Sportsmen's Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. WALZ. Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding time.

I rise in support of the SHARE Act and the Sportsmen's Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act.

I thank my co-chair on the Sportsmen's Caucus, Mr. Wittman, for his work on this bill. Like so many you have heard here today, we, as a Nation, are blessed with an abundance of opportunities in the outdoors. Like so many, I take advantage of them: hiking, biking, hunting, and fishing.

For those who do participate in hunting and fishing, it truly is a passion, it is a way of life, and it is a heritage that we share with our parents. I don't think there is one of us who participated in it who doesn't remember a crisp autumn morning, waking up with our father, cooking breakfast, and going out to the field with the dew on the grass and the Sun coming up. To this day, I don't remember if we necessarily got a pheasant, but I remember my dad, and I remember talking about it.

It was on those trips that I think we understood that hunting and fishing, as a way of life, is not in a vacuum.

Hunting and fishing in Minnesota, 1.7 million Minnesotans participate in hunting and fishing. That contributes $3 billion to our economy and creates 48,000 direct jobs. If you take that across the Nation, it is $90 billion a year to our economy. That is not in a vacuum either, because we have a really unique system of conservation in this country: user pays and public benefits. Every shell and cartridge that is purchased and every fishing rod and boat that is purchased has an excise tax in it that goes back into the very conservation.

The people who are out hunting and fishing understand as well as anyone, if you don't have the proper habitat, you don't have the pheasants.

An organization like I belong to, Pheasants Forever, has literally put in all of the money and has leveraged this in order to turn tens of thousands of acres of the prairie back to virgin prairie, which are now abundant with game for people to take advantage of. Those are the types of things that make sense.

I understand the concerns that the gentleman expressed, and I understand that this is not a perfect bill. But I can tell you that it has been worked on for a long time and that it is a starting point.

There is a realization and an understanding that we have to compromise on issues. We are going to have to work with the Senate, and we are going to get this in front of the President.

Yet, I think most of us agree that our goal with this is to allow Americans to continue to have their constitutional rights and their abilities to do those activities they want, whether that be hiking, whether that be mountain biking, whether that be hunting, or whether that be fishing and, at the same time, to make sure that there is an economic engine in it that contributes to the ability to keep those lands up.

I ask my friends to approach it with an open mind and to understand that this is truly deeply engrained in this culture. There are commonalities here. We have the same goals, to make sure these are available for our children.

If we can come together and work on this, we have to take this first step. We are becoming a more populated country, and there are fewer opportunities for people to get out there. Many people are not landowners themselves; so, the public lands are the only places at which these activities can take place.

There is enough out there. If we manage it right, we can share the land, as the act says, and we can do those activities that mean a lot to us and continue them for future generations.

I encourage my colleagues to support this piece of legislation.

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