Puke-green Decoys

(Written April 10)
A decade ago, every Montana legislator started getting postcards and emails from a Washington, D.C., lobby firm attacking our state’s oldest and most upstanding conservation organizations. Calling the organizations “green decoys” and saying they were liberal groups funded by the left, the firm worked to make themselves look like advocates for conservation, hunters and anglers. 

Now, Montana has several genuine green decoys working the halls in the Montana Legislature, and they’re going to turn our state into a playground for the billionaires, at the expense of those of us who love our public lands, waters, and wildlife.

Let’s start with Montana Development Unlimited (formerly Trout Unlimited). Its highest priorities this year include ensuring that the Big Sky area and billionaires at the Yellowstone Club can pollute the Gallatin River with their sewer water and allowing more exempt wells to enable large-scale development. What, exactly, is in this deal for cold, clean water and the fish that depend on it?

Next up is the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a once-proud organization that put together some significant land deals to preserve elk range and stood up for public hunters. Today, RMEF is standing up at the state capitol for unlimited cow elk tags in a move meant to cull elk in areas where outfitters have leased up tens of thousands of acres to sell trophy bills. Elk herds are over populations objectives set by state biologists, and they want to slaughter the cows that can’t be sold for $20,000 or more. 

The libertarian Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) has been desperately trying to run away from four decades of calling for the total selloff of public lands, landowner big game tags, and getting rid of our stream access law. The home of “free market environmentalism” has supposedly become a kinder, gentler organization and worked itself into a seat on the sportsmen’s advisory group in the state Legislature. But PERC hasn’t changed a bit. As the saying goes, when people show you who they are, believe them.  

The new kid on the block is the deceptively named “Montana Conservation Society,” a dark-money group run by big outfitters, large landowners and an out-of-state lobbyist. It has only five members and sponsored the cow elk slaughter bill. Now, MCS, through its Michigan lobbyist, is trying for a huge share in hunter dollars to run a master hunter program, at the expense of our struggling youth Hunter Education program, which is in need of those dollars. 

This is just the beginning of the graft and sellout that will likely lead to the loss of public land, water and wildlife that our state is poised for. These people worship one thing: money. And they’ll sell out our outdoor heritage to get it. At a time when the Trump administration is working for the full-blown sale of our public lands, we need to be united to stop it. Instead, we’re getting stabbed in the back by the people and organizations who are supposed to stand up for conservation.

When does the outright give-away welfare for the well-connected, very wealthy folks ever end?