All forms of outdoor recreation involve some kind of land use, and some recreational activities may generate acute environmental problems. Oil drips and oil-laden exhaust from the millions of powerboats in America is a major source of freshwater petroleum pollution. Mountain bike tire lugs and "waffle-stomper" tread design on hikers' boots have been targeted as the cause of severe soil compaction and consequent erosion in many wilderness areas. Off-road-vehicle [ORV] abuse of trails and land has become severe enough in some localities that strong law enforcement measures have been adopted to lessen the impact of these vehicles. While generally benign in their overall effect, the proliferation of community ball parks adds to the load of lawn management and electrical consumption for lighting. Kayaking and canoeing in some areas generate substantial retail sales of products and services such as guiding. These activities have substantial lobby groups that can pressure regulatory agencies into artificial agendas for lake water levels or downstream dam releases. The effects of heavy participation in these sports along some river corridors generates so much bankside foot traffic that soil and vegetation become severely abused. In the Tennessee area, the Hiwassee and Ocoee Rivers and in North Carolina the Nantahala River exhibit this kind of degradation.
Of all the forms of outdoor recreation, however, hunting is the sport most vulnerable to transformation due to alterations in long-standing patterns of land use. Unlike all other forms of outdoor recreation, hunting involves a vector of risk that reaches far beyond the hunter. While far more people die annually in boating accidents than are killed in hunting, the inherent dangers in hunting require a relatively large area for the safe practice of the sport. When there was a density of less than one person per square mile in America firearm safety was a minor issue. Today, there are on average 125 persons per square mile in Tennessee and safety has become a major issue for hunting. Public safety in relation to hunting in the last decade has become a major public relations issue for hunters.
American hunting became a traditional and emotionally protected activity at a time when settlement density was lowest. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the isolated and scattered locations of farmhouses represented minimal risk for the practice of safe hunting, and farmer-hunter relations reached a peak in the 1950's. As our population has grown, more people come within the range of danger due to firearms used in hunting. The risk is accentuated by the patterns of development that we are seeing as the countryside is resettled with houses. Fields and woodlots that for a hundred years or more had been free of structures and accessible to hunters are now being rapidly lost for hunting access. As farm land is re-sold and sub-divided by non-resident inheritors, new owners build houses in the countryside and increase the potential conflict with hunting use of the land.
Since the 1950's, however, more people have become involved in hunting at the same time that more land is being transformed into suburbs. What is particularly difficult for the hunter--especially the deer hunter--is the fragmentation of landscape through the even distribution of houses not only into the former fields of farms but into the coves and heavily forested areas as well. Keith-Springs Mountain must now be considered developed and houses have been insinuated into many of the cove areas around the plateau. Sewanee Summit properties has brought a line of houses into an otherwise largely unoccupied forest tract. Similar development is occurring along the Jumpoff Road, in Sherwood, and far beyond Tims Ford Dam along Rt. 50 into Moore County.
As development proceeds in the Franklin County area, more hunter-landowner conflicts will arise and the safe practice of hunting will become more difficult. Hunters will be driven into increasing competition for access to smaller and smaller tracts of hunting space, particularly in the southeastern side of the county. This competition has already lead many hunters to organize into clubs to lease and control access to hunting areas. Such arrangements are beneficial to club members but generally remove large areas of land from general hunting and eventually degrade the general tradition of hunting into an elitist activity. Hunters who are excluded from club-lease arrangements must then compete for space in increasingly hunted public areas such as state forest areas or on pivately held timber and paper company lands.
In the long term, even apart from the moral objections of anti-hunters, hunting will be forced out of the landscape by the simple pressures of ubiquitous residential development. Ironically, the disappearance of hunting will coincide with the rising need for hunting as a management tool to contain deer populations. Political pressures are strong upon management agencies such as TWRA and AEDC to provide for the stocking of more animals and for more generous seasons or quotas. The wildlife biology practices that have had such success in whitetailed deer restoration, however, now generate conflicts with landowners who have too many deer. At the same time, there is a growing non-hunting public who have no interest in the use of public funds to support hunting and who are developing agendas in Tennessee and other states to shift wildlife agency funding to non-game species and habitat protection.
In addition, we must note that as public environmental awareness increases and as state and federal regulations become more effective, large areas of land are now beginning to be managed on an ecosystem basis, not on the basis of a preferred use whether that use is commercial, military, or recreational. Ecosystem management represents a fundamental practical and philosophical shift in land management that has been largely unappreciated by the hunting community. Often refusing to acknowledge ecological realities, hunters have insisted upon large deer herds and "trophy" bucks to harvest. The management practices to accomplish these goals with respect to animal biology and land management must be regarded as highly artificial. Current deer herd size, male-female ratios, and genetic mix across the South do not represent the conditions of natural animals. Although the whitetailed deer is a native species, management practices have turned it into a virtual exotic.
As official policy on public lands and as adopted policy on large private lands shifts to ecosystem management, conflicts with the agendas of hunters will develop and in some areas become severe. Locally, for instance the surrounding buffer lands of the AEDC site have been utilized by TWRA and the USAF to promote public relations agendas and to provide hunting access when access on private lands has become more restricted. Some AEDC land has been groomed explicitly to promote deer herds, and some land adjacent to Woods Reservoir have been groomed to favor the needs of waterfowl hunters. As ecosystem management is phased in at AEDC as it is being phased in at military bases all across the country, land policies designed to favor hunting [cutting of trees and brush from around duck blinds, for instance] will be altered or eliminated. Planting of non-native species of grasses and other plants for deer food will likely end as well. On a sustainable ecosystem basis, deer herd size is likely to be much lower than present levels.
We can anticipate that a transformation of wildlife management from hunter to observer-oriented will take place as development continues and as hunting becomes a more and more problematic solution to the problem of herd management. Franklin County has one of the largest deer herds in Tennessee; it also has one of the hardest herds to safely access and this problem grows worse each year. Eventually there will probably occur--despite the inability of current hunters to imagine this--a restriction against the use of rifles for deer hunting. Many counties in other states where much rural development has occurred have restricted deer hunting to "shotgun only." The reason for this are quite simple: typical deer rifles have a downrange danger zone of two to five miles. The typical danger zone for "buckshot" in shotguns is about 150 to 200 yards and for a rifled slug about 500 yards. Shotguns are substantially safer for deer hunting in developed areas.
There are strong legal and symbolic prejudices against the use of shotguns for deer hunting in Tennessee, but hunters will be increasingly pressured to accept this if they want to continue to hunt in developing areas. Eventually--if the last thirty years of rural development in this county can be accepted a precedent--deer hunting and many other forms of hunting will become impossible throughout most of the county even without the use of rifles. It is naive in the extreme for hunters or the general public to imagine that life is still pretty much like it was in the 1950's or that ecosystems are essentially static or that the rates of development will peak and taper off. None of these things is true: major alterations in the conditions of land use by hunters have already occurred severely abridging the practice of the sport; ecosystems are in fact dynamic and do not permanently favor a single species in spite of intensive managment; and even a declining birthrate among caucasian Americans will not stem the flood of people moving onto new rural lands.
As population continues to grow and as the rate of development increases, the nature, type, and quality of outdoor recreation will continue to shift toward group-based activities such as team sports or repetitive activities such as boating. Wildlife management will increasingly be oriented to non-game species and utilized by a predominantly non-hunting public.