It's Payback Time!

Are you a giver or a taker? It's a simple question that goes far beyond a one-word yes or no answer.

The bottom line here, in the event that this question may come as a big surprise to some of my faithful readers, is very simple. Do you take more from your fishing or hunting trips  and your living area, than you put back?

The purchase of a fishing or hunting license grants us nothing more than an opportunity to legally fish or hunt. It is a privilege but not a guaranteed right. It promises opportunities, not limit catch or a heavy game bag.

$portsmen must learn to ask politicians the hard-hitting questions.

In days of old, when knights were bold, the landowner owned the fish and game. They also owned the river water that flowed through their property, and Heaven help those pesky peasants who poached one of the king's red stags, a brown trout or Atlantic salmon.

The human population was far less 300 or more years ago than now, and peasants were kept in their places and ruled with an iron fist. People caught poaching were severely punished, and any fish or game they may have taken was confiscated.

Things are much different now. We have flowing springs, but bottled-water plants are tapping into the underground aquifers. They are taking water but putting nothing back. There are developers ready to quickly fill wetlands, and they operate on the premise that it's easier to say "I'm sorry" later, if caught, than to ask for and be granted permission first.

These are trying times, and everyone wants and needs some outdoor recreation. We need to smell the roses, but what will happen when the roses stop growing?

What will happen when former trout streams become a mere trickle before drying up because a bottling plant has shipped our water out of state for corporate profit, and the trout have disappeared because bottlers have drained and sold our water? What about the ducks that once inhabited the wetlands or the bullfrogs that croaked all night

How many people are speaking out to Gov. Jennifer Granholm? Are you standing up to face big business, and asking the hard questions: Is sale of our water right?

What happens to Great Lakes water when Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas want our water? What will be done then? Hopefully, compacts already in place limit such withdrawals but those who do not care are greedily trying to circumvent those laws.

Who among us is speaking out about urban sprawl in the Traverse City area? Or near Charlevoix? Or in the Petoskey-Harbor Springs area? Cadillac is another area primed for a push from those who wish to move north to what they perceive as paradise in northern Michigan.

How many people are willing to take a few minutes from their busy lives to ask why? Why is state government allowing this to happen? Why are cities like Detroit becoming an empty maze of cluttered and unsafe streets, boarded up crack houses, and why has 1.2 million people fled Detroit over the past 20 years? Why is the same thing happening in Flint and other cities around this state?

People must learn to give something instead of always taking.

When will we get rid of all the crooks in government. Books have been written about Kwame Kilpatrick, who followed the lead of former Detroit mayor Coleman Young. The city was just something to be looted for personal game. They caught Kilpatrick, tossed him in the clink, but whatever they do to crooked politicians isn't enough to satisfy those who lost their savings.

One needs to look no furthern than some politicians. Consider Kwame Kilpatrick and his sordid text messages and political hijinks. He got some time in the can, but not nearly long enough for someone who profited while the city he was paid to protect teeters on the edge of death and total collapse, a city where crime is rampant.

I ask: What will become of our open fields, marshlands, hardwoods and conifers that now provide cover for game and non-game animals and birds here in northern Michigan? Has anyone paid attention to the downsizing of Michigan's deer herd? The marked decrease in snowshoe hares and some game birds?

How about those rivers where salmon and trout were once plentiful? Those rivers don't support the same number of salmonids as they once did, and  they may never regain their great popularity as world-class steelhead waters.

What about our Department of Natural Resources, a state agency nearly as financially bankrupt as the entire state government. When people lose their jobs in downstate factories, they often move north. Acre by acre, day after day, our land is being gobbled up, paved over and otherwise descecrated. Pheasants like these roosters are no longer common anywhere in the state.

A nice brace of ringneck pheasants taken during a snowstorm.

The answers are not nice but they are easy. We're talking about an excessive loss of habitat. We're talking greedy businessmen. How, I wonder, can Exxon and other gas companies declare such huge profits for shareholders while the average person was breaking his back trying to stay afloat when gasoline was over $4 per gallon just over a year ago. We have Medicare programs that no one understands, and skyrocketing prescription drug prices. It's bureaucracy at its worst.

Granted, what has happened in the past several years to our deer herd is not easy to cope with. But take a hard look at some of the problems.

Urban sprawl is eating away at land necessary for deer to live. People move north, buy their five or 10 acres of paradise, and disrupt deer travel routes. Homes are built where deer crossed roads. As more people move in, buy land, the terrain becomes even more fragmented. The deer soon disappear to another area that has yet to be exploited.

People see bears where they've never been seen before. The animals need a place to live, but humans have taken over. We own 20 acres we bought 30 years ago, and admit that we may have contributed to the problem. However, we did it long before the big push to move north came about.

Deer numbers in our area are way down so we hunt elsewhere when we can. Does this solve the problem? Of course not, it just puts a bit more hunting pressure on an area that hasn't felt the full force of land development like what has taken place around Traverse City. Where are the brook that once lived here?

Try to find brook trout like this now.

Thirty years ago when we moved here, Traverse City was a quaint northern Michigan town with about 8,000 people. Look at it today. It has the same types of problems as southern cities now faced. Drugs, embezzlement, rape, robbery, murder. We've got that whole bag of nastiness up here now, and paradise has lost most of its glitter and luster, but it still looks nicer than downstate so people keep coming back for another sample of the north.

Twenty or 30 years from now, when Traverse City has expanded southeast past Kingsley, southwest to Thompsonville, northwest to fill the entire Leelanau Peninsula, and northeast to meet Charlevoix that is expanding southward, we'll have the same problems that people fled when they moved north from the downstate big cities.

The difference is those who moved north brought much of their excess baggage with them, and now they want this area to be like their home area once was. Folks, it doesn't happen that way.

When will people look around, see the slow but inevitable destruction of this area, and wonder how and why we let it happen? Of course, the answer is easy: we are too busy raising a family, pinching pennies because half our pay is a view of the bay, and if we live long enough, we'll learn that if we aren't part of the solution, then we must be part of the ever-growing problem.

Meanwhile, paradise has been turned into another drug storechain, gas station, bank or a cement-carpeted parking lot. And one must look hard to find a rose to smell, a deer to see, or that wonderful silence at night when the northern lights sparkled in the heavens. Sorry folks, but the aurora borealis is hard to see through the glare of city lights.

The problem is people have taken what we deemed as ours and given nothing in return. How sad is that? How greedy are we? Many people should be ashamed of themselves. They've paved over paradise and turned it into a parking lot.

It's time for state residents to start giving something back.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors