Confessions of an Eco-Redneck

It's hard, Steve Chapple complains, to be a real redneck in Montana. You just don't get enough sun in the winter months. But that doesn't prevent the author from doing the best he can in this collection of columns from the late 1990s. Whether hunting television sets (literally) in the wilderness ("No bag limits") or recounting all the possible excuses for coming home empty handed from a fishing trip, Chapple has a lot of insights to offer for outdoorsmen and women, and those irreverent enough to appreciate slaying sacred cows with a 30.06. A jacket blurb compares Chapple to Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. But the truth is, he is far more coherent than the former and far more readable than the latter. He is closer to Patrick F. McManus, but without the slapstick and with a lot more edge. Despite the subtitle, a significant portion of the book does not deal with environmental issues or saving wilderness. A large number of essays simply examine one or more topics vaguely related to wilderness or redneck life and drawing some very perceptive conclusions about what these topics say about society at large. Essays on tavern animals and the state fish in Hawaii fall into this mode. These are some of the more thoughtful columns I have read and I heartily recommend the book for these essays alone. Nonetheless, it was the title and essays related to saving the wilderness that attracted my attention to this book. The introduction and initial essay deal with what should be obvious, but which comes as something of a shock to many of my left coast conservationist friends, namely that hunters and fishermen are, in fact, sympathetic to environmentalist issues. So, one might add, are ranchers. It's actually rather amazing that this observation should even be controversial. Early conservationists were hunters. James Audabon, the famous bird painter, used to shoot and eat the very animals he painted. (This little tidbit of history was somehow left out of the California 4th grade story about Audabon in the state authorized Houghton Mifflin reader.) And Teddy Roosevelt was a famous big game hunter. National Park Service officials at Roosevelt National Historic Park do their best to brush over this inconvenient fact with an almost painful presentation about different historical "values." But the fact of the matter is that those who enjoy recreation in the wilderness are those often most concerned with protecting it, not various wealthy liberal city residents. Chapple's book is almost an apology to these latter people. He wants to assure them that, whatever the cultural differences, rednecks and liberal donors to wilderness groups have a lot in common. It's an interesting argument, but I'm not convinced by it. In fact, most of these essays suggest that "eco-rednecks" and today's environmentalists actually do not have a lot in common. Chapple's "Animal Rights" activist essay, for example, comments on the famous "I'd rather wear nothing