New York should extend deer season

 

A couple of weeks ago the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) surprised deer hunters with something akin to an early Christmas present: Our game commission is floating the idea of extending the southern zone deer season through the Christmas break.

 

Currently, in that zone (which includes all of the counties covered by this newspaper), the late-season archery and blackpowder offerings immediately follow the regular firearms season and last for 9 days. This year, they run from December 14 to 22.

 

Under the DEC’s proposal, they would like to add 7 days to those special seasons, this year and going forward, from December 26 through January 1.

 

That may not seem like much, but this greatly increases opportunity for hunters to get into field and forest to fill their freezers. That “holiday deer hunt”, as the DEC calls it, would occur during what is for all schools and colleges and many factories and offices the Christmas break. Hunters who may have previously struggled to find the time to fit a Saturday or Sunday of hunting into their busy schedules will have access to numerous days of leisure to get outdoors.

 

I am in full support of the DEC’s plan. It’s a winner. I look at the impact that it has on what we could call the Four Fs: family, funding, feeding and flowers.

 

The shared breaks will allow shared hunts, getting the whole family outdoors. That bond is how a lifetime of sustainable harvest, conservation-mindedness and respect for nature are created in a youngster. The holiday hunt also brings back to the fold older family members who have moved away. The holidays are when many come back to New York State and spend a few days, if not the whole week, at their loved ones’ homesteads. Now, they can rekindle the love affair they had for their old stomping grounds.

 

Bringing back the snowbirds and chasers of greener pastures will also help bring much-needed funding to the DEC, advancing the good work they do in managing wildlife, stocking fish, protecting the environment and hosting campgrounds and trails. A non-resident license that covers hunting, archery or muzzleloading, and two doe tags comes in at $150. If the State picks up four thousand hunters for the holidays, that’s $600,000 being directly invested in the DEC. There’s a lot the DEC can do with that, especially in the COVID era when state budgets are strained and people are flocking to the outdoors.

 

The outcome of all of these efforts should be a harvest of nature’s bounty. A couple of deer can keep a family well-fed for a year, providing them a very healthy protein. This is much needed in today’s world: In 2019, more than 10% of US homes had some level of food insecurity. That number has been driven up dramatically by the socioeconomic impact of COVID and its lockdowns of the economy. In late-March, when COVID was at its most frightening, a quarter of US households claimed they didn’t have enough to eat. The State could help fight hunger by extending the season and allowing hunters to fill their freezers and their bellies as well as those of others who may be in need: The Venison Donation Coalition in New York provides a whopping 38 tons of venison each year to food banks…a holiday hunt could substantially increase that.

 

Lastly, there is the considerable environmental impact of an extended deer season. Further winnowing down the herd saves local forests and wildflowers. Many naturalists, yours truly included, know that the overabundance of deer in Western New York has destroyed our forests’ understories, wiping out vast stands of rare orchids and other wildflowers. What I always use the example in this plight: Our family farm for all my childhood had a vast population of trilliums; in one spot, a sea of white covered over an ace of the forest floor every spring. Those trilliums have been wiped out for almost 20 years now, as the deer browsed on the plants’ tender leaves, some of the first greens of the spring. Rightsizing the deer population could bring back these and other plants we’ve lost.

 

If you would like to make your voice heard as the state ponders this initiative, know that through November 8 the DEC is accepting public comment on the proposal. You can voice your opinion in two ways, email (WildlifeRegs@dec.ny.gov with Holiday Deer Hunt Proposal as the subject) or postal mail (Jeremy Hurst, NYSDEC Bureau of Wildlife, 625 Broadway, 5th Floor, Albany, NY 12233). Before doing so, it’s suggested you read all the details on page 7 of the September 9^th New York State Register at tinyurl.com/HolidayDeer.

 

From the 28 September 2020 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News

New York should promote its dark skies

Over the past 15 years, astrotourism has become one of the fastest-growing trends in tourism.

 

We clearly saw that with one significant event – 2017’s solar eclipse – that saw 7 million Americans make the pilgrimage to the eclipse’s best paths.

 

But, astrotourism is more than just one eclipse. It has become a sustainable industry.

 

What once was travel only partaken by hardcore astronomers has become mainstream as more and more people from all walks of life are venturing to places with dark skies (that is, away from the city lights) to see the northern lights or observe celestial bodies and meteor showers in skies nearly as pristine as those that our ancestors slept under.

 

It’s something that New York should capitalize on, but really isn’t.

 

All told, the state and individual counties and chambers of commerce spend millions of dollars every year on advertising all of the natural wonders in our state (like Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, and the Thousand Islands). Very little, if anything, is spent on promoting our dark skies, despite having some very special sites in the Empire State. 

 

In the Southern Tier, a good chunk of territory that runs along the Pennsylvania border and includes towns like Alma, Whitesville and Jasper falls under nearly dark sky jurisdiction and stargazers are greeted by nighttime skies featuring countless stars and thick imagery of the Milky Way. The skies are so dark that at the town of Alma’s strategic plan issued in 2016 had a whole section devoted to the promotion of stargazing, in hopes of one day having a dark sky festival and having the purity of their skies receive accreditation from various astronomy governing bodies.

 

Looking across the state, approximately two-thirds of the Adirondack Park, a massive area, falls into that same category of night sky, too. There is a small area within it, though, where the skies are even darker, the darkest in the entire northeast. About a half hour to the east of the ever-popular community of Old Forge is a dark sky area centered around Raquette Lake. There, skywatchers are treated to the heavens exactly as they were before Thomas Edison’s light bulb took hold and drowned out the stars. In that place, 10,000 stars can be seen with the naked eye. To put that in perspective, that’s 7 to 10 times what you can see on a good night in rural Niagara County. 

 

To see exactly what I mean about dark sky ratings, refer to the dark sky finder at  tinyurl.com/ConferDarkSky. There, you can zoom in and out of the map of the United States to find the best places to see the stars.

 

The nearness of the Southern Tier and the Adirondacks to the population centers of the northeast is appealing to this newest demographic of outdoor adventurer….both locations are just one tank of gas away from 56 million people.

 

They could all use that primordial exposure to the sky above. We all could. 80% of North Americans can’t see the Milky Way through light pollution, even here.

 

Ten years ago, in a column for this paper, I lamented the loss of dark skies in the immediate area. Thanks to the city lights of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Lockport and the Greater Toronto Area, Niagara’s skies are anything but dark and our rural communities aren’t spared that. That’s why locals had such a hard time seeing Comet NEOWISE earlier this year – other places in this state had a great chance to see a rare naked-eye comet, but we couldn’t.  

 

That nighttime misery, as bad as it is, is nothing compared to that of New York City where its residents never see stars unless the electrical grid goes out as it did in August of 2013. That outage was probably a wake-up call to many metropolitan denizens. That’s because the first time that you have unfettered access to the heavens is unforgettable, you feel like a new person -- spiritually and intellectually. You’ll want more of that experience…guaranteed.

 

It’s time that the good people at “I love New York” and other tourism offices across the state took advantage of that desire to be mystified by the stars. With even just a little focus on astrotourism, they can bring in new customers who will, in turn, be repeat customers. We’re already losing tens of thousands of astrotourists every year to Pennsylvania’s well-promoted Cherry Spring State Park.

 

Let’s not get further behind in that regard as outdoors-centric travel continues its ascent in the COVID era as people look to escape lockdowns and home confinement to experience the awesome sights that Mother Nature can provide.  

 

 

From the 14 September 2020 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News

 

COVID crisis shows value in liberal arts degrees

 

Organizations – be they businesses, non-profits, or governments – that have best weathered the shared and unique circumstances during the COVID crisis are those with creative thinkers as their leaders or in positions of responsibility within their enterprises. In many cases, they’ve made navigation of this event look easy.

 

What’s not easy, though, is finding people like that.

 

We, as a society, have driven the workforce to specialization and, in turn, narrow scopes, narrow worldviews, narrow thinking. The over-reliance on severely focused fields of study – it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about degrees in business, public administration, psychology or any number of certifications – works well in normal times: You have a job; you do it; and you do it well. But, when stuff hits the fan, just as it has and will in this crisis, you need a different sort of person to master the nuances, extremes, and ever-changing new normal -- people who can break free of the reins of situational myopia.

 

Events like this highlight the incredible value of liberal arts degrees.

 

The liberal arts – the studies of the sciences, arts and humanities – had long been held in high esteem. Their studies created the foundation of education in the Western world and saw their dawn in ancient Greece, a society known for deep intellect and reasoning. The Greeks saw a desire for a universal understanding and the liberal arts promoted that.

 

That love affair with intellectual versatility continued for centuries. For a good portion of the United States’ early history, the liberal arts were the predominant method of study in our universities and colleges. But, after the Civil War, things changed dramatically. Those in academia capitulated to statehouses and businesses which wanted something different. They didn’t want well-rounded citizens; they wanted task-specific workers. They wanted cogs in their machine; they didn’t want someone else mastering that machine.

 

Higher education was transformed, as was the view of classical education. It has been the case, especially since the Second World War, that liberal arts diplomas have been reviled by misguided employers, institutions of higher education, and prospective students. Let’s look back over the past half-century. In the academic year ending 1971, only 0.8 percent of the bachelor’s degrees conferred in the US were for liberal arts. For the academic year ending this past May, they represented a still miniscule 2.2 percent, a previously-upward trend that has been in reversal for the past decade and a half.

 

That’s unfortunate given the incredible value they could bring to the table now, in this crisis. Just think about what the manager of a small business or the lawmaker in a state capital must face for the foreseeable future: How do you navigate a changing economy? How do you adjust to meet mandates or create protocols in public and personal health? What are the expectations of your customers, coworkers and community in this strange new world? What impact has this had on the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of those same people? What can we learn from other places? What can we learn from science? What can we learn from history? What will the future hold? What can we make the future be?

 

Those best prepared to answer those questions and weather this storm are the versatile souls who were once known as Renaissance Men or Women. Think of how well-rounded, inquisitive, reasoned and creative someone must be to navigate the nuances of COVID – they must be or become in part, an sort of expert on health, sciences and people while still holding true to their job as a businessperson or elected official.

 

We’ve failed as a country in the development of free thinkers…we don’t have enough of them. I don’t know if we can achieve that, either. Despite there being 1,500 colleges and universities in this country, only 200 still consider themselves liberal arts schools. Also, most other colleges, when setting degree requirements, don’t emphasize the use of classical education in the later years of one’s program, they are more or less thrown at underclassmen as core courses then devalued thereafter.      

 

It’s truly unfortunate, given what the liberal arts are: The central academic disciplines are philosophy, logic, linguistics, literature, history, political science, sociology, and psychology.

 

Those are considerably important tools in this crisis and their proper use – all at once -- could pay considerable dividends to the person, the organization and the world. 

 

And realize, too, that history is but an endless series of crises and this is just the latest. Before that, we had the Great Recession. Before that terrorism. Before that the Cold War. I could go on and on. More are going to happen. Even organizations and governments – large and small – have to deal with their own individual crises quite often. 

 

In this one and those to come, we need special people who know a little about everything, think deeply and react appropriately and justly.  

 

We need those people whom you once asked: “What the heck are you going to do with that degree?”

 

 

From the 07 September 2020 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News