It's so beautiful out here,
but someone has to pay to keep this wilderness and all its wildlife going.
So where does that money come from?
A big chunk of funding comes from hunting and gun sales.
But these days the number of hunters is declining, and the debate around guns is raging.
This old system is starting to look a little shaky,
which makes you wonder:
How did weapons become such a critical part of conservation in America?
Well you could say it all started
when a tree hugger and a gun lover
went on a camping trip.
The year is 1903 and the place is Yosemite Valley.
This bearded guy is John Muir.
He was a passionate naturalist who had started the Sierra Club in back in 1892
to raise money and lobby for environmental causes.
He called hunting "the murder business."
Muir's unlikely camping buddy was President Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt loved hunting.
He really, really loved hunting.
And ... he loved wild places.
In Yosemite, Muir and Roosevelt camped in cathedral-like groves of sequoias and at the
base of Bridalveil Falls.
And when Roosevelt got back to Washington, he wrote: "There can be nothing in the world
more beautiful … our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children
and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred."
Roosevelt championed the idea that hunters
should help pay to protect the wilderness they enjoyed.
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation was born.
More and more states sold hunting permits and then used that money to restore habitat
and manage wildlife.
In 1937, Teddy's fifth cousin Franklin signed a law that put a tax on guns and ammo
and sent the money to state wildlife agencies for
restoration, preservation and training hunters.
In this system, hunters are conservationists.
They provide some funding and they help keep wildlife populations in check.
"White-tailed deer are a prey species.
When they don't have any predators
and they have good food,
they're real happy, they make a lot of little deer.
Man has to take the role of
predator around here so to speak.
At one point we were harvesting 15-20 adult does
off here to get the population down."
Chip West gets his hunting permit at this gun shop
-- this season it costs $39.50 -- and all that money goes straight to Delaware's
Division of Fish and Wildlife.
And he's got to stock up on ammunition -- 11 percent of what he pays is collected
by the federal government and then doled back out to the states.
In 2016, Delaware raised $4.2 million from hunting and the sale of guns and ammunition.
And some of that money went to protecting the nesting grounds of piping plovers,
studying a threatened bog turtle, and lots of other programs
across 60,000 acres of the state.
Of course, there are other folks who work on conservation here --
private groups and federal agencies.
But state agencies do a lot of work on the ground
and their funding is starting to dry up.
That's because baby boomers like Chip are starting to age out of hunting.
Here's a typical age distribution of hunters from 1992.
Lots of hunters in their 40s, controlling the deer population
and putting lots of money into the system.
Now ... those people have gotten older, and pretty soon, they'll stop hunting.
Chip West: "Were not putting enough young kids in
to take care of all of us old geezers going out the other end."
"When my gig is up if you don't replace me with a hunter
where is the money going to come from?"
Well in the last few years, the decline in revenue from hunting permits
has been offset by an increase in the sale of guns.
All kinds of guns.
Some people are pretty disturbed by this --
that any aspect of conservation is tied to
the sale of weapons.
And no matter how you feel about guns,
firearm sales are a pretty
unpredictable source of revenue.
So if you're going to preserve all this -- who's going to pay for it?
Some say it should be people who buy tents and binoculars.
Others say we should all pitch in, because you don't have to be a hunter or hiker
to benefit from America's wilderness.
This is Skunk Bear, NPR's science show.
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