Shooters and hunters (& old sofas) on BLM & National Forest public lands

The Department of the Interior has a tough job managing our lands because of the many different ways people want them to be used.

Are they a source of lumber?  Minerals?  Feed for cattle?  Hunting?  Off-road vehicles?  Shooting?  Hiking/camping/birding?  Preservation of animal species?  Vacationing?  

The answer of course is all of the above.

But today's lesson, dear student, is about the problems created by hunters and shooters.  

That problem can be summarized as these two groups of users are messy.  

Shooting is allowed on many public lands.  That's fine.  But for some reason shooters do not adhere to the pack it in pack it out philosophy that other users seem to respect.  They leave their shells and targets everywhere.  

These photos are from ONE SITE near where we camped recently.  It is not an outlier.  

Why do shooters think they can just leave their trash behind?  

Maybe there needs to be permits to shoot in public lands.  By getting the permits users have to agree to certain standards.  Money from the permits could also be used to pay civic groups to clean up messes.

Hunters are another problem.  As with shooters, we have no philosophical objection to the use of our public lands for this purpose.  However, from what we have been told, hunters start a lot of the forest fires.  Many also do not remove the carcasses as they are supposed to.

It seems the only answer to this problem is raise fees for hunting. Use the extra money to pay civic organizations to retrieve carcasses and clean up messes.  After hunters get the message, and do a better job of cleaning up after themselves, lower fees accordingly.

And, campfires should be considered a thing of the past, unless one is in an established campground. They are a lot of fun, and can make you feel like you are "really" camping, but the damage to our public areas from fires is astonishing.

Everybody's personal dump:

Now that I'm on a roll I might as well add one more group to this list--trashy people. Too many people just dump their junk in BLM lands.  We have seen huge piles of trash:

Even abandoned cars

But the biggest issue, oddly, is that people dump their old sofas.  Maybe they bring them out for a weekend party, throw up on them too many times, and just abandon them.  

But they are everywhere:

The only solution I can see is to end the dang sequester.  And then to hire more BLM officers to write more tickets.  The main source of income from our public lands is tourism.  Tourists are not intested in visiting town dumps.  They all have one at home if that's their thing.

Another possibility is to invest in more signs.  Signs work for some people.

And finally, how about taking a lead from the adopt a highway program.  Adopt-a-campsite.  Keep it clean and get a sign with your name on it.  Private citizens might like this, and businesses would like the basically free advertising.

There!  I can go have my glass of red wine now knowing how much better the world would be if I could just have my own way about many things,