Nonconsumptive users consumed by hunters

Fifty-eight-year-old Ronald Jordan doesn't exactly fit the profile of a "cultural warrior.'' He is an Anchorage small businessman who once ran for a state House seat, but his highest profile political action to date has come as chairman of a local community council fighting to get the state to stop planting moose-attracting vegetation along local roads.

The moose can't help but come to eat when food is put out for them, Jordan said, and sometimes the big animals don't pay attention to traffic. They walk in front of cars. Cars hit them. The cars are smashed. The moose are maimed or killed. And sometimes people are injured as well. As a life member of the Alaska Moose Federation, which runs the says-all Web site www.growmoremoose.org, Jordan doesn't like any part of this equation.

All of which, however strange this might seem, has put him at odds with wildlife viewers, who obviously like wildlife to be found where it can be easily viewed, like along a road. And part of this, in turn, has led Jordan into the culture war now swirling around the Anchorage Advisory Committee to the state Boards of Fisheries and Game.

The committee is a powerless organization which offers only advice to the boards, but it has become a symbol of a changing Alaska. Environmentalists tried to make it even more of one by filling board seats with advocates for protecting wolves and bears from bullets and traps. Alaska hunters caught wind of that and pushed back by going online at www.AmmoLand.com and elsewhere to warn that "environmental groups have mobilized to insert their preferred candidates in order to use the board to promote their agenda, including supporting the listing of Cook Inlet Beluga (whales) as endangered."

The latter claim was wrong. Neither the Anchorage committee nor the state boards have any real say over federal proposals to classify the Cook Inelt beluga as an endangered species. But the online assault, aided by conservative talk show hosts Rick Rydell and Eddie Burke in Anchorage, did get the message across.

An overflow crowd turned out earlier this month for a town hall-style meeting at which members of the advisory committee were to be elected. A slate of candidates backed by environmentalists won hundreds of votes, but the candidates backed by Sportsmen for Fish & Wildlife won more. Jordan was one of those eight successful candidates. He and the others supported by SFW generally back what has come to be called "abundance-based" fish and game management in the 49th state.

In this, they are like the members of most of the 80 other advisory committees representing communities large and small all across the state. The Anchorage committee of the moment, in fact, would probably fit well in the Southwest Alaska community of Bethel, said Wade Willis. Willis fills one of the holdover seats on the 21-member Anchorage panel, and he sees a problem with the Anchorage committee looking like the Bethel committee.

The Anchorage committee, Willis argues, is supposed to be representative of the state's urban center of 280,000 people, not a rural hub of 17,000. And everyone in Alaska knows there are big differences between the rural part of the state and what some call "Los Anchorage.'' Rural Alaskans are married to the land and a lifestyle in which hunting goes back for generations. Urban Alaskans are part of a society moving away from that.

Willis is the former Alaska representative of Defenders of Wildlife, a wolf-adoring environmental group. And though a lifelong hunter himself, he tends to refer to other hunters, or at least hunting advocates, as members of the "kill it and grill it'' crowd. In this, he believes, he is probably more representative of most of Anchorage than the rest of the board.

Willis is, for instance, generally opposed to Alaska programs designed to increase numbers of moose, caribou and Dall sheep by killing wolves. Polls have shown up to 75 percent of Anchorage residents agree with him, whereas in some parts of rural Alaska there is strong support for what has come to be called wolf control. And in rural Alaska, there is even stronger support for traditional wolf hunting and trapping.