Hook And Bullet Voters Deserting Bush

EDIT

"Stouder's feelings reflect widespread disappointment among those in a traditionally Republican stronghold – hunting and fishing enthusiasts – who say White House policies are destroying millions of acres of Western lands for fish and wildlife. Their recent activism puts them hand-in-hand with an unlikely ally: environmental groups typically aligned with Democrats.

"A lot has been made about the differences between environmentalists and hunters and anglers," said Chris Wood, vice president of conservation for Trout Unlimited, whose Republican members tend to outnumber Democrats 2 to 1. "But they share most of the same goals: healthy habitat for fish and wildlife, clean air, clean water. What's uncomfortable for the hunting and angling community is that (until now), we viewed our relationship with the federal (government) as a collaborative one."

EDIT

Last fall, 486 outdoors clubs signed a letter to Dale Bosworth, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, complaining about Bush's decision to open the Tongass National Forest – nearly 17 million acres of old-growth forest in Southeast Alaska – to logging. "These people are flat-out furious with a lot of the public-land policies of the Bush administration," said Greg Petrich, director of the Northern Sportsmen Network of Juneau, Alaska, which led the letter-writing campaign. "This is not the kind of treatment they want to see for their public lands."

Hunting and fishing groups have expressed similar concerns about Bush's efforts to open public lands along the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains to oil and gas drilling, and his reluctance to more tightly interpret laws protecting wetlands from developers and farmers. Throughout the West, these groups say, Bush's policies are threatening some of the best hunting and fishing in the United States. "Bush doesn't know the depth of the attachment that people out here in the West have to public lands," said Stouder, an Idaho resident and Western field coordinator for Trout Unlimited. "This administration is using end runs to completely neuter everything we've done to protect our fish and wildlife."

EDIT