Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 5, 1990                   TAG: 9006050051
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Bill Cochran
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

YOUNG PEOPLE ANSWER TO PROBLEMS

His answer wasn't stocking more fish or establishing a longer deer season or providing additional nesting sites for the falcon.

Bristow, a 30-year veteran of wildlife resources management, had the right reply: getting more young people involved in the outdoors.

With young people, you have the support, you have the funding and you have the mandate to carry wildlife management into the next century. Without those things, there is nothing ahead but hard times.

Already, the number of hunting licenses sold nationally is declining; game and fish agencies are badly in need of additional funding, and anti-hunting sentiment is spreading, having gained a fresh foothold in California.

Bristow is 52, and when he looks around in the outdoors, he sees too many other people his age and not enough youngsters. That scares him.

"It is becoming evident to anyone who is involved with the administration of fish and wildlife that we are dealing with an older age group. Young people are becoming more and more alienated with what people in my age group grew up with, which is some knowledge and relation with the natural world."

With that in mind, none of us should be surprised at efforts to ban hunting, said Bristow.

"It is sort of a natural thing if people don't understand what hunting is all about," he said. "Unless we do a better job, it [anti-hunting sentiment] will become stronger."

Coming from Arizona with 30 years of experience in wildlife resource management, Bristow takes over an agency whose funding always has been borne on the backs of hunters and fishermen.

"There is going to have to be some way that the rest of the society is going to become involved and support wildlife programs," he said. "They are going to have to help pay for it."

Bristow follows James Remington, whose three-year term as executive director helped bridge the gap between the era when wildlife management meant stocking deer and bass and a new age when it means managing people as much as game.

Remington has made Bristow's task easier. During a brief period, Remington appointed promising young professionals to head nearly every division of the agency, and he rebuilt declining revenues.

A former management consultant and Philip Morris executive, Remington projected the idea that outdoor sports must be marketed.

He put the emphasis on long-range planning, and built Virginia's first public Sporting Clays range with the idea that sportsmen want to fire their shotguns more often than present-day duck or rabbit resources will permit.

He involved hunt clubs and landowners in the management of deer and helped break the logjam that has prohibited the development of the Jackson River below Gathright Dam as a blue-ribbon trout fishery.

He made it easier to buy a hunting or fishing license and fought for higher pay and better benefits for his people.

He often bucked the old political buddy system, and some say he was forced to resign because of that, but Remington denies it, and so do board members of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

What is certain is that the agency is better off because of the Remington Renaissance, and Bud Bristow has a solid foundation on which to build.