Our 42-passenger plane lands with ease on the mile-long sand runway just south of the Arctic Circle. Scraggly black spruce trees line the sides of the airstrip and water laps gently at one end. We are 200 miles from a road; 240 miles from the closest town, where our plane had to refuel; and more than 600 miles from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Side-by-sides (that is a type of ATV) take us down narrow sand roads, past a “Welcome to Gangler’s” sign to our cedar cabins on the shores of Egenolf Lake, also in Manitoba.

The name Gangler carries meaning in the fishing world. Advertisements for the facility run in fishing magazines across the country. Anglers come here from around the world to catch the Canadian Grand Slam, which means landing a northern pike, lake trout, Arctic grayling, and walleye in a single trip.

I’m a fishing writer, but I’m not here to fish from dawn to dusk on the hunt for a grand slam. Neither are an increasing number of other visitors to this remote outpost in northern Canada. We have come for more than fishing.

“With a fishing lodge, to make money, you have to run more people through. When you run more people through, you destroy your fishery,” says Gangler’s owner Ken Gangler, a tall 62-year-old from Chicago who is also a bass guitarist.

Gangler, who got into fishing lodges with his dad, Wayne, and mom, Gerry, almost 40 years ago, is now trying to change up the fishing lodge they started together in 1985. He’s not the only one adapting.

Lodges are evolving across North America not to abandon fishing but to appeal to a broader market, in much the same way ski areas like Jackson Hole Mountain Resort are expanding their summertime offerings to via ferratas and downhill mountain-bike courses. Longer seasons and more options mean a greater chance to weather the next recession, bubble burst, or—God forbid—global pandemic.

Adaptation is a way for owners like Gangler to protect a fishery he loves in the face of overuse and impacts from climate change. And it’s a way to respond to an overall declining population of anglers and also to the changing face of fishing in the U.S. and Canada—what was once an almost entirely white male sport is, according to slowly becoming more diverse by gender and ethnicity.

Meeting a new demand

Thousands of miles to the west, tucked along the edge of Alaska’s Denali National Park, sits another cedar lodge with matching chalets along the shores of an Instagram-worthy lake.

Matt Bertke, 33, took over Chelatna Lake Lodge from his parents, Duke and Becky, a handful of years ago. They ran it for decades as a hardcore salmon-fishing lodge, rotating in 16 clients every four days and flying them each morning to remote lakes and rivers to cast for red, silver, and king salmon. Fishing was the point of the lodge. And it worked. (My husband and I worked for the elder Bertkes at the lodge for several years, finishing in 2011.)

Duke Bertke started scaling back around 2001, and by the time Bertke took over in 2016, the place was more of a rainbow-trout-and-grayling fishing lodge with a few salmon runs at the end. Bertke faced a decision: Scale back up to what the lodge had always been or rethink the business model to better suit the changing world of angling.

He went with the latter. Today, three years post Covid, he offers fishing but also hiking, bird watching, kayaking, rafting, and helicopter adventures. He’s done photoshoots with the high-end outdoor clothing company Filson and is hosting photography groups.

“Everybody is more interested in capturing and sharing their experience more than 10 years ago,” Bertke says. “Because everyone has Instagram and TikTok, they want to be in a beautiful place doing different things.”

Bertke says he isn’t sure if anglers are changing or if he has changed, but either way he is attracting people who want a more varied experience. The change is taking pressure off the local fishery and bringing in more families and groups with mixed interests.

Expanding to offer more than just fishing to clients may actually help the fishing industry in the long run, says Stephanie Vatalaro, senior vice president of marketing and communications for the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation.

It’s no secret that fishing numbers across the U.S. dropped in the past few decades as the traditional angler—white, male Baby Boomers—aged out of the sport and recruitment didn’t quite keep up. By the mid-2000s, about 17 percent of the U.S. population fished, according to numbers from the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation, which tracks fishing trends. Those numbers have stayed steady for the past 15 years, except for a brief jump to about 20 percent during the Covid pandemic, when people flocked outdoors.

But most notably, the anglers making up for losses in numbers over the last few decades are women. . And one of the main motivations for women to begin fishing, at least according to the data, is to spend time with friends and family.

This fits what Bertke sees at his lodge, and Gangler encounters at his as well. . It’s worth noting, though, that while remote lodges like Bertke’s and Gangler’s also open up backcountry spaces to more participants, the price-point of flying to a remote lodge stocked with food and supplies and offering full-day guided activities, is not, by its nature, accessible to everybody.

The Recreational Fishing and Boating Foundation doesn’t track numbers from fishing lodges, so it doesn’t have data to show how angler numbers affect the lodge industry. Vatalaro is also clear that numbers show generalizations—many women fish to be with friends and families, sure, but many of them also just love to fish. And plenty of fishing lodges will continue catering to the dawn-to-dusk angler, even as others rethink the future.

Ecology with a side of fishing

The afternoon before we head out to fish or hike, we settle onto couches in the Gangler’s main lodge. A projector screen occupies the middle of the room, and Brian Kotak, a Ph.D. scientist from Manitoba, introduces the area, with its 12 river systems and 100 lakes. He explains how all the sand around us, which makes the lodge area feel more like a beach in Mexico than a lake shore in northern Canada, came from glacial retreats 8,000 years ago. Sand and gravel eskers (ridges) crease across the landscape like scars. The tops rise about 400 feet above most of the rest of the flat landscape, giving hikers endless views of trees and lakes.

Kotak has been a critical cog in the lodge’s transition from die-hard angling to something akin to eco-tourism. He takes visitors for hikes on the eskers and to sit in a blind on the runway to watch as wolves wander by. He calls to bull moose, explains caribou migrations, and tells people which berries are safe to eat. He and other staff members stay up late to monitor northern lights for anyone interested in the celestial phenomenon.

To Gangler, the transition to a more nature-based experience makes sense. He’s always been focused on the history and context of the location, and his entire guide staff are Indigenous from either the Cree or Dene First Nations.

Gangler founded the lodge with his father in 1998 on about six million acres of land allocated by the Canadian federal and provincial governments specifically to his business. Any Indigenous people, per their treaty rights, can still use the land, as can Canadians in general, but the allocations prevent other outfitters from setting up shop. Over the years, Gangler has added nine cabins and five smaller lodges, which he calls outposts, on other lakes in the area.

For years, he kept a full schedule with fishing clients from June to the end of August and hunting in September. But he started to see signs: devoted clients aged or died out. Today’s anglers, he realized, still wanted to fish but also wanted their families involved.

“I’ve got a son who plays travel baseball, it eats up all your time,” he says. “Whenever we have vacation time, we want to spend it together.” When fishing numbers went down, he decided to make changes.

He figured maybe he could give people a grand fishing adventure and also provide something for everyone else in the group to do. Maybe the mom fishes and the dad is just getting into it, or the other way around, but a lodge that offers canoeing, bird watching, tundra hikes, and nature walks is bound to capture more of those families looking for vacations.

So far, as it is for Bertke, the gamble is paying off. Gangler runs about 200 eco trips each year and keeps adding more. He hired another biologist to give additional tours.

During the five days I’m at Gangler’s, none of us catch a Grand Slam, but we do reel in some nice northern pike that our guides filet and fry on a beach. We also catch fat lake trout and cast flies to grayling at the mouth of a river. One morning we spend several hours hiking over lichen-covered ground in a forest that looks best suited for fairies.

The day we say our goodbyes in the main lodge, a dozen women with gray hair and sun visors walk in. They’re part of an alumni reunion, and not the historic clientele for fishing lodges like Ganglers. Some will fish, others won’t; most will do some combination of activities.

More Fishing Lodges That Offer More șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű

From Alaska to Virginia, Manitoba to Montana, high-end fishing lodges across the U.S. and Canada are starting to cater to more than just anglers. Do you like to fish but your partner is a kayaker? There’s a lodge for that. Do you want to fish a little but heliskiing is really your thing? There’s also a lodge for that. Check out a few possibilities as you plan your next adventure.

: This iconic Alaskan lodge walks the line between the ski and fishing worlds, and in June, it does both when guides takes guests heliskiing in the morning and fishing for king salmon at night. The lodge also offers yoga, a via ferrata course, and rafting.

: This lodge nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains gives anglers plenty of trout fishing on the Dan River but also offers wine-tasting and cookie-making classes, mountain biking, archery, hiking, horseback riding, shooting clays, and cooking classes.

: Despite its name, the Montana Fly Fishing Lodge now offers more than just fishing in the Yellowstone River Basin. A stay could also include horseback riding, whitewater rafting, shooting sports, and riding ATVs.

: Johnny Morris, the legendary angler and Bass Pro Shops founder, created the Big Cedar Lodge for anglers and families. Expect plenty of golf, a spa, clay shooting, go-carts and yes, bass fishing.

: Go to Bristol Bay for iconic Alaskan salmon and rainbow trout fishing,and stay for unparalleled brown bear and wildlife viewing. The lodge flies guests on tours to view caribou and moose, wolves and whales.

: This lodge opened almost 80 years ago for fishing, and decades later added rafting the Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue River to its offerings. Go for the day or stay multiple nights.Ìę

: Nestled on the edge of Reindeer Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada, the 11th largest lake in North America, the lodge offers world-class fishing. But it also offers wildlife viewing, canoeing and a full restaurant in the boreal forest.

Christine Peterson of southeast Wyoming has fished from Alaska to Argentina, though spends most of her time chasing trout in her home waters of Wyoming. She writes about fishing for Outdoor Life, TROUT, and the Casper Star-Tribune, among others.

The post These Beautiful Fishing Lodges Now Offer MultiSport șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On September 14, one of the most influential business owners in the outdoor space made a decision that stunned the world. Yvon Chouinard, founder of the apparel brand Patagonia, announced that he had voluntarily given away his $3 billion company, placing ownership in a trust and vowing to spend all future profits on environmental causes. A Patagonia spokesperson said the move will generate about $100 million each year for the fight against climate change.

The decision wrote its own headlines. Outlets from the to Forbes to this website published stories highlighting the unorthodox moveÌęand its potential to do good for the planet. Everyone from to weighed in.

A month after the restructuring, though, questions linger. One of the most pressing queries is what, exactly, $100 million a year can accomplish in the world of environmental philanthropy.

The short answer: a lot, depending on where the money goes.

“With $100 million, in some places like Namibia, or Australia, you can get huge protection done,” saidÌęDavid Banks, chief conservation officer at The Nature Conservancy. “One hundred million dollars doesn’t go very far in New Hampshire or Rhode Island.”

As Patagonia begins making philanthropic decisions under its new corporate model, we spoke to experts about what the money can do for the environment, and how this compares to other paths taken by companies and billionaires who want to do good.

What Can $100 Million a Year Actually Do?

To predict Patagonia’s philanthropic potential, it’s important first to understand the company’s new structure. When Chouinard and his family changed Patagonia’s ownership model, they wanted to ensure the business maintained its current growth trajectory but started sending all profits to the environment. To accomplish those dual goals, they created a trust called Patagonia Purpose and donated 100 percent of the company’s voting stock to it, to oversee the brand’s strategic direction. The non-voting stock—about 98 percent of private Patagonia shares—were donated to a new 501(c)(4) nonprofit called the Holdfast Collective.

The Chouinards will sit on the company’s board and guide the trust, but from now on, all of Patagonia’s profits not reinvested in the business will go directly to the Holdfast Collective, and from there, to environmental causes and political action.

One hundred million dollars sounds like a lot of money—but when it comes to fighting a global crisis like climate change, it might not go as far as most people think. Many organizations already spend annual sums on climate work that dwarf Patagonia’s promised dollars.

The Nature Conservancy, for instance—the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to conserving land and biodiversity—spent more than $156 million in 2020 on land and easement purchases around the globe, and almost $700 million on its total efforts, according to the organization’s financial reporting.

Said Banks, any group focused on natural solutions to climate change needs to look at high-value areas like the Amazon and Congo basins, which are under severe threat from industrial logging and deforestation for agriculture, and will be extremely expensive to protect in perpetuity. Banks estimates it will cost about $500 billion a year to create a fully natural climate solution that keeps global warming below 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the goal set by the Paris Agreement and other experts.

“When you think about $100 million relative to that, it’s not a lot,” he said. “But if you can use that $100 million not only to influence policy, but to demonstrate some real wins
then others can start to get on board.”

One high-value way to do that, in Banks’s view, is to support state and local bond initiatives that fund land protection. “You can put $1 million dollars into a local bond initiative that [might] generate $20, $30, $100 million a year of funding for land protection,” he said.

The Nature Conservancy calculates that in the past decade it has generated about 2,000 conservation dollars for every $1 it has spent to support ballot measures. In 2019, the group spent $18,000 campaigning for a bond initiative in King County, Washington, that ultimately generated for open spaces, parks, and trails.

And Patagonia could rely on the Holdfast Collective to dive even deeper into politics than that, if it wants. A traditional nonprofit filed with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) has significant restrictions on political donations, but a 501(c)(4)—the legal designation of the Holdfast Collective—doesn’t.

The Holdfast Collective’s new executive director, Greg Curtis, declined comment on the nonprofit’s future political funding. But if an organization cares about fighting climate change, some of that certainly depends on lobbying in Washington and supporting ballot measures, saidÌęDavid Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, a publication dedicated to tracking the world of charitable giving. And Patagonia hasn’t been shy about its political activism in the past. It once with tags that read “Vote the Assholes Out.”

Wherever the Holdfast Collective’s money goes, it will no doubt occupy an important place in the world of 501(c)(4)s fighting for environmental change. Fewer 501(c)(4)s exist than traditional nonprofits in the climate space, and most are orders of magnitude smaller than the Holdfast Collective. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby, for instance, had a budget of in 2022.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the competition on the other side of the climate fight is fierce and well funded.

The oil and gas industry spent on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2021, according to watchdog website Opensecrets.org. In the first quarter of 2022, the country’s top oil and gas companies spent $12.4 million on lobbying.

“During the first three months of 2022, [those] companies spent millions lobbying congress on a range of issues and bills, including Biden’s stalled Build Back Better legislation, carbon capture and sequestration, and federal oil and gas leases, according to filings,” opensecrets.org .

“We’re seeing a kind of arms race between mega donors on the left and right,” Callahan said.

All of which has some experts asking: Could other routes have stretched Patagonia’s dollars further?

It’s a difficult question to answer. The decision to pursue this new corporate structure was, admittedly, “very unusual,” according to Callahan. “There are a lot of examples of billionaires who have given away most of their wealth, and not a lot of examples of companies that have been put into this kind of nonprofit,” he said.

Perhaps the only comparable example in recent memory is Republican donor and billionaire Barre Seid’s decision to his electronics company, worth $1.6 billion, to a conservative nonprofit dedicated to, among other things, fighting climate change legislation.

By contrast, there are plenty of recent examples of billionaires treading the more conventional path of corporate activism: the Bezos Earth Fund, named for the Amazon founder, has committed in grant money over 10 years to fight climate change, and announced in 2021 it had awarded in grants to organizations focused on climate and conservation. REI, Jumping into the 501(c)(3) space, recently started a public charity called REI Cooperative Action Fund, which has given away to 19 nonprofits working to build a more equitable and inclusive outdoor culture. And Patagonia’s fellow outdoor brand Cotopaxi operates under what it calls a “gear for good” model, wherein it gives a certain percentage of annual revenue to the Cotopaxi Foundation, which then distributes it to charitable causes. Since 2013, the foundation has distributed to programs working to promote education and lift people out of poverty.

The Chouinards could also simply have sold the company, similar to what Doug Tompkins—founder of The North Face and Esprit—did. Tompkins then used the profits for environmental causes. But Chouinard that he dismissed this idea because he wants to ensure the company maintains its core values into the future. A sale, he wrote, wouldn’t offer that guarantee.

Capitalism for Good

Patagonia has, for years, struggled with its role as a multibillion-dollar global enterprise in a world plagued by climate change, overconsumption, and pollution.

“We haven’t figured out how to make a jacket in a way that gives back to the planet,” said Corley Kenna, Patagonia’s head of communications and policy. “It’s one of the reasons why we are invested in the food business now, because you can absolutely grow food in a way that gives back to the planet.”

It’s that willingness to publicly discuss tensions over capitalism and the environment that will give Patagonia credibility in the philanthropy space, according to Banks. (Compare that to a company like Walmart, which faced criticism when it ran an anti-hunger campaign while paying employees barely more than minimum wage.) Patagonia can dive aggressively into climate work with a name that carries weight, said Banks.

“They can be the real leaders showing how it can be done.”

The post Patagonia Will Donate $100 Million a Year to Fight Climate Change. What Can that Money Accomplish? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Jessie Diggins’ life revolves around snow. She is, after all, the most decorated Nordic skier in U.S. history. But recently, it’s not the snow itself that’s top of mind for her; it’s the lack of it. Losing winter as we know it—along with the other environmental ravages of climate change and a warming globe—has become one of her biggest sources of worry and motivation.

“I want my grandkids someday to have the opportunity to learn cross-country skiing,” Diggins told OBJ. “Maybe they like it, and maybe they don’t. But at least I want them to get the chance to experience winter the way we knew it growing up.”

Earlier this year, that wish brought the three-time Olympic medal winner to Capitol HillÌęto lobby for a wonky-sounding bill that could help : the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which finally became law on August 16.

She’s not the only pro athlete getting involved in politics. Environmental concernsÌęalso brought Tommy Caldwell, one of the planet’s best rock climbers, and Colorado senator John Hickenlooper together for a climb last fall, so that Caldwell could bend the senator’s ear about his climate concerns. Mountaineer Conrad Anker has paid repeated visits to the offices of Montana senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines for the same reason. And pioneering climber Phil Henderson, the leader of the first all-Black American team to summit Everest, is out pounding the pavement, encouraging his community to , when he’s not making sports history.

As athlete activism , some fans are for folks like Diggins, Caldwell, Anker, and Henderson to stay in their lanes and quiet down. Whatever the haters may say, their efforts are working. The four athletes, working with nonprofit , were among the many voices that helped move the IRA over the finish line. The law tackles health care costs, tax codes, and pollution in historically marginalized communities, and also contains the largest climate investmentÌęin U.S. history.

“This puts us on a path for energy security in the 21st century,” said Mario Molina, POW’s executive director. “It will also help us reach our commitment under the Paris AgreementÌęof 40 percent greenhouse-gas emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.”

But the fight isn’t over.

A little over a week after President Biden signed the bill into law, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Business Journal sat down with these four athletes, along with Molina of POW, to ask what the legislation means to them, their careers, and the broader outdoor community—and what still needs to be done to ensure a safe future for our planet. The below conversation has been edited forÌęclarity.

Of all the ways you could spend your time, why advocate for climate-change legislation and the Inflation Reduction Act?Ìę

Jessie Diggins: It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge fan of fresh powder or you’reÌęinto fly fishing or trail running, we’reÌęall invested in some way in being outdoors, breathing clean air, enjoying the amazing environment, and protecting our crazy-cool outdoor playgrounds.

Tommy Caldwell: I don’t like politics, and I don’t really like the idea of lobbying. But I do understand that policy is our quickest way to make a change. At the very least, I want to slow down climate change so we can extend the health and wellbeing of our children and our children’s children. This is really about future generations.

And will this law actually protect our planet, in your view? Or at least help?

Mario Molina: Under a business-as-usual scenario, where we don’t do anything at all, we are on a trajectory to reach warming of 3.5 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Everything that we’re experiencing now—the heatwave that we just had, the increase in hurricanes, floods, reduced snowpack, the unreliability of winter, droughts and fires out West—is the consequence of about 1.2 degrees.

Say you’re mountain biking down a 40-degree slope and you see a cement wall in front of you. When is it too late to hit the brakes? Do you want to hit that at 50 miles per hour? Or do you want to hit it at 25 miles per hour? We are going to continue to see the impact [of climate change], but there is a scenario in which those impacts are manageable, and we were able to protect some semblance of seasonality.

What has that 1.2-degree warming, and the resulting climate changes, looked like for you on trails and mountains over the course of your careers?

JD: A couple of years back, we started our World Cup season with the pre-camp in Finland in Rovaniemi, which is right on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Even there, the trails had completely melted out, they were full of rocks and dirt and puddles, and it was down to a very thin layer of man-made snow. We would jog home after skiing these small loops on this dirty snow, and there would be little flowers and green moss and plants blooming on the side of the trail—in November! In the Arctic Circle! For me, that was just really shocking. It brings it home that nowhere is safe.

Phil Henderson: The biggest example I can give is from Mount Kenya in 2000, where I spent a lot of time, and where there are permanent ice fields. The route to one of the higher peaks is easy [Editor’s note: easy for you, Phil]. I went back in 2010, and that ice was gone, those permanent ice fields were pretty much gone.

Similar story: I went to Kilimanjaro in 2000, and then back in 2018, and again what you see is shrinking glaciers, ice that’sÌęnot there anymore. So I’veÌęseen it with my eyes in places that most people will never see. But others see it in their cities, in the urban areas: winter coming later, the snowpack being far more shallow, no runoff in the rivers.

Tommy Caldwell: I started noticing the glacier changes in the mountains—that’sÌęreally obvious. As glaciers melt out, the mountains are thawing and starting to fall down in certain places. Beyond that, the two places where I spend most of my time, Colorado and Yosemite,Ìęare drastically changed because of forest fires. Once, the summertime was an incredible climbing season; now a lot of the time we’reÌęstuck inside because of the air quality.

What do you mean by that? Mountains are actually falling down?

TC: Ice is melting out of the cracks. I first started to notice it in Patagonia. Mountains melted and moved, and that created ,Ìębut also just completely sporadic rockfall, whole sides of the mountain.

Conrad Anker: The original ascent route of The Ogre [in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range] is completely melted out. It’sÌęnot climbable from a safety parameter. Think of it like this. If you’veÌęever scraped ice off in your driveway on a cold day, it’sÌęcompletely stuck there. You chip so hard, you end up breaking the concrete. If you’reÌęan ice climber, you want those conditions. But then on a warm day, when there’sÌęa bed of water underneath it—which is what happened this year in the Marmolada Glacier Collapse [in the Dolomites]—that’s when things move.

So while this bill likely won’t stop some of those changes, it sounds like it could help them from getting worse. Where does it fall short?Ìę

MM: We would have loved not to see oil leases included in the bill. The International Energy Agency has said pretty emphatically that in order to reach the 1.5-degree Paris target, there can’tÌębe any new fossil fuel development.

Now, having said that, rarely in politics do you get something done that doesn’tÌęget criticism from both sides. If you’reÌęgetting criticism from both sides, you’veÌęprobably struck somewhere in the middle of the best you could get.

What are some of the tangible, immediate benefits of the climate portions of the bill?

CA: Near-term, if we have more solar panels and wind towers, those two industries hire from the climbing community.ÌęThey put advertisements in the magazines that talk to those people; they actively recruit within them. So there’sÌęgoing to be more climbers working on towers and using their skills. We’reÌęgoing to create jobs. Here in Montana, we’re a coal state but have a tremendous amount of wind and solar potential. The law will put people to work.

TC: I moved into a new house a few years ago and I’veÌębeen debating putting solar on—I’ll admit, it does seem a little bit expensive. This [the bill’s Residential Clean Energy Credit, which allows homeowners to subtract 30 percent of solar costs from their federal taxes through 2032] just moves the needle to a place that makes it a no-brainer. If that can happen for me, on my house, it can happen for other people.

What’s next then? Where do we go from here?

MM: The work that’s left won’t be done in our lifetime. That’sÌęsomething we have to recognize. But this is a massive quantum leap. Number one is clean-energy permitting and number two is interconnection and transmission [of that energy]. We have to make permitting far more effective, far more efficient. After that, the focus is grid upgrades.

What can we do as people who love the outdoors?

JD: . And not just every four years. Vote this fall [in the midterms]. We’veÌęseen history made in the margins of elections, in the smallest numbers you can imagine. That can actually make a big swing and change the course of what will happen and what laws are able to be passed.

PH: Look at your daily life, and minimize as much energy use as you possibly can. If you can use solar, switch to solar. If you can drive an electric car, drive an electric car. If you can ride a bike, ride a bike. If you can walk, walk. We just have to really change our way of thinking and living on a day-to-day basis.

Even with everything you’ve seen—ski trails melting, mountains crumbling—do you feel hopeful?

TC: It’sÌęamazing how my mood can go from feeling pretty discouraged to feeling very hopeful just based on this one bill. Once this version of the bill finally passed, I did find myself filled with hope.

JD: We need to remember that we’reÌęnot at the end of the race yet—and this is a very, very long race. But I think it’sÌęimportant to celebrate where we are right now, and then to keep looking forward, using our voices, and not taking for granted how amazing the outdoors are. Every time I get out to ski, I have to remind myself how incredible that opportunity is, and that we have to fight to protect it. It’sÌęwhen we start taking things for granted that we’re most at risk of losing them.

Editor’s note: Protect Our Winters is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. . POW is focused on sparking the civic engagement that fuels big climate policy wins like the Inflation Reduction Act.

The post Four of the World’s Top Outdoor Athletes Explain What the Inflation Reduction Act Means to Them appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Land ownership lines wind drunkenly in a tangle of squares, rectangles, and zig-zags in central Wyoming. The area’s recreationists have learned to live with “no trespassing” signs. They know red and blue placards on the North Platte River signify where anglers and boaters can legally cross land. They pine over thousands of acres of untouchable public land surrounded by uncrossable private property.

But soon Wyoming residents will have almost nine more miles of North Platte River access and more than 75,000 additional acres of accessible public land after the Bureau of Land Management announced its largest land purchase in the state’s history. The chunk of land, which includes the purchase of more than 35,000 acres of a private ranch adjacent to 40,000 acres of previously inaccessible BLM and state land, sits just southwest of Casper, Wyoming, in the center of the state. The property is a rolling mix of bluffs and coulees, sagebrush flats and grasslands.

“This isn’t a little place,” says Jeff Muratore, a longtime central Wyoming resident and avid hunter of the land that will soon be opened. “It’s big, and it’s full of all kinds of terrain from the lowlands near the river to country that elk would roam in.”

Wyoming lawmakers talk openly about transferring federal lands to the state. Public land owned by the state is limited by law, which means if the state acquires more land it must then sell an equal number of acres. It’s not always a friendly place for public land, despite many people flocking here for recreation. So if the BLM can open 75,000 acres in Wyoming, then maybe it can happen anywhere. Perhaps slowly picking up chunks of land and signing easement deals isn’t just a dream. Maybe the painstaking process of working with thousands of private landowners over more than a dozen states is a solution to opening millions of acres of landlocked public land across the West.

“The priority now is to get more of them so we can establish a record of success,” says John Gale, Conservation Director for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (BHA).

, mapping company onX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership released a showing that more than 9.5 million acres of federal land in 13 western states are permanently inaccessible to the general public. Anyone who has looked at land ownership maps to find a spot to hunt, fish, camp, or hike has seen those chunks of green or yellow with no discernible access point. But the sheer volume sent shockwaves through the outdoor community, and it’s even more alarming now, during a time of unprecedented crowding.

“We’re not making any more land, and our population is increasing,” says BLM director Tracy Stone-Manning. “But we do have the ability to open up land and open up access to the growing population.”

Those transactions cost a lot of money, though, sometimes tens of millions of dollars. And private landowners ready to sell don’t want to wait a decade for Congress to decide to act.

So outdoor groups pushed for full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which finally passed in 2019 as part of the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. The same legislation included a wonky directive to federal land management agencies: and blocked or heavily restrict to the public that could be opened for improved hunting, fishing, and other recreational access.

The BLM did as it was told. In 2020, BLM officials asked people to nominate applicable parcels. Thousands of responses came in, and the agency narrowed it down to about . The nomination process is

more people recreated outside in 2020 than they did the previous year, a record high for outdoor participation on a finite amount of land. So more open land seems like a universal positive, right?

Maybe, but with caution, says Yufna Soldier Wolf, a tribal advocate for the Indigenous Land Alliance of Wyoming. Lands blocked to the public are, in some ways, also protected from the public. All of the public land we call ours was tribal ancestral land, largely stolen outright or through broken treaties. The recently purchased Wyoming land was used by the Northern Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, and other High Plains Tribes.

“When you talk about management of the land, a part of that is the consultation process. What if you run into human remains? What if someone wants to put a trail in here? What if they want to set up an ORV trail?” says Soldier Wolf.

On the other hand, lands blocked from the public are also blocked from tribes, says Jesse Deubel, New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s executive director.

The state of New Mexico will soon to the public through the purchase of the L Bar Ranch west of Albuquerque. The Pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and Hopi Tribes all supported the land deal because it would open up access to more than 1,000 important archeological sites that had been blocked.

Stone-Manning understands concerns about Indigenous sites and, more broadly, issues of using public land responsibly. The BLM went through the federal environmental and cultural resources review process for the Wyoming purchase as it does all land deals. And the agency works with tribes to identify and protect important areas.

The BLM also needs more resources, she says, including funding for more education and enforcement. Right now, only 250 law enforcement officers patrol 245 million acres of land.

“[If we say] we don’t want to allow people in there because people will wreck it, then that is an admission of failure,” Stone-Manning says. “And we can’t accept that failure.”

While the Wyoming deal had been in the works long before the Dingell Act, it shows the power of agreements between a willing buyer and seller, Stone-Manning says.

Groups like BHA are interested in addressing other challenges presented by gridlocked land. The group raised more than $70,000 to fund the legal expenses of four Missouri hunters accused of trespassing in Wyoming. The hunters “corner crossed,” which means they stepped (using a ladder) from one parcel of public land to another at a place where four pieces of land meet. The four were found not guilty, but in most of the West, and one BHA and other groups hope will be settled in favor of public land users.

BHA also recognizes the risk of antagonizing private landowners by forcing them to allow corner crossing, Gale says. Conservatives in red states like Wyoming tend to push back against the federal government, especially when it comes to creating more public land. It’s why successful deals using LWCF money to purchase land from private owners who want to sell (like the one in Wyoming) feel like a bright spot in a West filled with more people and less trust.

“It is a finite number of lands that are landlocked,” Stone-Manning says, “and if we keep chipping away at it, we will eventually solve the problem.”

The post The BLM Made the Largest Public Lands Purchase in Wyoming History, Unlocking Previously Inaccessible Acres appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Fifteen years ago, Al Gore sounded the alarm about climate change, warning about melting ice caps, droughts, and rising sea levels. Some of us were seeing these changes firsthand in Alaska and other remote locations, but for most Americans the impacts of the crisis seemed awfully abstract.

Until now. According to The Washington Post, one in three Americans lived through a weather disaster in 2021. And the rise of megafires, superstorms, atmospheric rivers, and bomb cyclones is not just disrupting our summer adventures and ski seasons; it’s also presenting very serious challenges to our shops, supply chains, trail crews, and business futures.

Here are three outdoor companies facing these issues head on.

Shuttered in the Dark

It took 12 days to reopen Massey’s Outfitters in New Orleans after Hurricane Ida smacked Louisiana with 150-mph winds and rain last summer.

That meant 12 days during which owner Bobby Johnson and others worked in the dark, cleaning up water that ran through a damaged roof and waiting for the internet and power to be restored. It was 12 days during which he had to turn away customers who needed generators, water filters, and other survival goods. Without power and internet, he said, the store just couldn’t operate.

Johnson’s father-in-law started Massey’s Outfitters in 1972, and he and his brother-in-law, Mike Massey, now own and operate three locations in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Covington, Louisiana. They know the realities of owning businesses in a hurricane-prone region. But the old stormproofing methods are becoming insufficient as climate change fuels longer and longer hurricane seasons with ever-stronger storms. “When I started in ’93, we would have a storm scare every couple of years,” he said. “Now it’s a storm scare every year.”

And the setbacks keep getting worse. In addition to closing the New Orleans store for 12 days, Hurricane Ida shut the Baton Rouge store for three days and the Covington one for six. Johnson figured it cost his business $140,000 in lost sales—during a month that’s lean already.

“It’s frustrating,” he said. “And as a business owner, I worry about the staff and what they’re going through.”

The company’s operations staff was flung to hotels throughout the region during Ida, some working with spotty internet and cell service for three weeks. Many employees now worry every year about losing their homes or cars to the next monster storm.

Johnson is evolving. His stores established two more backup internet systems, and he’s looking into additional generators. He’s also stocking more disaster supplies. He sold almost $20,000 worth of solar panels and GoalZero power stations in the days before Ida. “Find me a rechargeable fan, because I could have sold 150 of them,” he said.

But the silver linings, he noted, don’t outweigh the costs. “Any hurricane could cause our business to be wiped off the map,” he said. “But the biggest worries are all the stuff that will keep us from being open and the additional costs after the storm—everything you have to do that isn’t normal.”

Smoked Out

During the worst of the summer 2021 smoke season, the air quality index outdoors in Reno, Nevada, measured 400, well above the “hazardous” threshold of 300. Indoors, it surpassed 200: officially unsafe for working conditions.

As smoke rolled in from California’s Dixie and Caldor megafires, Patagonia’s major distribution center sent home hundreds of employees to protect them from the “stagnant, smoke-laden place,” said Chris Joyce, Patagonia’s head of distribution, logistics, people, and sustainability. Even public schools closed.

“Twenty-five years ago, when this building was built, it relied on the idea that you’d have nice, cold, clean mountain air to draw in at night in order to cool the building,” Joyce said. “We kept our energy usage low by not having air conditioning units to try to cool a 300,000-square-foot space. But that meant for the entire summer, we no longer could bring cool, clean air into the building.” Last summer was the center’s worst yet. Smoke season lasted 12 weeks in 2021 (up from six weeks in 2020), forcing the building to close for two full days and three partial days.

Patagonia took a bottom-line hit not only in employee wages for those days (paid out in full), but also in buying pallets of portable air-filtration systems for employees to take home at half price. The company noted losses from shipping delays to e-commerce and wholesalers: “millions of dollars sitting on the dock,” Joyce said.

Joyce is working through how much it will cost to retrofit some kind of energy-efficient cooling system into the main warehouse. Early estimates come in around $2 million, and that doesn’t include the other nearly 500,000 square feet of warehouse buildings the company has in Reno.

Moving elsewhere seems futile. “Because this is climate change, there’s nowhere in the West that isn’t being impacted by smoke or fires more and more heavily each year,” he said. The brand has felt the impact before: in 2017, when Patagonia’s leadership team waged war on the Trump administration’s decision to shrink Bears Ears National Monument, they worked from hotel rooms spread out across Southern California after being displaced from their main campus by the 281,000-acre Thomas wildfire.

Patagonia has spoken out about public lands and climate change issues for years. And every year, it gets more and more personal.

In Hot Water

Hilary Hutcheson saw climate change coming. When she started guiding anglers on rivers in Northern Montana in the 1990s, climate scientists were already warning of what would come.

“They correctly predicted earlier snowmelt, which would make trees grow sooner and soak up the water that we’d need come August,” she said. “We’re seeing unprecedented warming on classic trout streams, which leads to undue stress on fish, plus hybridization of native and non-native species that threaten ecosystem stability, wacky runoffs that can strip native trout beds, dried-up riverbeds, increased nutrient loads, and epic wildfires that wipe out habitat and erase shade.” For a fly-fishing guide and the owner of a fly shop (Lary’s Fly and Supply in Columbia Falls, Montana), that means working in a fundamentally different place from what she’s known since childhood.

Fly-fishing has seen a resurgence since the pandemic, so business is good right now. But Hutcheson knows it likely won’t last. “I’m aware we can have good seasons,” she said, “but the overall impact of climate change is not something we can recover from in the long run if we let it continue to do what it’s doing right now.”

In 2018, a fire ripped through Glacier National Park, forcing Hutcheson off the river for nine days. Similarly, she’s heard from other fly-fishing outfitters that they experience a dramatic drop in business during bad fire seasons.

Already, many rivers face longer “hoot owl” restrictions, meaning anglers must stop fishing by 2 P.M. because hot water stresses fish (and angling makes it worse). Some rivers have closed completely, putting more pressure on other waterways. “And when we have wildfires, we get some cancelations because clients don’t want to breathe the smoke and they can’t see the mountain views,” she said. “For me, I don’t care about making money. I care about the people and the planet and the anglers coming. It is going to wreck the fishery overall.”

Hutcheson is using the opportunity to talk to clients about climate change and how they can make a difference. Her fly shop is carbon neutral: she’s reduced energy use from appliances and changed supply chain shipping patterns, and she buys carbon offsets. She recently produced a short film called DROP about the impacts of climate change and possible solutions.

“We’re focused on selling trips and fly rods, but our success gets the attention of policy makers who recognize the economic importance of the outdoor community,” she said. “So I hope we keep reminding them that we’re powerful and growing.”

The post 3 Outdoor Companies Hit Hard by Climate Disasters appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Tracy Stone-Manning fell in love with the West in less than a weekend. Thirty years ago she flew from her home in Maryland to visit the University of MontanaÌęand decided if she didn’t get into graduate school there, she’d wait tables. She was accepted into the environmental studies program and stayed, meeting her husband and then spending their honeymoon backpacking across western Montana’sÌęBob Marshall Wilderness. She went on to serve Coalition, director of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, and senior advisor to U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.

And now she heads back east—to Washington, DC to be exact—as director of the Bureau of Land Management. The agency about 245 million acres of western land, and it has been through five years of upheaval and dysfunction—it operated without a confirmed director for several years, and then lost nearly 300 staffers after lawmakers moved its headquarters from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado.

Like most political appointees in today’s polarized world, Stone-Manning, 56, is either poised to save the American West or destroy it. Her confirmation hearing included statements from a “dedicated public servant” and others saying she “colluded with eco-terrorists” when, more than three decades agoÌęshe retyped a letter from an acquaintance to the Forest Service warning of a tree-spiking incident. Her testimony resulted in the imprisonment of two people forÌęthe tree spiking–a dangerous practice where metal spikes are impaled into trees to try and prevent logging.

Ask those who live, work, and play out West what any of that means for the future, and you won’t get a definitive answer. They just want to get to work with the first confirmed director of BLM in five years, said , executive director of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Tawney met Stone-Manning decades ago with her work as director of the Ìę finding compromise on a polluted, controversial river in western Montana. He believes she has a “proven record of finding compromise between pretty diverse parties.” She can take an agency like BLM and set it right.

For Jason Baldes, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe in central Wyoming and National Wildlife Federation’s Tribal buffalo program manager, Stone-Manning joins a growing list of federal officials—among them Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and USDA’s Heather Dawn Thompson—who will think about land more holistically.

“The priority must shift from economic incentive to more ecological incentive,” he said. “The interconnectedness of so many places, the wildlife migrations, the cultural historical areas, the burial grounds, they have to include that Native voice and involve the Tribes.”

Stone-Manning was , and recently outlined that vision for the West’s public lands in an exclusive interview with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. (The conversation was edited for clarity.)

OUTSIDE: What does it mean to have a director of BLM for the first time in five years?Ìę
TRACY STONE-MANNING: A confirmed director lends long-term vision and leadership that the agency deserves, and that our communities and the lands themselves deserve.

Your confirmation hearing was contentious. How do you manage an agency like BLM in the face of this kind of polarization? Will you be able to move the agency forward?
Yes, absolutely. I think that transparency—and honesty and frankness—earns respect. And it’s how I operate. People are ready and hungry to dig into solving some real problems in the agency and real challenges for the landscape in the future.

What are your top priorities for BLM?
The first one is the rebuild.

The second is twofold:ÌęWe’re in the middle of a climate crisis. We’re in the middle of a biodiversity crisis. It’s something we have to address seriously and quickly. And the way to do that is, in part, to restore habitat. We need to put wildlife acres back on the board that aren’t on the board today.

And that, of course, dovetails right into recreation. We have a quickly growing use of our public lands. And for those of us who have our favorite secret spots, and who used to see two cars at the trailhead, and now see 25. Fast forward 20 years, and those numbers are going to be even bigger. We have a real obligation to get ahead of the growth.

As people like to say, ‘the good Lord isn’t making any more land.’ We’ve got to get smarter and better about how we manage plans for recreation so that people have the same kind of experience we have today.

Lastly, the President has called on us to turn the corner on fossil fuels and reach for a clean energy economy. And BLM has a giant role in that work. But we have to be smart about how and where we do that so we don’t conflict with the places where people recreate or places that are key wildlife habitat.

As you say, we have no more land and an increasing population, how do you start to figure that puzzle out?
The go-to, for me, is to ask people on the ground about the issue. Step one is understanding who currently uses these lands and why. Step two is understanding who’s not using these lands and why. And if the why are barriers that we can fix, we need to fix them.

As the U.S. continues to grow, people who have been wildly fortunate enough to not have to engage in any process, who could just put hiking boots on and roll, that kind of change is going toÌębe hard. But it’s a change that we have to make, so that we don’t love these places to death. So that 40 years from now, nobody goes there because it’s too crowded and trashed.

The good news is there are some popular sites that are overcrowded,Ìęand then there are hundreds of places that people don’t know about. We need to steer people appropriately to those hidden gems so that we can alleviate some of the pressure.

There’s a good example from the Park Service: over the summer there was a four-hour wait to do the hike at Angel’s Landing in [Zion National Park,] a place that is surrounded by spectacularly beautiful country, where you could not have to wait and still go on a hike. So I think we just need to get better and smarter about how to invite people to other places.

What do you say to someone who is concerned that that’s just going to put humans everywhere, especially areas where wildlife take refuge?
It’s the age-old conundrum that the agency has always dealt with, balancing the needs of wildlife and humans. People are smart, we will figure out where those places are on our own. So the agency should probably be a step in front of the public in guiding people and steering people towards those places that are ready to receive the extra attention.

It also comes back to that notion of a shared responsibility about place. There’s going to have to be some parameters on how we access them so that we’re fair to each other and that we preserve wildlife.

We’ve done that before. As a culture, we’ve done it through hunting. We have shared understanding and regulations about where we can take an animal, where, when and why. We need a shared understanding of where we can recreate and what the parameters around it are for the people and the wildlife we serve.

Management planning looks at what you can accommodate and designs services and facilities that can accommodate people in places with the least impact. Do you need toilet facilities at a given trailhead?

What is your vision in terms of access and public land and making sure that they’re not being overused?
We’re not making any more land, but we can open up access to land. In Arizona, . That kind of work is clearly important going forward because there’s just no reason on God’s green earth that we should lock up public lands by accident because it’s surrounded by private land.

What, realistically, do you feel you can accomplish?
Three years is short. I do think we can accomplish quite a bit. We have to. Are we going to solve those crises in one administration? Of course not. But can we get the fundamentals laid and the work starting, so that we really make headway on the problems? Absolutely.

How do you build continuity into the management of a quarter billion acres over various administrations?

Rebuilding the staff, the career staff that is there for the long haul. When administrations change, priorities change, but the fundamentals, if we build it, right, stay the same. And certainly the expression and the will of the American public stays the same.

How do you achieve balance between renewables, oil and gas, recreation and all other uses of public lands?
Two-hundred forty-five million acres is a lot of land that has a lot of needs, from a lot of different constituencies.

Multiple use doesn’t mean every single acre has all those uses. It means being smart about all those uses. Where is it appropriate to do oil and gas development? Where is it appropriate to do renewable energy? Where is it appropriate to have dispersed recreation versus campsites?

Who do you see as the BLM user of the future?

Ideally, 40 years from now, the typical BLM user is the demographic of the United States of America—that people enjoying our public lands are this full suite of what America looks like.

In a region that has so much economic dependence on extractive minerals and energy and agriculture, how do you help these folks feel comfortable about where the direction of BLM is headed?
Anytime you sit down with a person, when you’re frank and honest with them and listening to their needs and what they’re solving for, you can find solutions.

Let’s look at restoration and invasive grass. The first go-to partner there is the ranching community. They know it’s a problem. We know it’s a problem. We can and will work together.

There’s a huge responsibility for our public lands to provide livelihoods and jobs and economies for our communities. Public lands are still going to drive the economies of the West. And recreation is a giant driver in that.

Any other parting thoughts for readers?
The public has a remarkable responsibility and a remarkable power in how we manage and use our public lands. Everything from how the public uses its voice to how they use the lands themselves. We are all responsible for making sure that we don’t love these lands to death.

We at BLM are responsible for being the managers and stewards of these 245 million acres for the American public, but we cannot do it without the American public weighing in and being part of the work and the solution.

The post Tracy Stone-Manning’s Plans to Rebuild the BLM appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Land Tawney wants everyone to stop using the term “backpack tax.”

People hate taxes. But the idea of taxing outdoor gear to help pay for conservation should be unifying, explains Tawney, the CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. So instead, he suggests, let’s call it an Outdoor Legacy Fund. Let’s describe it as an opportunity for everyone who enjoys the outdoors to help contribute to the protection of that same outdoors. Because hunters and anglers can’t keep paying more than half of the bill to protect the nation’s fish and wildlife through their license fees and excise taxes, especially when only 4 percent of the U.S. population hunts and only 14 percent fishes. But ultimately, the “backpack tax” or Outdoor Legacy Fund or whatever it’s billed as, is, in fact, a tax—one Tawney feels gets more critical as outdoor participation continues to surge. He also thinks that, even after decades of fruitless discussion, it’s finally gaining steam.

More than Their Share

Our conservation funding system was never built with hikers, trail runners, climbers, or mountain bikers in mind. That’s because it was created nearly a century ago, before any of those sports existed as organized pursuits—back when the biggest recreational users of U.S. public land were hunters and anglers.

In the early 1900s, when wildlife species were disappearing across the country, the hunting community and surrounding industry rallied to create what’s known as the Pittman-Robertson Act, which levied a 10 to 11 percent tax on guns and ammunition, paid for by the manufacturers, to help fund conservation.

It passed in 1937, and in 1950, the Dingell-Johnson Act also passed, setting aside a 3 to 10 percent tax on fishing and boating equipment. The two acts have resulted in about $23 billion going to states for conservation and recreation projects since their inception. However, income from those acts has been declining for decades as hunters age out and new participation lags. Not that it matters, said Randy Newberg, host of the online show Fresh Tracks with Randy Newberg and one of the nation’s most visible hunting personalities.

“The cost of conservation is increasing faster than the cost of excise taxes [ever could],” said Newberg. “If you think the old idea that hunters and anglers, through excise fees and licenses, can foot the increasing conservation bill, I have some news for you. That’s just a terminal path.”

In the meantime, record numbers of hikers, campers, and other recreationists are flooding the nation’s parks and open spaces. It’s a welcome development for those who have spent years encouraging outdoor participation. But it comes at a time when more studies show that non-consumptive outdoor recreation is having a real impact on the wildlife that hunters and anglers have been paying to conserve.

A 2019 meta-analysis in the journal Conservation Science and Practice found that 70 percent of the time, the richness and abundance of wildlife suffered in association with higher levels of recreation. And as newer user groups strain trail systems, more states are relying on money from strapped general funds, lotteries, and other sources.

Luke Todd is the owner of The Sports Lure in Buffalo, Wyoming, a store that sits at the base of the Bighorn Mountains. Some estimates showed upwards of 35,000 people visited the Bighorns during July weekends in 2020—roughly the population of Wyoming’s third-biggest city. The fish and wildlife felt it, Todd said.

“We hate to have more closed roads and trails,” he said. “But [the outdoors] is a very fragile thing.”

Improving access is the only way to accommodate more visitors; it’s that or start restricting visitation. But to do that, land managers have to either buy new land, or buy easements to access public land across private parcels—an expensive proposition. That’s why hunters like Tawney and Newberg say it’s time for everyone to chip in.

But Can It Pass?

This isn’t the first conversation about instituting some kind of backpack tax. In 2000, the outdoor gear industry helped remove a provision from the final version of the Conservation and Reinvestment Act that would have levied taxes on outdoor equipment. Discussions have continued over the years, but no more legislation has been drafted since then.

But many outdoor brands worry that an additional tax will cut into their revenues—or that they’ll be forced to pass the increase onto the consumer, upping barriers to entry. And the financial burdens on outdoor companies have only increased since 2000, said Rich Harper, Outdoor Industry Association’s director of government affairs. The industry already pays billions per year in tariffs and local and state taxes, many of which were instituted in the last few years.

The conversation should focus on other options, said Marc Berejka, REI’s director of community and government affairs. REI has opposed the idea of backpack tax for years.

“The combined tax revenue generated at the local, state, and federal levels by outdoor recreation exceeds $125 billion,” he said. In other words, the outdoor industry—and by extension, outdoor consumers—are already paying plenty in taxes; it’s time for the feds to meet the industry halfway. “The government doesn’t spend anywhere close to $125 billion in supporting recreation,” Berejka said.

In the past few years, Georgia and Texas each passed bills to divert a portion of proceeds from existing sales tax on outdoor recreation equipment. That money now goes into a pot to help pay for local and state parks and historic sites and to protect wildlife and clean water. Texas has had various iterations of the law since 1993, but in 2018 approved spending $277 million, or 89 percent of funds from sales taxes on outdoor gear, on land conservation. Berejka believes states should follow Texas’s lead instead of instituting another tax.

Jessica Wahl Turner, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, says conservation advocates should look first at programs that already exist but are aren’t fully funded, like the Recreational Trails Program (which uses gas tax to pay for trails) and the Sport Fish Restoration Fund (which is financed through motorboat fuel and fishing equipment sales and import duties on boats).

But Tawney believes passing the buck isn’t enough, and that most outdoor users are ready for a backpack tax—even if some of the cost falls to them. “People are willing to do it, but companies are not willing to have that conversation,” he said.

While the exact details are far from final, some industry experts have tossed around the idea of a 1 percent tax, which would raise the price of a $100 pack to $101. A 5 percent tax, as was discussed in the ’90s, would raise that pack to $105. Backpack tax proponents say that’s not a make-or-break amount for consumers. Even so, Tawney advocates for lowering tariffs as a way to prevent increased costs. Plus, he says, if more money doesn’t go to conservation now, states and municipalities will begin charging (or raising) trail and user fees—a much larger financial hurdle for those with limited incomes.

Todd, owner of Wyoming’s The Sports Lure, says a tax on outdoor gear isn’t only necessary, it also just isn’t that big of a deal. His parents started the shop in 1968, and all those years have proven that hunters and anglers are proud to invest in the resources they rely on.

“[An excise tax] will be relatively invisible to the consumer and the dealers,” he said. “I don’t see it as an impediment.” Plus, he adds, it would be worse to undervalue, rather than overvalue, our fish, wildlife, and natural spaces.

“We have an embarrassment of riches, and we have to take care of them.”

The post Is It Finally Time for the Backpack Tax? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When Durrell Smith leaves his house to go hunting, shotgun and dogs in tow, he pens a note to his wife with his GPS coordinates.Ìę

It’s responsible hunting. It’s also one of the many precautions he takes as a Black man hunting alone in southern Georgia, like leaving the field long before dark, and answering a few extra questions from other hunters wondering what he’s really doing out there.Ìę

“It’s the issue of familiarity,” he said. “It’s not that we don’t know other minorities go outdoors, it’s the fact that a lot of mainstream culture is not used to seeing others in their space.”

Until more Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s faces become prevalent in hunting companies’ marketing, outreach, and internal efforts, diversity experts say those attitudes will continue. And the outdoor industry desperately needs hunting and fishing to embrace those faces.

For one thing, the hunting and fishing industries carry weight in Washington. They align often with powerful pro-Second Amendment groups like the National Rifle Association, and conservation organizations like Trout Unlimited or Ducks Unlimited. The industries also get a political leg up on the outdoor industry from their conservation contributions: Every $36 fishing license or $10 conservation stamp goes to support habitat projects or pays a biologist’s salary. Federal taxes on hunting and fishing equipment pump millions of dollars into state wildlife agency coffers. Experts fear that, without those dollars, critical wildlife research and public land maintenance efforts could fall apart. Another concern: Without hunt and fish, land managers might be forced to institute a backpack tax or hiking licenses to make up the lost revenue. Both those policies inhibit access for first-time outdoorists and could undermine some of the outdoor industry’s fledgling DEI efforts.Ìę

For many outdoor companies, the murder of George Floyd was another call to action as executives realize BIPOC outdoor enthusiasts are a growing part of the market, and they can’t be ignored, persecuted, or avoided anymore. But hunting and fishing companies have felt forced to choose: go all in and reach out to groups that aren’t part of their traditionally white, male base, or play it safe and try to wait out the racial reckoning. Some brands, like Orvis, chose the former, signing pledges and hiring BIPOC experts for training. Many didn’t.

So hunters like Durrell, founder of the popular Gun Dog Notebook podcast, started a group called the Minority Outdoor Alliance as a way to promote and increase BIPOC participation in the outdoors. Opportunities to support the existing BIPOC hunting community exist, he said, but, like in the outdoor industry, hunting companies have been reluctant to not only talk, but put money on the table.Ìę

That’s the issue Eric Morris ran into when he launched his Nontypical Outdoorsman show in 2019, an effort to highlight more of the hunters of color he’d seen go unrepresented in mainstream hunting shows.

“TV shows are risky,” brands told him when he reached out for sponsors. “Most fail in the first year.” They told him he’d have to prove himself before they would commit a dollar.Ìę

Morris decided to try. Outdoor companies were talking about diversity, he knew. They’d sign on, he thought.

His first season, which he launched on The Pursuit Channel using largely his own savings, featured episodes on turkey hunting and accessing public land, and included interviews with two Black veterans. More than 60,000 households tuned in for each episode, far above his initial goal of 40,000—high for a new show. When he reached out to find sponsors for season two, though, only one company—Thorogood Boots—stepped up.

“I drank the Kool-Aid and thought people would be serious about increasing diversity,” Morris said. “I think there are some [brands] that believe there is not a market among the minority community, but there is. From my experience, sometimes people get too bogged down in the politics and red tape and bureaucracy of diversity and not going out and just doing it.”

The Fishing Industry Tackles Inclusivity

Even before COVID hit and many Americans took to the water, the number of people grabbing fishing rods and reels in this country had been climbing.

But back in 2013, when leadership at the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (RBFF) sat down and dug into their numbers, they saw a disturbing trend.Ìę

“We started to realize that Hispanic participation, which is the fastest growing demographic [in the country], was flat,” said Stephanie Vatalaro, the organization’s senior vice president of marketing and communications.Ìę

The group started Vamos A Pescar, a national marketing campaign aimed at offering education and information to the country’s Hispanic communities. And whether or not that helped the cause, Hispanic anglers are now the fastest growing demographic, according to a 2019 report by the RBFF.

About a decade ago, executives at Orvis, one of the nation’s oldest and largest fly-fishing and wing-shooting companies, had a similar moment. The company saw its fly-fishing sales were growing, but its customer base was shrinking.Ìę

“We saw things that weren’t looking great in our future,” said Orvis CEO Simon Perkins. The brand understood its primarily white, male core supporters; they were easy to market to. But Orvis executives also realized the brand was becoming less relevant with each passing year. They knew they needed to learn how to talk to other audiences if they wanted to survive. The evolution hasn’t been easy.Ìę

“These conversations are uncomfortable,” Perkins said. “If you’re going to grow a business or industry, you have to always be working really hard to listen outside that echo chamber, and that takes time and effort and resources.”

Orvis then started a program called 50/50 On the Water meant to increase gender parity in fly fishing.Ìę

In mid-2019, long before Justice June, Orvis reached out to the nonprofit Brown Folks Fishing to figure out how to improve its diversity efforts.Ìę

Orvis has since signed the group’s Angling for All pledge, a commitment to identify and eliminate barriers to racial diversity in fishing, and hired Erica Nelson and Sydney Clark, co-founders of REAL Consulting, to help it evolve and reach new audiences in a meaningful way.

But Orvis’s process is far from the norm in the nation’s fishing industry, said Nelson, a Navajo angler and Brown Folks Fishing ambassador.Ìę

“I don’t think companies know how to respond,” Nelson said. “If we open the doors to being inclusive to all, white people in general think there’s not enough for them. Somehow they think they will be pushed out.” But that fear is unfounded, in her view.

Hunting Struggles to Keep Up

As much as fly fishing’s base has traditionally been white men, hunting has struggled even more to increase representation. In 2016, 90 percent of hunters 16 years and older in the country were male and 97 percent were white, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, a trove of data collected every five years. And they’re aging.

Yet despite efforts by state agencies and nonprofits to increase participation, BIPOC hunters rarely see themselves reflected in marketing from companies.

That’s what Jimmy Flatt, co-founder of Hunters of Color, is trying to solve. If 96 percent of hunters are white right now, and the country is becoming more diverse, that whole hunting-funded pool of conservation dollars is in jeopardy. Companies need to begin recognizing, promoting, and fostering BIPOC hunters—and fast. But right now, the hunting industry as a whole is “handcuffed” by seeing the 96 percent number, Flatt says: Brands look at that data and believe they should cater only to the majority.Ìę

That’s one reason calls for racial and gender equality sometimes fall on deaf ears. Take Bass Pro Shops, a leading hunting and fishing retailer. In defiance of calls for gender equity, the company is currently selling a T-shirt with a graphic of a woman yelling at a man with the word “problem” underneath. The next graphic is a man sitting alone in a tree stand with a bow with the word “solved.”ÌęÌę

Gender diversity has become less of a sticking point among hunting brands in recent years. Vista Outdoor, which owns about 40 brands from CamelBak to Remington firearms, for example, sponsors the Wyoming Women’s Antelope Hunt, an effort to bring more women into hunting, and is increasing its educational campaign about safe firearm use, said Kelly Reisdorf, Vista’s chief of investor relations and communications officer.Ìę

Growth in Hunt and Fish Depends on Audience Diversification

Even though fishing’s numbers are headed in a better direction than hunting, advocates all agree that the future of the sport depends on the industry doing a better job representing all current and potential hunters and anglers.Ìę

“A lot of companies are missing out on progress and profits, actually, by continuing to focus on their same target audience they have done for generations,” said Morris, founder of the Nontypical Outdoorsman show.

And it’s not just equity for equity’s sake—inclusion means more ideas and minds solving today’s complex problems, from climate change and invasive species to lack of access, said Wayne Hubbard, founder of Urban American Outdoors, one of the country’s first TV shows to represent diverse hunters and anglers. It also means a stronger voice in voting booths.

While the fishing industry has made some gains in that respect, they might not stick if people don’t see themselves represented.Ìę

“Will [fishing participation] grow even more, or [will there be] a drastic decline because the industry itself is not being inclusive?” said Nelson, of REAL Consulting.

Like outdoor industry companies, hunting brands could re-evaluate their marketing budgets to think of new ways to partner with diversity professionals, Nelson recommends. They should stop being afraid of alienating one group and instead welcome all groups—it’s not a zero-sum game. The hunting and fishing industries as a whole should include more BIPOC voices on their nonprofit boards, she added. They should also be more aware in general: neither survey, the one from the Boating and Fishing Association or the Fish and Wildlife Service list Native American as a demographic, instead using the catchall term “other.”

Not only is that a lack of representation, Nelson said, it’s erasure of the nation’s first hunters and anglers.ÌęÌę

The fishing and hunting industry can and should learn from the steps and missteps in the rest of the outdoor industry, Nelson added. Instead of comparing how the industries are doing, furthering a competitive mindset, our industries should be working together, with each other and with diversity experts.Ìę

Orvis’ Perkins agreed.Ìę

“Issues of diversity and access are inextricably linked to the long term survival of hunting and fishing,” he said. “We are also seeing an increasingly blurred line between core outdoor and fish and hunt. As these industries continue to overlap the outdoor industry’s leadership around diversity will help create the groundswell, and the rest will follow.”

The post The Hunting and Fishing Industry’s Struggle to Diversify appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.