“Drill here, drill now!”

This simple slogan has become a rallying cry for folks fed up with high gas prices, approaching “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner” and “Pork, the other white meat” in its popularity. Clearly, Americans are fed up, and rightly so, with a sagging economy, a weak dollar and tightened budgets.

High gas prices have especially hit home with hunters and anglers. Don’t tell our spouses, but we spend a lot of money chasing deer, elk, pronghorn, trout, pheasants, grouse and the others game species that fuel our passion. In Big Sky Country, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks released a report this year detailing that hunters spend $270 Million in the state each year on hunting alone – add in about $300 million for fishing and hunters and anglers drive a significant portion of the state’s economy. Clearly, with tightened budgets, we have less money to spend at Bob Wards, Sportsmen’s Surplus, and countless other retail stores that cater to our innate need for stuff.

Additionally, Montana is a big state with diverse opportunities for the sportsmen, and we like to travel to sample as much as our budgets and home and work responsibilities allow. In short, high gas prices are especially hard on Montana’s hunters and anglers.

With that in mind, it would seem that hunters and anglers would be all for more drilling more. The reality, however, is that we are accustomed to special interests against us dressed up in sheep’s clothing, waving red herrings and going off half-cocked.

Fact is, for those who haven’t witnessed massive leasing and drilling that has engulfed the Rockies in the past eight years, we’ve “been there, done that,” and it hasn’t worked.

Vice President Dick Cheney created the Energy Task Force in 2001 made up of the energy industry, and the Bush Administration passed the Energy Policy Act of 2003 that in part sought to vastly increase domestic production of oil and natural gas. Since then, record applications to drill have been processed for drilling public land, record lease sales have taken place, record productions have occurred, and yet, as the rate of all this drilling and production has increased, so to has the price at the pump.

But how can that be? The answer is simple: we don’t have enough dead dinosaurs…not even close. The U.S. has only 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet we use 25 percent of it. If looking at just the Rockies, we have less than 1 percent of the world’s oil. This amounts to a drop in the barrel—literally—so it should come as no surprise that even though we’re already drilling here and now, it is not the answer.

The solution is a comprehensive energy policy that includes moving away from petroleum to renewable energy, conservation, and technological innovation. If it were as simple as punching more holes in the ground, we would not be in the mess we’re in.

Sportsmen have come to realize in the last decade that the places we hunt and fish: the Upper Green River Basin, Roan Plateau, Powder River Basin, Book Cliffs, and many other public hunting and fishing lands throughout the West are becoming industrial zones. Game is being run off, habitat is being destroyed, streams are sullied and we are losing the places we know and love. And the price at the pump keeps going up, and up…and up. Sportsmen know when they are getting a raw deal, and destroying more of our public lands for an unattainable, unachievable energy policy is only making this deal worse.

Yes, we can and should drill where we can do so in an environmentally sensitive way, but that is not what is happening right now. Outside Pinedale, Wyo., mule deer populations have plummeted 46 percent; in the Powder River Basin, sage grouse populations have plummeted, trout streams in western Colorado are being poisoned from careless spills, and here in Montana portions of the Yellowstone River were recently leased for drilling. The Yellowstone River!

Few know our lands and understand the needs of fish and wildlife like sportsmen do, so Trout Unlimited, the National Wildlife Federation and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership have teamed up with over 300 local rod and gun clubs and businesses that cater to hunters and anglers to push for the Sportsmen’s Bill of Rights, a set of commonsense recommendations for our lawmakers and land management agencies to implement when balancing drilling with the immense fish, wildlife, and hunting and angling values our public lands are renowned for. While drilling is not the silver bullet, we know that, in the short term, drilling for natural gas and oil is a part of the solution. These recommendations will help to ensure that, while we continue to drill here and now, our hunting and angling heritage is not lost in the West, forever.

Corey Fisher is an energy field coordinator for Trout Unlimited’s Public Lands Initiative. He lives in Missoula, Mont., and can be reached via e-mail at cfisher@tu.org.