06/02 © Ronald L. Moody (2002)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

The World in 2040 -
A Hunting Ground Stalked by Change

Where will you be in the year 2040?

After you finish answering that question with the usual lies, go ahead and admit that you, like me, will likely have long since paid our debt to nature.

Actually, 2040 wasn't in my date book, either, until I saw a recent news story about an English Literature contest. High school students were competing for a college scholarship by writing essays on the theme: The World In 2040.

I've been wanting a second chance at high school English for nearly 40 years so naturally I jumped right in. This could be the only occasion when far-sightedness is an asset. After all, any hunter who can zero in on the flick of a deer's ear across a canyon should be able to see what hunting will be like 38 years over the hill. (huh?)

So. Let's wipe our eyeglasses and jump right into 2040.

The journey starts with an unsafe assumption that people are still people in 2040 because we declined the temptation to 'improve' the human genome. If so, the essential nature of the human hunter will be intact and hunting will be practiced in some form.

Arriving in 2040, we see twice as many people living on the same amount of earth. Land use planning never caught on until after open landscapes already had disappeared. So the first difference we notice is that actual wilderness hunting in 2040 is limited to a lottery drawing for a once-in-a-lifetime permit. Everywhere else, people and animals are pretty well mixed together.

Hunting is still very much a prominent part of 2040 life, however. Looking around I can see that hunting is now more tightly controlled and completely re-organized - the crowded urban world forced hunters to change in order to survive. What do you expect in a USA-Canada of 425 million people that includes only 5 million hunters?

Because space is scarce in 2040, opportunity is strictly allocated - partly by a person's willingness to pay for their sport, but mainly by their ability to manage land and wildlife, and their competence in the skills of the hunt. Un-qualified citizens need not apply.

In 2040, a candidate for a hunting license must complete a formal training program. Hunter Education is a lifetime continuing process with periodic re-training and re-testing. Those who do not improve their abilities are weeded out to make room for new blood. To paraphrase the late Vince Lombardi: "best hunters hunt."

Nimrods of 2040, however, do not wander freely from one hunting place to another. All available hunting land - public and private - is divided into state-supervised hunting "concessions."

After qualifying for a license, every new Nimrod must first purchase membership in a hunting concession before they have a place to hunt. He/She and their fellow concessionaires are free to hunt on their own hunting ground; but they must earn any other opportunities they get by being good wildlife managers.

This is done through an "opportunity exchange." If the members of a hunting concession manage the wildlife on their hunting ground so well as to produce a surplus, they are allowed to offer their surplus hunting opportunities to outside hunters in exchange for the chance to hunt on other productive concessions. Members of a concession in the Rocky Mountains can thus exchange an elk hunt for a quail hunt down in Dixie, and so on.

Concessions are licensed by the states and are valid only so long as the hunters meet state wildlife management guidelines. Hunters who overshoot or neglect habitat will flunk an inspection and lose their investment.

Concessions are evaluated by the public wildlife trustee - production of surplus hunting opportunities for exchange is one of several ways to get merit points. State regulators also employ the point scores to decide which concessions get a chance to expand by bidding on vacant territories. Another way a concession group can improve itself is to offer non-consumptive wildlife opportunities to the non-hunting public. On a sliding scale, the more wildlife opportunities a group of hunters is able to offer to more people, the higher their state evaluation score will be. Access fees charged to the public now help pay for conservation.

State regulations also require the hunter-concessionaires to provide a specified number of hunting opportunities to youths. Indeed, concession groups are required to matriculate a certain number of new licensed hunters in order to be eligible to bid on vacant hunting territories or expand their hunting ground.

Like hunting, all wildlife institutions are changed in 2040. By this time, the Greater Society has had more than 40 years of experience with management theories based on non-consumptive preservation and attempted segregation of the wild from human influence. Frustrated with the decline in wild life and wild lands that resulted, the Greater Society finally committed itself to the only human support system that actually produced the results society wanted for wildlife - Hunting Based Conservation.

National and State Parks, which historically were closed to hunting, are now re-organized as conservation concessions that include hunting as a management tool, but with special guidelines for heavy non-consumptive public use. Streams and rivers are designated as specialized concessions which are regulated in the same way as land recreation concessions.
Private landowners are given the choice of sharing the profits of good wildlife management, or of paying the cost of bad management. They have little trouble making a decision. The landowners receive half or more of fees paid by the concession on their land. They also share supervisory power with the State in the all-important state evaluation of the concession that encompasses their property.

Perhaps the single greatest change we see in 2040 is that hunters now are honored by society for their conservation of wildlife instead of being despised as mere "trophy killers."

But that is a little too far-fetched. I'd better go back to the good old days where I belong. I hope the teacher grades this essay on the curve since the author obviously is around the bend.