I'd first like to express Chief Peterson's disappointment in being 

 unable to address you, bit his loss is my gain. But I do bring you his 

 wishes for a very successful symposium. 



The next thing I must do is explain the change in the topic of the 

 talk that I plan to give you. The title of this speech was a kind of 

 moving target. When Chief Peterson got the request to come and talk 

 it was supposed to be on the future of hunting. And because he 

 couldn't make it, he assigned me to come and make this talk for him. So 

 I prepared a paper on the future of hunting. And about that time I 

 got word form the Region that they really want me to talk on energy 

 conservation plans for the Forest Service and how they affected 

 hunting. Well, I still felt fairly comfortable here because I thought 

 there could be a tie between these, but then I started looking into the 

 policies of the Forest Service. . .the national policies now. . .of the Forest 

 Service on energy and then I ran into kind of a problem. How in the 

 heck could I really tie those into hunting because we're addressing real 

 big things back there? Like the efficiency of all our dwellings, the 

 caulking and all the insulation that goes into the ranger stations. 

 That's one big policy. We're going to try to be as efficient as we can. 

 And the other one involves the use of fuels and if you don't believe 

 this is a serious thing, you ought to talk tho these guys in the field 

 that have got restrictions now on how many miles they can drive in 

 their pickup. And here I though well, maybe I could tie that to 

 hunting because in this day and age of the paper shuffle, probably 

 going hunting would be the one opportunity a ranger would have to 

 really get out and take a look at the lands he administers, but it's still 

 a taboo in the government business to use government vehicles to do 

 this, so I still couldn't tie this thing to energy to hunting. It is true 

 that we recognize the seriousness of the nation's energy situation and 

 have encouraged our field units, in all their planning, to try and be as 

 efficient as possible in the energy area. And if this is a concern, I'd 

 certainly be willing to address any of these areas. And then when I 

 saw the title that you had on this, it says here "Oil and Gas on the 

 Rocky Mountain Front-and the Impact on Wildlife." Well, there are a lot 

 of peop!e--mainly I guess my own Forest Service people--that rushed 

 down to this meeting to see what the hell I was going to say about this 

 because they knew I didn't know anything about it. And I had some 

 other people come here hoping that they'd get to hear some great words 

 of wisdom. For some reason they think there's no use to pray to the 

 saints when you can pray to Jesus Christ for ths same price, so they 

 try to get the answers from higher up. But really all the answers 

 come from down on the ground and if we haven't learned this as a 

 group, we sure as heck ought to. And after my little talk, if you 

 folks want to ask questions that involve this area, well we'll do our 

 darnedest to try to address them. And we've got the Forest 

 Supervisor here, the Deputy Regional Forester, and the Wildlife Chief 

 of the region. There are many people here that can probably address 

 these points. Now when things get into appeal, there's no doubt about 

 it, that it does get on high, but we still have to go down to the field 

 to get our answers. That's the only place they come from. 



So with that I'd like to start by crystal-balling how hunting on 

 national forests will be affected by the energy crunch. Actually, I see 



