CONSERVATION

Eight years ago, I thought conservation meant protecting wildlife. I still believe that, of course. It's habitat and wetlands and healthy populations. It's the organizations doing the work, the volunteers giving their time, and the hunters and anglers whose licences, tags and dollars help fund so much of it. But the longer I've spent in this industry, conservation has become a much bigger word to me. I think it's about continuity. It's recognizing that something existed before you arrived, understanding your time with it is temporary, and deciding it should still be here after you're gone. I don't think that only applies to wildlife. I think it applies to almost everything worth keeping.

What We Carry Forward

Long before Canadian Huntress existed, giving back was already part of the world I knew. Since 1999, I've been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time around charitable foundations and functions connected to large organizations, corporations and boards my father-in-law was involved with. He invited me into that world, and over the years I watched how it worked. There were dinners and speeches, tables bought in support of a cause, silent auctions and draw tickets. People introducing people. Organizations raising enormous amounts of money in a single evening, others working under the radar, building support year after year.

At the time, I don't know that I thought particularly deeply about any of it. It was simply part of the world I'd grown accustomed to as an adult. You attended. You bought the tickets. You bid on something…you simply showed up. My father-in-law never sat me down and explained why. I learned it by watching him. Giving back wasn't something I associated only with having enough to spare. There were years when I couldn't afford to bid on anything at those fundraisers, but I still wanted to be in the room. There was something about watching people come together for a cause that always got me right in the centre of the chest. You didn't have to have a lot to understand the importance of giving something back.

It took getting older for me to understand how much that stayed with me. And years later, when Canadian Huntress brought me into an entirely different world, I began recognizing something familiar. The ballroom was different. The people were different. The cause was different. But underneath it all, I knew exactly what I was looking at.

Eight Chairs

For the past five years, I've purchased a table of eight at the Delta Waterfowl Thousand Islands fundraising dinner. The first time I walked into one of those dinners, there was something about it I already understood. The tables, the auction items, the draws, people buying tickets and bidding against each other and laughing about spending more than they intended. People who had attended for years standing next to people there for the first time. And underneath all of it was the reason everyone had gathered in the first place: conservation. It was the hunting world's version of something I'd been watching since 1999. So I did what had always seemed normal to me. I bought a table, eight chairs, and invited people to sit in them. With one exception over all those years, I've never asked any of my guests or friends to pay me for their seat. Somewhere around $2,500 a table, every year. Over five years, that's over $12,000, not including products, raffle prizes and other things Canadian Huntress has contributed along the way. But the older I get, the less interested I am in the number. What I think about now are the chairs, because a chair can be an invitation. Maybe someone attends their first conservation dinner because you gave them somewhere to sit. Maybe they meet someone, or learn something, or buy a handful of draw tickets that night. Maybe years later they're the one buying the table. You don't really know. And maybe that's the point. Not everything we put into something is supposed to come directly back to us.

Before It's Gone

When most of us hear the word conservation, we naturally think about protecting something under threat. A species. A wetland. A piece of habitat. But there's another part of conservation we don't talk about nearly as much: we have to care about things before losing them becomes urgent. That might be one of the greatest lessons the outdoors has taught me.

We protect habitat we may never hunt. We restore wetlands we may never see. We care about wildlife that will belong to generations of hunters and anglers who haven't even been born yet. And as hunters, our role in conservation isn't limited to the money we contribute or the habitat we help protect. It's also participating in the responsible management of wildlife itself. Regulated hunting means understanding populations, seasons and limits, and recognizing that harvesting deer, bear, birds and other game is part of maintaining healthy wildlife populations and the landscapes that support them. That has always mattered to me. Conservation isn't about never taking from the land. It's about understanding what we take, why we take it, and making sure there is something left for the people who come after us.

Somewhere along the way, I started seeing that same principle everywhere. Knowledge can disappear. Traditions can disappear. Access can disappear. Organizations can disappear. Entire ways of doing things can vanish when one generation assumes somebody else will carry them forward. Traditions have a cadence to them, one generation picking up where the last left off, and when that cadence breaks, that's usually when things quietly start to vanish. Even communities can disappear that way. Conservation, to me, has become the decision not to assume that somebody else will take care of it.

The People Who Show Up

I've also learned that putting something back doesn't always involve writing a large cheque. Somebody buys a $20 ticket. Somebody donates a prize. Somebody volunteers at an event. Someone teaches a new hunter something they wish somebody had taught them, or takes a kid fishing, or makes an introduction that changes another person's direction entirely. And somewhere there is always somebody who arrived early to help set up and is still stacking chairs after everybody else has gone home. That counts. Actually, I think a lot of conservation depends on those people, the ones who simply keep showing up.

There are things I support outside Canadian Huntress that I've intentionally never talked about publicly. This past spring, one of those organizations gave me a plaque for my continued support. I had no idea it was coming, and strangely enough, it meant more to me than almost anything hunting-related has in a very long time. Not because I needed a plaque. It was because somebody had noticed something I had never been trying to be noticed for.

I've thought about that quite a bit since. We live in a time when almost everything can become content. A donation can become a photograph. A good deed can become a caption. Supporting something can become part of how we market ourselves. Sometimes visibility matters. Organizations need people talking about them. Fundraisers need promotion. But I hope we never confuse being seen supporting something with actually supporting it. Some of the most generous people I've known throughout my life have been people you'd never know were doing it. They just did. My father-in-law was one of the people who taught me that.

More Than Wildlife

Maybe that's why my definition of conservation has changed so much. Eight years ago, I would have told you conservation was about wildlife. Today, I'd tell you wildlife is one beautiful part of it. Conservation is also responsibility. It's deciding that because something mattered to you, you're going to do your small part to make sure it could matter to somebody else. Sometimes that's a wetland. Sometimes it's a hunting tradition, or knowledge, or an organization doing good work. Sometimes it's eight empty chairs at a table. And sometimes it's another person.

Somebody gave me opportunities before I had much of anything to offer them in return. People introduced me to rooms I hadn't been in before. They invited me to tables. They taught me things. They showed me, usually without ever saying it out loud, that eventually you should become the person who does the same for somebody else. Maybe that's one of the responsibilities that comes with getting older. At some point, you stop being the person being shown the way. You become one of the people responsible for keeping the path there.

What We Leave Behind

The first entry in this Journal was about confidence, what we learn about ourselves. The second was about heritage, what we inherit. And maybe conservation was always supposed to come next, because eventually we have to decide what we're going to do with all of it. What did we learn? What were we given? What are we going to carry forward? Maybe that's the pattern of this Journal itself, what we learn, what we inherit, what we carry forward, each one setting up the next.

That's what conservation has come to mean to me now. Not simply protecting what exists, but participating in its continuation. Leaving something better than you found it. Making room for somebody who comes after you. Taking care of something that may never repay you for taking care of it.

I used to think conservation was mostly about what we protected. These days, I think it's just as much about what we pass on. A place. A tradition. Something we know. A seat at a table. An opportunity somebody once gave us. Maybe none of it was ever really ours to keep. Maybe we were only supposed to look after it for a while. Outside Looks Good On You™

Until next time, Dana