By Hal Herring

I left Alabama when I was in my mid-twenties, to live and work in the West. I never planned to stay gone this long. People I grew up with, hunting and fishing friends, school friends, and extended family sometimes ask me why I’ve stayed here in Montana, and why I am raising my children here, so far from the rivers and creeks I grew up on, from the hardwood bottoms and flat-top foothills of the southern Cumberland Mountains that were and are so important to me. I’ve thought a lot about how to answer that question.

The answer boils down to public lands, and the freedom they offer to people like us, who are of somewhat less than moderate means, and who live, when the work is done, to fish and hunt and shoot and wander.

I mostly grew up in the country, and at a time when there were few whitetail deer. Small game hunting was the obsession, and access to that kind of hunting was not usually a problem. You could leave home with a pocket full of 20 gauge shells, from high brass 4s to low brass 8s, and come home with a squirrel, dove, snipe, quail (they disappeared around 1984), a rabbit, even a teal if you were lucky. By the time I went away to work and college, all that land was leased for deer hunting, or posted by the owners.

By Bob Marshall

Covering conservation news recently has been like working the obituary beat at a newspaper: You spend your days reporting about good things passing away. And while that's not much fun to write about, I know some readers are tempted to quit and seek grief counseling.

That's why it's important to revisit the news from recent weeks. Not only was there a string of victories for conservationists, but sportsmen's groups played pivotal roles in many of them.

• The RESTORE Act passed a major hurdle in the Senate. If blessed by the House and signed by President Obama, this means 80 percent of Clean Water Act fines resulting from the Deepwater Horizon disaster will be spent on restoring the Gulf Coast that event damaged.

By Hal Herring

Seven weeks ago, Chad Love of Field Notes posted an article describing the resignation of Alaska Fish and Game’s Conservation Director, Corey Rossi, after Rossi was charged with 12 violations related to an illegal black bear hunt in 2008.

Now, Anchorage Daily News reporter Richard Mauer has uncovered Rossi’s radical plan to privatize some of Alaska’s hunting and wildlife:

Six weeks before he learned he was under criminal investigation for violating his department's hunting rules, state Wildlife Division Director Corey Rossi told his staff about a pet project -- unprecedented in Alaska -- to give private landowners special rights to hunt big game, even out of season, and to be able to sell those rights to whomever they want.

Such a plan echoes the message of the controversial group Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, which is not surprising, since Rossi served on the board of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife-Alaska before his appointment to the state wildlife agency by then-Governor Sarah Palin. In the Anchorage Daily News story, Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife founder Don Peay says that it’s time to “revisit” the widely accepted principle in the United States and Canada that game is a public resource.

By Hal Herring

Driving home in the night from Little Guy Wrestling practice last week, the once-great emptiness west of the highway was broken by the drill rig, lit like a Christmas tree, in front of the dark bulk of Ear Mountain, the peak made famous by A.B. Guthrie’s classic novel “The Big Sky.” We knew it would come. The packed community meetings at Choteau’s Stage Stop Inn, the big water trucks and pickups with Colorado license plates in the parking lot at the Exxon, the gathering excitement--here on the Rocky Mountain Front--of change, lease and royalty money, jobs, new people coming in, and if the resource proves strong and profitable, maybe even a way of life ending and a new one beginning.

For the past decade, I’ve written, sometimes it seems endlessly, about energy development, traveling, looking, interviewing and studying. I’ve been objective (I hope), knowing that energy development is a given. I’ve argued with those who say they are, for instance, “against fracking,” pointing out that it is fine to be against irresponsible fracking that ruins property values or pollutes water supplies with spills, or against drilling in critical wildlife habitat, but that to be against fracking is like saying, “I’m against cars” or “I’m against people building houses.”