Sierra Club, and even more often its state chapters, still has a knee-jerk reaction to prohibiting hunting to control animal populations. And this is definitely the case with cougar hunting out West; You can find plenty of info on this here at the Oregon state chapter as well as here at the California state chapter.

And while the Sierra Club claims to be for hunting as a conservation tool, it says that it takes no position on the 2nd Amendment and the individual right to bear arms. This stance seems to ignore the fact that if that right is removed, hunters will NOT be able to provide their very necessary conservation efforts. You can also find a list of the candidates that they currently support here, and I doubt that many sportsmen will find it to their liking.

There is a ton of information on all of this if any concerned sportsman is willing to just follow the links, and I encourage everyone to do so. For instance you can also read all about the current group of candidates that are running for the Sierra Club’s board of directors here as well as their positions on many important environmental issue. It is in these details that many hunters will find their answers to the question of whether to support the Sierra Club’s outreach to them.

And while I will not be signing up as a member just yet, I do think that I will at least enroll in their newsletters so that I can follow these issues at the Sierra Club as well as at Sierra Sportsmen Network so that I can make an educated decision about whether to support them in the future.

I will also be submitting some images to the photo contest that they are running that, as their new Sierra Sportsmen Network site says, “captures your passion and respect for the people, places, and critters we love to share our outdoor experiences with”. This contest will be judged by some very important and influential members of our outdoor community who are obviously looking to help build a bridge between sportsmen and “conservationists”.

Like I said, check out the Hog Blog for more perspective on this very important issue. In addition, I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this, so feel free to leave detailed comments.

Jeff

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