Advocates for The Sportsmen's Act of 2012 are publicly saying there's still a mathematical chance the legislation could find its way to the Senate floor next week. Privately, they're admitting it's time to get ready for The Sportsmen’s Act of 2013.

So what can we learn from this sad chapter?

First, the defeat of this bill is arguably the greatest legislative disappointment ever for sportsmen. I say that not just because of the important habitat conservation initiatives that will die or be postponed by the loss, but because of the way this defeat unfolded.

I’m not going to write today about the U.S. Senators responsible for the recent stalling of the Sportsmen’s Act of 2012. What is most important in the blocking of the Sportsmen’s Act is the unpardonable ignorance it reveals. Included in the Sportsmen’s Act is the path to the reauthorization of NAWCA (North American Wetlands and Conservation Act), a program that provides matching funds to groups working to preserve and restore wetlands across North America.

Yes, in 1989, when NAWCA was created by an act of Congress, it was intended primarily to boost populations of waterfowl and other wildlife. But since then, as the Federal Flood Insurance Program has sucked away and squandered billions of taxpayer dollars, and as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the 2011 floods have proved, wetlands and floodplains are NOT about ducks and geese. Ruined wetlands and floodplains are about economics and deficits and man-made disasters. Wildlife and the hunting heritage, and wild, beautiful days on the marsh or in the blind with friends and family and abundant waterfowl above us are the interest on the principle of protected and restored wetlands. Destroying wetlands, channelizing creeks, draining swamps to plant more corn for ethanol, or to feed the earth’s insatiable billions of people, destroys the principle. Just as you can take an inheritance or a windfall stack of money and, instead of investing it, blow it on lottery tickets and cigarettes and groceries (new guns are excluded), you can destroy the economic principle of the planet.

There are many reasons why The New York Times is arguably considered the finest news organization in the nation, but few of those were on display last week when the paper’s editorial board decided to weigh in on The Sportsmen’s Act of 2012, an important conservation initiative that would help fish, wildlife, and all Americans.

First the board opposed the bill for a list of erroneous reasons--then, when informed of the mistakes, it botched the corrections, leaving serious misconceptions floating about the bill as well as the sportsmen’s conservation movement.

I realize that surveys show most sportsmen say they’re politically conservative, and that they believe most liberals don’t understand them. I also know most conservatives love to hate the NYT the way most progressives and liberals love to despise The Wall Street Journal. But the story that unfolds here should be seen not just as an opportunity to confirm your worst suspicions, but also as a lesson on why sportsmen who care about the future of fish and wildlife habitat--and human health--should broaden their reading (and writing) horizons.

The summer I got my first driver’s license, I spent a lot of days fishing alone on Alabama’s Paint Rock River. I’d leave our house before dawn and drive east and north up the Paint Rock Valley, park at one of the old fords and wade-fish upstream, catching rock bass, shellcrackers, largemouths, once in a while a smallmouth, which was as exotic to me as a sailfish. Midmorning, heat rising fast, cicadas yelling in every tree, I’d go downstream to where the river was bigger, tie up a bottom rig and cast nightcrawlers or catalpa worms (we called them “tobby worms”) for channel cats, river drum, redhorse, whatever came by.

That river was pure adventure to me, clean, born of subterranean streams and highland creeks that lay unseen in the emerald jungle of hardwoods that covered the low mountains on either side of the valley. It took me awhile to work my way north to the Paint Rock’s headwaters in the Walls of Jericho, that dramatic and isolated canyon system, with its caves and ether-clear water and perfect plunge pools for swimming, the bizarrely-colored darters and sculpins flitting among the smooth rocks of the creek bed.

Not long after I began to explore the Walls, the road in was closed. Mud bogging and hillclimbing in the big 4WD pickups with the then-popular Co-Op Grip-Spur tires (yes, my friends and I were a part of that problem) had made the old trail impassable and littered with beer cans and even a busted truck or two. For the next 15 years or so, the Walls were inaccessible, and the mountain land that surrounded the canyons changed hands among paper and timber companies more than once. It was one of the natural wonders of the South, the forested headwaters of one of the most biologically rich rivers left on the planet, and very few people even knew it existed.

One of the most persistent and effective threats to public fish and wildlife habitat is the energy lobby. They push for access to public lands--even wilderness and roadless areas--and then they push to demolish regulations that would make them be sensitive to fish and wildlife values on that public property.  

And their most persuasive argument--visible everywhere during the current election season--is this: We need to drill more to lower the price at the pump.

In fact, the most effective tool America (and its politicians) have in reducing fuel costs is regulations that stress conservation.

That's not me talking. That's the word from energy economists--and always has been.

As the Associated Press explained in this excellent report, the U.S. could yield to the wildest demands from the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd--opening everything from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to every acre of public land, plus shipping dirty tar sands from Canada--and still not make a noticeable dent on the price of gas at your local filling station. 

A news story about the increasing cost of farmland caught my attention this morning, while contemplating the fate of conservation programs once election day is over. It isn't good news.

Every dollar increase in farmland prices makes CRP and other vital wildlife conservation easement programs less competitive, which means the public will have to pay more to convince farmers to take acres out of crop production.

Worse, this story pointed out farmland prices continue to soar even in the face of a disastrous drought, because financial speculators consider farm commodities a better value than the stock market: "Across the nation’s Corn Belt, even as the worst drought in more than 50 years has destroyed what was expected to be a record corn crop and reduced yields to their lowest level in 17 years, farmland prices have continued to rise. From Nebraska to Illinois, farmers seeking more land to plant and outside investors looking for a better long-term investment than stocks and bonds continue to buy farmland, taking advantage of low interest rates."

Anyone who has ever had the joy of fighting—or just seeing—a billfish as it rises from blue water, with colors blazing and big eyes flashing defiance, can understand why the experience of seeing one listed on a menu is a shock to the soul. Some things are just too majestic to put at the mercy of the commercial market, much less appear on your plate.

Yet for decades that was the case—and to the shame of America’s sportsmen, the biggest market in the world for billfish was the U.S. The nation with the greatest fish and wildlife conservation legacy on the planet was also a leading cause for the steady decline of these majestic creatures.

Well, that cause was finally eliminated recently when President Obama signed the Billfish Conservation Act of 2001, capping a four-year struggle led by the International Game Fish Association to ban the import of marlin, sailfish and spearfish in the continental United States.