Forest Service and Boone and Crockett Club Sign Memorandum Advancing Wildlife-based Access

May 28, 2026
4:12 am

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The Forest Service’s new partnership with the Boone and Crockett Club and fourteen other conservation heavyweights isn’t just another bureaucratic handshake—it’s a deliberate push to keep public lands open for the very activities that sustain both wildlife and the Second Amendment. By focusing on “wildlife-based access,” the agreement quietly recognizes that hunters and anglers remain the most reliable constituency for maintaining roads, trails, and habitat projects that everyone else later enjoys. In an era when anti-access litigation and “roadless rule” expansions threaten to turn millions of acres into de-facto wilderness, this MOU supplies boots-on-the-ground data and volunteer muscle that agencies increasingly lack, turning abstract multiple-use mandates into tangible trail maintenance and habitat work. For the 2A community the stakes are straightforward: every maintained access point is another place where law-abiding citizens can exercise both their firearms rights and their role as conservationists. Groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and National Wild Turkey Federation have long paired habitat dollars with hunter recruitment; now those efforts gain formal federal recognition instead of being treated as afterthoughts. The result is a stronger rebuttal to the narrative that public-land sportsmen are a liability rather than an asset—evidence that can be cited the next time a lawsuit or regulation tries to shrink the footprint of lawful hunting. Longer term, the agreement signals that the most durable defense of the Second Amendment on federal ground may come less from courtrooms than from sustained, science-backed presence in the field. When hunters fund and execute the projects that keep elk herds healthy and turkey populations stable, they create constituencies that politicians notice at re-election time. That political capital, paired with the cultural argument that conservation and firearms ownership are inseparable, gives the 2A community a proactive tool rather than a perpetual defensive crouch.

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For the 2A community the stakes are straightforward: every maintained access point is another place where law-abiding citizens can exercise both their firearms rights and their role as conservationists. Groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and National Wild Turkey Federation have long paired habitat dollars with hunter recruitment; now those efforts gain formal federal recognition instead of being treated as afterthoughts. The result is a stronger rebuttal to the narrative that public-land sportsmen are a liability rather than an asset—evidence that can be cited the next time a lawsuit or regulation tries to shrink the footprint of lawful hunting.

Longer term, the agreement signals that the most durable defense of the Second Amendment on federal ground may come less from courtrooms than from sustained, science-backed presence in the field. When hunters fund and execute the projects that keep elk herds healthy and turkey populations stable, they create constituencies that politicians notice at re-election time. That political capital, paired with the cultural argument that conservation and firearms ownership are inseparable, gives the 2A community a proactive tool rather than a perpetual defensive crouch.

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