Christina Larson, Blogging for Kevin Drum makes a very good point about hunters and other sportsmen.

Specifically, if they are allowed reasonable access in an environmentally friendly way, they are great allies in protecting critical habitats.

I don’t hunt myself. I keep Kosher at home out of respect for my wife, and anything that you would shoot would be treif, and so we could not eat them, but I’ve taken my kids fishing, and only my astonishing ineptitude has prevented us from taking fish home to cook.

Here we have roadless land where hunters can walk in to hunt, and they, who are not what one could call reflexively anti-military, are screaming bloody murder.

Hunting is essential in much of rural PA, because the deer have gotten completely out of hand, because the wolves have been eliminated.

I’d like to see wolves reintroduced, if just because they are more efficient, and tend to go after the old and infirm animals, but for the foreseeable future, hunting is an indispensable part of the ecosystem.

Land Conservationists Take on the National Guard – New York Times

By SEAN D. HAMILL

FORT INDIANTOWN GAP, Pa., June 27 — There are few better vantage points than Hawk Watch to see both sides of the debate between the Pennsylvania National Guard and local conservationists.

Hawk Watch, a 30-yard-wide clearing named for its grand view of soaring raptors, is on the ridge of Second Mountain, about 12 miles northeast of Harrisburg and part of the Appalachian range.

“This is Stony Creek Valley,” said Larry Herr, pointing north to 44,000 acres of state-protected wilderness that is home to a nearly unaltered green carpet of hemlock, maple and oak trees going down the hillside to the valley 1,000 feet below.

Then, walking to the other side of Hawk Watch and looking south onto a 17,000-acre base operated by the Pennsylvania National Guard, Mr. Herr said with contempt: “And this is the Gap. Notice the difference.”

Amid large swaths of a similar tree canopy are pockets where the valley and hillside have been carved up for guard training areas, the trees removed and roads, buildings and ranges put in their place.

“That’s why we don’t want them over here,” said Mr. Herr, 67, a hunter who is part of the Stony Creek Valley Coalition fighting the guard’s request to use about 900 acres as a buffer for a new target range for Abrams M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. “We don’t trust them.”

In a series of public meetings, charges have flown back and forth about a lack of concern for the public and past environmental abuses by the Guard — charges the Guard denies — and accusations that sportsmen regularly trespass on Guard land.

……

Emphasis mine.