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ESPN Outdoors makes the case for hunters being the original environmentalists…

A wild deer, with its bulk built from acorns and clover, supplies some of the most environmentally-responsible protein a person can eat. It’s a source that requires less water, fossil fuels or carbon emissions than the meat and even the vegetables Americans typically consume.

Hunters often claim to be the original environmentalists. In the case of their diet, a back-of-the-bar-napkin ESPNOutdoors.com analysis suggests they may have a point.

The short version — if you don’t want to plod through the math below — eating a pound of wild venison instead of a pound of beef may keep roughly a gallon of gas out of industrial food production.

You can read through the rest and all the “math” but that’s basically the upshot.

I think it’s also missing an important element that many so called environmentalists ignore.  Many (most?) hunters belong to a number of groups.  For example, personally I’ve donated to the following Pheasants Forever, Prarie Pothole, Ducks Unlimited and the Minnesota Waterfowl Organization.  And those are only a few of the countless similar organizations.  All of these organizations, as their primary purpose, are dedicated to obtaining and restoring wildlife habitat to it’s natural state.

While it’s true that Pheasants Forever, for example, is doing it at least in part to provide habitat for pheasants which it’s members would later like to hunt.  But pheasants do not live in a vacuum.  Every acre of habitat which is provided for pheasant is also suitable for countless other animals.

And really does preserving habitat really change the result depending on what the reason for it was?

Without hunters these groups would not exist.  And given the number and size of many of these groups, I would be willing to venture that as a group hunters give a lot more to environmentalist causes than so called environmentalists themselves.  Instead environmentalists seems to spend most of their time whining about how nobody pays attention to their silly futile efforts to make a difference.

So it’s left to hunters….who truly think globally but act locally.