I am in this campaign up to my eyeballs, my precinct in western WA is semi-rural in a mostly urban District, and my duties as Legislative District Chairman keep me from banging every door.
Fortunately, there's the telephone, and the most robust, well-organized phone contact and data entry interface I have seen in years of field work. That is how I first met my neighbor, Mark Rutherford, and how I heard his story.
When Mark started talking, I could not put the phone down. When he told me about the path he had taken to become an Obama supporter, I wondered if he had written that down. As it happens, he had.
Mark had written a letter that he wanted to distribute to his community of hunters and sport fishermen. Here it is, posted here with his full permission. I hope people will find it as compelling as I have.
Outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen of America,
On Election Day, November 4, 2008 we have a historic chance to break with the past and cast a vote for the American outdoor lifestyle.
Do you like sunrise with a duck call in your hand and watching sunset from a tree stand in deer country? Do you love the leap of a wild rainbow trout? Do you love the smell of firewood that you cut yourself? Do you hike on Public lands? If so consider our future as outdoors men and women.
What follows is one man’s fiercely independent look at where America is headed. I am not being paid to write this, no political action committee put me up to this. My qualifications are as a middle aged outdoorsman with much more outdoor mileage than most politicians, who have mileage walking the halls of congress with the lobbyists. The only elected position I’ve held was to the Alaska Fish and Game Advisory board and I wasn’t elected to represent Republican hunters or Democratic trappers, rather I was elected to represent rural Alaskans who used fish and wildlife. I remain independent when it comes to my views on America’s outdoor lifestyle!
Lots of you know me as the owner of one of Alaska’s last great independent wilderness guide companies. I haven’t sold out to one of the catalog or box store "safari" outfitters. For those who haven’t met me yet, I’ll look forward to meeting you someday hunting, or fishing, rafting, or camping. I have earned a living through these past five decades entirely in the American outdoors by ranching, guiding, trapping, commercial fishing, logging, mining, and firefighting among other livelihoods.
I want to encourage all of you to vote in your upcoming state and federal elections. Nothing you do as an outdoors person (except take your kids outdoors) this year will be as important as making your voice heard through the representatives you send to office.
Bear down on this question of how to cast your vote in the upcoming elections with me. Ask yourself: "As an outdoorsman am I better off today than I was 10 years ago? Twenty, Forty?"
If you’ll consider what is at stake for a moment; I want to explain why I have chosen to break with the historic past and support Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for president instead of John McCain, the Republican nominee. I well know that elected Republicans have traditionally represented the interests of outdoors people, and rural, working class, independent farming, and ranching Americans. Not any more!
For those of you wondering which candidates will best represent your interests I want to pass along some observations that I have made along the trail. The trail I’m referring to is not the campaign trail where promises are cheap. The trails I mean are the game trails etched across a vast American landscape, the trails by creeks that once were full of trout and smallmouth bass, and the trails chosen by husbands and wives bringing up sons and daughters to love and live with nature.
I have logged well more than 15,000 miles on foot, on horseback, by paddle, and oar in the last 30 years in the American outdoors. Ten years ago I left a multi decade career in Alaskan Natural Resource management to start and run the best guiding company on the great salmon, Rainbow Trout, and Arctic Grayling streams of the Bristol Bay of Alaska. Today some of those salmon streams are in dire danger as a result of "out of control development pressure" by Alaska governor Sarah Palin and by the Washington DC Republicans who line their own pockets as they preside over the destruction of our resources and heritage.
As gun owners many of you know that as a young man I lived through each year waiting impatiently for hunting season and that I raised my children eating wild game. I joke that since I have carried a .44 magnum in a shoulder holster in Alaska for more than 30 years that my left shoulder hangs an inch below my right. I am no stranger to the issues of gun control and wildlife conservation.
When I worked as a State of Alaska forestry technician I worked for both Republican and Democratic administrations. I watched both administrations sell every stick of timber they could, right down to the banks of Grayling and Salmon rivers of Alaska when they could get away with it. I am not making this up; I laid out some of those timber sales.
Sarah Palin has a lot going for her, but mark my words. "She will sell you down the river in a heartbeat" if you get in the path of her "Missionary" zeal to develop the wild country of Alaska and soon the entire United States. She sells her pro-development agenda as "energy policy" when in fact it is policy that will enrich a very few corporate executives and deprive the vast majority of outdoors people of more and more public land! Palin is a "stand in" for the policies of oil and gas development that made Dick Cheney a fortune. In fact, when I really focus on the politics of the American outdoors, the entire pro-development platform of the Republican Party has never made me one dime but instead has cost me the wild land I hunted on as a teenager, and the streams I where caught my first salmon are now destroyed.
Frankly I’m disgusted, as a pro business man, who owns and runs a successful business. I have lived to see my retirement gutted, my savings depleted, and my mother’s fixed income reduced. The policies that we were told would help Americans have destroyed our wild lands, our rivers, and our forests, and now destroy our life savings and business opportunities. I’d scream "Throw the bastards out" if this wasn’t a polite discussion.
Are you lucky enough to have a "Teddy Roosevelt Republican" running in your state race who really understands that conservatives actually "conserve" and not merely sell our public resources to line their pockets? Well if you do, then by all means vote for that man or woman. But if you don’t trust the Republicans after what they have done to squander the resources and treasury of America then for the love of god, please, please, please, help defeat them!
Do you want your children and grandchildren to have a life in the American outdoors? Or do you want them to live their life as a "greeter" in a box store, built on the land that you grew up hunting? What good is your fishing rod if there is no clean water to fish? What good is your hunting rifle if there is no place left to hunt? What good is your bank account when the money is gone?
So please don’t vote for members of Congress or state offices who strip mine your heritage as an American outdoors person. Vote for a Democrat or an old time "Roosevelt Republican" but please don’t send the same people back to work for us who sold us down the river!
Good luck afield,
Mark Rutherford
Owner. Wild River Guide Company
www.wildriverfish.com
Email is: salmontroutguide@gmail.com
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Mark understood that this election is not just about Obama. Now that he lives here in Washington, he wanted his message to get out to the outdoors community here. So he asked me to write a letter to hunters and fishermen here, to be attached to his, explaining why a vote for the Democratic ticket was a vote to preserve wildlife habitat and our other natural resources. I gladly complied, and here it is:
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Mark Rutherford has asked me to write an addendum to his letter to American outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen as it relates to the 2008 elections in Washington State.
I am flattered that he has done so, for I am an outdoorsman only if the definition extends to being outdoors most of the time running a five-acre farm, raising beef cattle, hogs, and chickens, tending to a vegetable garden and a fruit orchard, and shooing black-tailed deer and raccoons away.
I am the Democratic chairman for the 34th Legislative District and I’d like to reinforce Mark’s point about "Teddy Roosevelt Republicans."
The first President Roosevelt was a long-range planner who thought generations ahead, and was conscious of the life cycles of forests, waterways, and animal and fish populations -- what we call ecosystems today. Roosevelt looked at our natural resources as long-term investments in the nation’s prosperity and security.
There always have been, and there continue to be, Republicans who value fresh, clean air and water, healthy forest systems, and thriving wildlife and fish populations, just as there always have been, and continue to be, people in both parties whose background is entirely urban and who have no consciousness of the outdoors.
Theodore Roosevelt left his legacy of conservation not only to the nation as a whole, but also to a significant segment of the Republican Party. But today, the Republican Party is dominated by "bottom-line," "profit-now" thinking that is incompatible with conserving natural resources as a long-term investment in the nation’s future. For example, I’m guessing that shooting wolves from airplanes as a "management tool" leaves a bad taste in the mouths of more than a few Republican outdoorsmen.
In Washington, the contrast between short-term, profit-driven governance and long-range planning couldn’t be more clear. In the 2008 election, the Democratic Party is the party of conservation of our natural resources, and a lot more faithful to Theodore Roosevelt’s ideals than the present version of Roosevelt’s own party.
The races that may be the most important for the long term conservation of natural resources for Washington and Vashon in particular are the Governor, the Attorney General, and the Commissioner of Public Lands.
Governor Gregoire established the Puget Sound Partnership as collaboration between communities, corporations, and state agencies to clean up existing pollution and to mitigate or prevent further pollution and degradation of fish, shellfish, and marine mammal habitat. Her Republican challenger, Dino Rossi, has shown no interest in this, and has allied with development and mining interests whose activities have been demonstrated beyond dispute to have a deleterious effect on the health of the Sound.
John Ladenburg, Democratic candidate for state Attorney General, made his mark going after polluters of Commencement Bay in two terms as Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney and two terms as Pierce County executive. The Republican incumbent, Rob McKenna, has little to no conservation credentials.
The race for Commissioner of Public Lands has the starkest contrasts between the Theodore Roosevelt conservation model and the "profit-now" mentality. The Republican incumbent, Doug Sutherland, is accountable for lax oversight of timber cutting on public land on the steep slopes of eastern Lewis County, by Weyerhaeuser, which contributes heavily to his campaign. Last winter’s heavy rains and the resulting floods wiped out farms in the Chehalis, Lewis, and Boistfort Valleys and dealt a severe setback to the economy of Lewis County, which is staunch Republican territory.
Moreover, Sutherland’s lax oversight of state tidelands allowed Taylor Shellfish Farms, another big contributor, to poach on state tidelands beyond the lands they had leased, with their invasive geoduck monoculture.
The Democratic candidate, Peter Goldmark, has vowed to restore the oversight to our state’s public lands that they need if we are to regard them as an investment and not just as a cash cow for short-term gains. Peter is a rancher, a hunter, a molecular biologist, and a regent of Washington State University whose election would put our public lands and natural resources back on the responsible footing that Theodore Roosevelt envisioned.
That’s my view of the races in Washington for 2008. I am not one of these "lock up the environment" Democrats, although certainly I am for strong environmental protections. I am a rural landowner who favors gun ownership, hunting and fishing for food, and maintaining our land, air, and water to maintain the strongest possible wildlife populations. Some of us might disagree respectfully on how to get there, but for this election in this state at this time, I believe that voting for the Democratic candidates for those positions is our best investment in the outdoors.
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Ivan Weiss Chairman, 34th District Democrats