Thousands of acres of forests and recreation lands are lost every day in America

A new threatened species has been discovered in almost every corner of the U.S.- the American hunter.

But it’s no wonder hunters are vanishing from the landscape at an alarming clip. They have gone the way of so many millions of acres of prime hunting grounds – pushed aside by the rising tide of modern life. Just as young would-be hunters are drawn to hunting aliens on video games, so too are their parents drawn to the new subdivisions marching relentlessly into and over our forests and favorite hunting grounds.

The U.S. Forest Service tells us we lose 6,000 acres of open space, forests, and recreation lands every day in America. That’s nearly 500 football fields every couple of hours.

Despite huge increases in U.S. population, the sale of hunting licenses has been dropping steadily since the mid-1970s. It seems like more than mere coincidence that between 1982 and 2001, 34 million acres of open space, wildlife habitat, and prime hunting grounds were converted to developed land. And the trend seems to be accelerating.

The forest service predicts that if these trends continue, during the next 12 years, we will lose 64 million acres of open space – an area almost three times the size of Maine. During those years, an average of a million acres a year will change from rural, where we now hunt, to exurban or urban, where most of us live and work. Bottom line: less quantity and quality of wildlife habitat, less native wildlife populations, less places to hunt what’s left.

A solution to this growing problem is to bring more of these threatened places into public ownership, thereby preserving the landscape, the wildlife, and the access for hunters.

Three premier conservation programs, one state and two federal, already exist to do just that: the state’s Land for Maine’s Future program and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Forest Legacy Program. These programs have been the most significant state and federal sources of funding to support land conservation.

Since its inception in 1987, LMF has protected hundreds of thousands of acres of land across the state – all places that are now permanently open to Maine citizens. Yet LMF has allocated the last of its conservation funds.

This November, Maine voters will have the opportunity to renew LMF by voting in favor of an environment bond which contains $17 million for the LMF program.

On the federal side, for the last 30-odd years, the government has been collecting more than a billion dollars a year in lease payments from big oil and gas companies to drill off our nation’s coasts. LWCF is authorized to receive $900 million a year from those receipts to buy and preserve our natural heritage for the public to use and enjoy.

Unfortunately, over the past few years, we’ve seen the federal government drain more and more from the LWCF. From 2002 to 2006, funding was cut more than 75 percent.

LWCF has helped to ensure the permanent protection of critical lands in our national forests, recreation areas, parks and wildlife refuges. This year, Haystack Notch, located in Maine’s section of the White Mountain National Forest near Mason Township and Gilead, hopes to benefit from this program. The acquisition of the Haystack Notch parcel would improve public access to the Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness Area.

The Forest Legacy Program was created to help states conserve working forestland threatened by development. So far, this program has prevented the loss of more than one million acres of forest land. And every federal dollar has been matched by another dollar in state, local, or private funds. Working with willing sellers, states have used the program to purchase critical lands and development rights.

This year, 41 states requested $192 million in Forest Legacy funding for 82 forest conservation projects. Despite the need, President Bush has proposed a 50 percent decrease from last year’s request and would leave scores of special places at risk of development, including the Grafton Notch – Stowe Mountain property near Newry.

At 3,454 acres, the property includes significant natural, recreational and ecological resources that are immediately adjacent to other protected forestlands and should be permanently protected.

This is not about going begging for more money from the federal government. This is not about spending tax dollars, either. This is about using money collected from big oil companies to preserve more of our open spaces, forests and, yes, prime hunting grounds for future generations.

It’s why this money was collected, and it’s the right thing to do. Once the bulldozers come, it’s too late – the forests and wildlife go and the hunters go, too.

Brad Wight, an active outdoorsman, is the former fire chief in Newry.