A Fundamental Freedom
~
Retaining Hunting Opportunities Through
Land Conservation
First published in the June 2010 issue of
Virginia Wildlife magazine
~
Retaining Hunting Opportunities Through
Land Conservation
First published in the June 2010 issue of
Virginia Wildlife magazine
Our Hunting Heritage
English colonists came to Virginia fleeing a broad range of restrictive or prejudicial systems, ranging from religious persecution to economic stagnation to an ingrained aristocracy that had since the Dark Ages withheld for itself the use of natural resources. This last unilateral retention included the Old World’s wild animals and the royal preserves they inhabited. As the European population spiraled upward with the advent of agricultural feudalism, the vast forests and fertile plains of the continent were quickly exhausted of trees and game under increased pressure for human sustenance. Only in the protected lands surrounding the liege’s stronghold could ecosystems be found that reflected, albeit on a much reduced scale, the lushness that once characterized primordial Europe. From their opulent fortifications, built and supported by the labor of their own serfs, the feudal lords and ladies would at times have occasion to saunter off on a hunt, their extensive caravansary of attendants, gamesmen, houndsmen, callers, bearers, beaters and soldiery in tow. (Louis XIV is particularly remembered for the vast assemblage – carriages, courtesans, orchestras – that accompanied the Royal Hunt through Versailles.)
The starving peasantry of the Middle Ages occasionally made desperate forays into the royal hunting preserves when their allotted rations of tubers and grains were exhausted, but the nobility’s monopoly over wild game and wilderness areas was explicit, sincere, and pitilessly enforced. To quell possible thoughts of insurrection, peasants were everywhere forbidden to own swords, spears or flails (or, later, firearms; it was this tyrannical domination that encouraged the enshrinement of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution). As well as being drafted to serve as unpaid bush beaters and game cleaners for noble hunters, the serfs were savagely reprimanded if caught poaching their lord’s game animals. Penalties regularly included blinding, castration, death by exposure (staked out in freezing water), or being sewn into a fresh deerskin for disembowelment by hunting hounds.
Because of the gross injustices of the Old World division between hunters and non-hunters, hunting in America began and to some extent continues as an unheralded democratic exercise, an opportunity to live off the fat of the land like no working-class European ever could, or can to this day. As aristocratic hunting practices ossified in elaborate courtly custom and vernacular, the hunting initiative among the dispossessed peasantry became associated with freedom, liberty, and honest rebellion (witness the sylvan hero Robin Hood). For the European poacher, as for the early American settler and all the world’s peoples who depended for at least part of their nourishment upon the beasts of the wild wood, the purpose of hunting was simple, honorable, and unquestioned: meat.
The domestication of the North American continent has proceeded apace for four hundred years, and today Virginia’s viable wildlife habitat is limited to public lands and to those private properties fortunate enough to have owners interested in providing undeveloped acreage for wildlife to survive in. As is the cause with federal habitat protection, funded by duck stamps and taxes on firearms, ammunition and related items, it is primarily hunters who have stepped forward to offer our remaining wildlife a place to live.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the chief threat to existing wildlife habitat held in private hands is destruction and fragmentation brought on by development—residential, commercial, and industrial. When the woods have been clearcut and paved over, when the fields are sold off and houses planted on their wasted fertility, they are lost forever to the animals that once lived there. Backed into increasingly isolated pockets of habitat, species dependent upon large, intact tracts of land such as bears and wood warblers wink out one by one, leaving behind a razed landscape of highways, suburbs and shopping malls.
We are a nation founded on individual liberty based on the wise use of our natural world, and while few of us any longer make a living solely from the earth, the retention of our hunting heritage is absolutely necessary to the continuing existence of privately owned wildlife habitat. Allowing the remnants of our healthy wildlife habitat to be devoured in the insatiable maw of “development” is a transgression of the highest order. Those who take positive steps to preserve the existence of our fellow creatures take an honorable, indeed patriotic stand in favor of a glorious hunting heritage that still offers us an unparalleled intimacy with the living earth.
Coming to Grips with Wildlife Habitat Preservation
Many farmers and other large landowners feel the eventual development and loss of their land to be inevitable—“You can’t stop progress” is the hopeless mantra often resorted to. In fact the premise that selling out to development is an inescapable fate for rural landowners is wholly false, thanks to an array of federal and state laws drafted specifically to preserve the public’s rural and hunting heritage. State income tax credits and federal income tax deductions are available to Virginia landowners who wish to keep their farmland and wildlife habitat open and productive.
Conservation easements are the foremost means of permanently protecting lands held by private citizens. Simply put, a conservation easement is a legal agreement between a landowner and a non-profit organization or government agency that establishes limits on how the landowner’s property will be used in the future. The landowner gives up the right to intensively develop his property because he wants his farm or hunting habitat to always be available in its natural state. A conservation easement is legally binding on all future landowners, and will protect the land from inappropriate development and uses in perpetuity while allowing the landowner to retain the rights of private ownership. Because this donation benefits the general public, state and federal government offers tax benefits to those who preserve their land and its traditional uses.
Individual landowners donate conservation easements to preserve family legacies and the scenes of irreplaceable memories of years spent together in the fields and forests. Hunting clubs donate easements because their members want to permanently protect its wildlife habitat and the various improvements—food plots, tree plantings, ponds, vegetated streambanks, hunting cabins—that they have often invested a great deal of time and money in. Conservation easements are a proven means of preserving our heritage from the mindless destruction that every year deprives our descendants of the hunting opportunities that we grew up with.
A Needed Sea Change
The wildlife species of Virginia have proven to be remarkably adaptable, often possessed of sufficient resiliency to shape their lives around our arbitrary activities. The more generalist a species is, the more it is able to exist in a variety of conditions and potentialities, the better its chances of navigating the broken fragments of habitat we have left them. Yet such is the extent of damage that has been wreaked on this continent, hunting landowners must often commit to active management of their properties for game species to be plentiful. Meticulous easement drafting and professional tax advice can result in conservation easements that can enhance hunting opportunities while assuring that the land remains protected from inappropriate development.
With only 13.69% of Virginia’s 25.27 million acres “under protection” (meaning under conservation easement or owned by federal, state, or local government), the vast majority of land in the state is privately owned and currently unprotected from development. Diverse forests contain the greatest terrestrial biodiversity in the state, and as of 2004 private property owners hold title to 12,983,849 of the Commonwealth’s 15,308, 778 forested acres. The preservation of private properties that maintain functioning ecosystems must therefore be of primary importance to those who care about wildlife and the outdoors. If these landscapes are not preserved we will become increasingly disassociated from the natural world, less genuine in our empathy, less involved in our responsibility, and finally altogether indifferent to the fate of wildlife and the wild earth.
The second image predicts the coming statewide coagulation of urban sprawl spreading out from Virginia’s established metropolitan areas including Norfolk/Hampton Roads/Chesapeake, Fairfax/Manassas/Arlington, and Richmond/Henrico. Smaller urban centers such as Roanoke, eastern Loudoun County, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Winchester, Charlottesville, Blacksburg, Marion, Martinsville and Harrisonburg also stand out as major contributors to the ongoing destruction of wildlife habitat and open space.
If land conversion rates remain as they are now we will see made real what this illustration so gruesomely depicts: the galloping extension of wave after wave of residential and commercial development linking city to city, suburb to suburb, with frenzied freeways spreading like spider veins and the end result a sprawling strangulated megalopolis with only a few detached pockets of green left open.
But this is merely a prediction and assumes that present trends will continue. It doesn’t have to look like this, and the decision is up to us.
English colonists came to Virginia fleeing a broad range of restrictive or prejudicial systems, ranging from religious persecution to economic stagnation to an ingrained aristocracy that had since the Dark Ages withheld for itself the use of natural resources. This last unilateral retention included the Old World’s wild animals and the royal preserves they inhabited. As the European population spiraled upward with the advent of agricultural feudalism, the vast forests and fertile plains of the continent were quickly exhausted of trees and game under increased pressure for human sustenance. Only in the protected lands surrounding the liege’s stronghold could ecosystems be found that reflected, albeit on a much reduced scale, the lushness that once characterized primordial Europe. From their opulent fortifications, built and supported by the labor of their own serfs, the feudal lords and ladies would at times have occasion to saunter off on a hunt, their extensive caravansary of attendants, gamesmen, houndsmen, callers, bearers, beaters and soldiery in tow. (Louis XIV is particularly remembered for the vast assemblage – carriages, courtesans, orchestras – that accompanied the Royal Hunt through Versailles.)
The starving peasantry of the Middle Ages occasionally made desperate forays into the royal hunting preserves when their allotted rations of tubers and grains were exhausted, but the nobility’s monopoly over wild game and wilderness areas was explicit, sincere, and pitilessly enforced. To quell possible thoughts of insurrection, peasants were everywhere forbidden to own swords, spears or flails (or, later, firearms; it was this tyrannical domination that encouraged the enshrinement of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution). As well as being drafted to serve as unpaid bush beaters and game cleaners for noble hunters, the serfs were savagely reprimanded if caught poaching their lord’s game animals. Penalties regularly included blinding, castration, death by exposure (staked out in freezing water), or being sewn into a fresh deerskin for disembowelment by hunting hounds.
Because of the gross injustices of the Old World division between hunters and non-hunters, hunting in America began and to some extent continues as an unheralded democratic exercise, an opportunity to live off the fat of the land like no working-class European ever could, or can to this day. As aristocratic hunting practices ossified in elaborate courtly custom and vernacular, the hunting initiative among the dispossessed peasantry became associated with freedom, liberty, and honest rebellion (witness the sylvan hero Robin Hood). For the European poacher, as for the early American settler and all the world’s peoples who depended for at least part of their nourishment upon the beasts of the wild wood, the purpose of hunting was simple, honorable, and unquestioned: meat.
The domestication of the North American continent has proceeded apace for four hundred years, and today Virginia’s viable wildlife habitat is limited to public lands and to those private properties fortunate enough to have owners interested in providing undeveloped acreage for wildlife to survive in. As is the cause with federal habitat protection, funded by duck stamps and taxes on firearms, ammunition and related items, it is primarily hunters who have stepped forward to offer our remaining wildlife a place to live.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the chief threat to existing wildlife habitat held in private hands is destruction and fragmentation brought on by development—residential, commercial, and industrial. When the woods have been clearcut and paved over, when the fields are sold off and houses planted on their wasted fertility, they are lost forever to the animals that once lived there. Backed into increasingly isolated pockets of habitat, species dependent upon large, intact tracts of land such as bears and wood warblers wink out one by one, leaving behind a razed landscape of highways, suburbs and shopping malls.
We are a nation founded on individual liberty based on the wise use of our natural world, and while few of us any longer make a living solely from the earth, the retention of our hunting heritage is absolutely necessary to the continuing existence of privately owned wildlife habitat. Allowing the remnants of our healthy wildlife habitat to be devoured in the insatiable maw of “development” is a transgression of the highest order. Those who take positive steps to preserve the existence of our fellow creatures take an honorable, indeed patriotic stand in favor of a glorious hunting heritage that still offers us an unparalleled intimacy with the living earth.
Coming to Grips with Wildlife Habitat Preservation
Many farmers and other large landowners feel the eventual development and loss of their land to be inevitable—“You can’t stop progress” is the hopeless mantra often resorted to. In fact the premise that selling out to development is an inescapable fate for rural landowners is wholly false, thanks to an array of federal and state laws drafted specifically to preserve the public’s rural and hunting heritage. State income tax credits and federal income tax deductions are available to Virginia landowners who wish to keep their farmland and wildlife habitat open and productive.
Conservation easements are the foremost means of permanently protecting lands held by private citizens. Simply put, a conservation easement is a legal agreement between a landowner and a non-profit organization or government agency that establishes limits on how the landowner’s property will be used in the future. The landowner gives up the right to intensively develop his property because he wants his farm or hunting habitat to always be available in its natural state. A conservation easement is legally binding on all future landowners, and will protect the land from inappropriate development and uses in perpetuity while allowing the landowner to retain the rights of private ownership. Because this donation benefits the general public, state and federal government offers tax benefits to those who preserve their land and its traditional uses.
Individual landowners donate conservation easements to preserve family legacies and the scenes of irreplaceable memories of years spent together in the fields and forests. Hunting clubs donate easements because their members want to permanently protect its wildlife habitat and the various improvements—food plots, tree plantings, ponds, vegetated streambanks, hunting cabins—that they have often invested a great deal of time and money in. Conservation easements are a proven means of preserving our heritage from the mindless destruction that every year deprives our descendants of the hunting opportunities that we grew up with.
A Needed Sea Change
The wildlife species of Virginia have proven to be remarkably adaptable, often possessed of sufficient resiliency to shape their lives around our arbitrary activities. The more generalist a species is, the more it is able to exist in a variety of conditions and potentialities, the better its chances of navigating the broken fragments of habitat we have left them. Yet such is the extent of damage that has been wreaked on this continent, hunting landowners must often commit to active management of their properties for game species to be plentiful. Meticulous easement drafting and professional tax advice can result in conservation easements that can enhance hunting opportunities while assuring that the land remains protected from inappropriate development.
With only 13.69% of Virginia’s 25.27 million acres “under protection” (meaning under conservation easement or owned by federal, state, or local government), the vast majority of land in the state is privately owned and currently unprotected from development. Diverse forests contain the greatest terrestrial biodiversity in the state, and as of 2004 private property owners hold title to 12,983,849 of the Commonwealth’s 15,308, 778 forested acres. The preservation of private properties that maintain functioning ecosystems must therefore be of primary importance to those who care about wildlife and the outdoors. If these landscapes are not preserved we will become increasingly disassociated from the natural world, less genuine in our empathy, less involved in our responsibility, and finally altogether indifferent to the fate of wildlife and the wild earth.
The second image predicts the coming statewide coagulation of urban sprawl spreading out from Virginia’s established metropolitan areas including Norfolk/Hampton Roads/Chesapeake, Fairfax/Manassas/Arlington, and Richmond/Henrico. Smaller urban centers such as Roanoke, eastern Loudoun County, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Winchester, Charlottesville, Blacksburg, Marion, Martinsville and Harrisonburg also stand out as major contributors to the ongoing destruction of wildlife habitat and open space.
If land conversion rates remain as they are now we will see made real what this illustration so gruesomely depicts: the galloping extension of wave after wave of residential and commercial development linking city to city, suburb to suburb, with frenzied freeways spreading like spider veins and the end result a sprawling strangulated megalopolis with only a few detached pockets of green left open.
But this is merely a prediction and assumes that present trends will continue. It doesn’t have to look like this, and the decision is up to us.
