I came of age during a great time of environmental protection. Activists fought thru the courts and protested to win the right to begin healing the scars of two hundred years of industrial revolution. 40 years later we all appreciate their struggle.
Here today in California, we”ve developed another environmental problem, ultra-protectionism, where very little or no harvest is permitted regardless of the science or population of the resource. Protecting a resource to death is not an answer.
Our forests are a thousand trees per acre. Healthy forests have 80 trees per acre.
The brush of our Chaparral has grown so high that it offers little or no food to our wildlife that depends on it.
Both our Chaparral and forest promise catastrophic wild land fire where intense heat sterilizes the soil and slows regeneration.
Lions have been protected a little more than 40 years and were specially protected about 20 years ago.
Funding was written into the law to the tune of 40 million dollars a year for 20 years and 20 million dollars a year thereafter. To date that”s eight hundred million dollars. Oh yes, the population of California”s mountain lions are so numerous that have begun to interbreed and worse they have devastated our big horn sheep, deer and elk herds.
There”s talk of requiring tags to shoot coyotes, a most resilient predator.
Then the reason for my writing: About 15 hundred bobcats are harvested annually here in California. If you pay for a trappers license, you may sell your fur and that”s enough to stop all bobcat hunting in California.
Our dogs and cats disappear, then predators starve and die.
This is not pre-colonial times or is it before humans crossed the land bridge across the Bering Sea from Asia. This is the 21st century.
California”s law makers and the fish and game commission are going down the wrong road. Ultra-protectionism is only destroying our home, California, our Golden State.
Joe G. Welz
Clearlake Oaks
