Pay-to-play hunting.

• Author: Williams, Peter
• Position: Letter to the editor

I am a progressive who hunts, and there certainly does seem to be a growing sense in the hunting community that progressives represent their interests better than the conservatives. Having been an environmentalist all of my adult life, and an occasional member of the Sierra Club and of similar organizations, I've been upset at the consistent stereotype that hunters are anti-environment.

The hunters I've met spending time on my family's ranch in rural east Texas are certainly socially conservative. And of course they do love their Second Amendment rights. But they have the good sense to know that a vote for Republicans who back oil and mining interests and take anti-environmental stances is a vote against their interests on this issue. They are also receptive to instances that pit the big guy versus the small guy, and the closing of access to land and wildlife by well-to-do private property-owners is just such as issue.

The hunters truly love the land and its creatures. Most people need a concrete connection to something for it to appeal to their visceral sense of fight and wrong. Protecting land, wildlife, and access to it is that for hunters.

The left needs to flame it so that the big guy is the Republicans and the big money interests they're in bed with. Instead the fight has been able to frame it so that the big guy is the Democrats and big government who are going to tell them what to do with their land.

Peter Williams

Oakland, Calif.

I was very surprised, but thrilled, to see your articles on hunting and fishing access as issues on which progressives should work. I fully agree that we of the "hook-and-bullet" crowd who do not vote Republican--and there are many of us, including all of the many relatives and friends with whom I hunt and fish--need to exert our potential influence to preserve access for the public to land and water. We also need to build bridges between ourselves and those who are not hunters and fishermen, but who also love the outdoors. They are our natural progressive allies (though there will be resistance from those opposed to hunting, including some within Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy).

Scott Dirks

Via email

I am a fifth-generation Montana native, and I neither hunt nor fish. But I am concerned about declining access to public and private land. The issue is not just about hunting but about whether the public will have a place to enjoy backpacking, birdwatching, chasing rainbows, daydreaming, fishing...