Archery Elk Hunting in the Anthropocene

What is the Anthropocene and Why Does it Matter?

I was eight miles deep in the backcountry of the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon hunting elk in Umatilla National Forest. This 1.4 million acre piece of national forest was designated such in 1908 is available for all Americans to hunt, fish, hike, camp, and other forms of outdoor recreation. The air was thick and smokey from various wildfires scattered throughout the state. Decades of mismanaged timber policies in the American West coupled with climate change have lead to an increased frequency of mega fires, or fires that burn over 100,000 acres of land and display erratic or unusual behavior that makes them difficult or impossible to control.

I had found a perfect spot to setup for the evening and do some calling, tucked in between a small chunk of trees between two fields loaded with fresh elk sign. The elk here are Rocky Mountain elk, one of the four subspecies of elk found in North America. Once plentiful, they were nearly extirpated by the turn of the last century. In 1913, elk were transplanted from Wyoming to this region and protected for another few decades until elk repopulated the Blue Mountain Region. By 1938, there were roughly 7,000 elk in this region. Despite some ebbs and flows, the elk population has done well here, and the Blue Mountains remain a top elk hunting destination in the state of Oregon.

I setup and quickly found remnants of a shelter, or possibly a cache some careless human had left. There were quite a few water bottles and a large tarp covering them, along with some battered looking, rusty pots and pans and a small pile of trash. I heard thunder and knew a storm was rolling in, and I pulled my rain gear, made from Gore-Tex, from my backpack and put it on as the raindrops fell around me. Gore-Tex membranes have been considered the Holy Grail of water proof gear for years. They are also full of dangerous forever chemicals and will likely be discontinued or completely banned in the near future.

I sat quietly for some time, eventually hearing a bull elk bugle in the distance. He was in about the same spot I had heard him bugle from that same morning around dawn, way down in a drainage. I had looked for him in the morning but was unable to find him. I waited awhile and returned a lazy bugle in his direction, letting him know there was another bull in his territory.

A few minutes later, I heard the heard the familiar crashes and crunches of large animals coming towards me from the edge of the timber line into the nearby ravine. A small patch of timber had been logged there the year before, and animals had been concentrating on the area to feed on the new growth.

Because of the ravine, I couldn’t quite see what the animals actually were. I calculated a route that would keep me concealed and slowly worked my way towards them. After about a hundred yard crawl, I saw the body of several animals: it was a herd of cattle, not elk.

Ranchers are given permits to graze their cattle in this area, a practice that has been commonplace for over a century. They drop them off in the beginning of the summer after the snow melt and pick them up in the fall. For pennies on the dollar, they are able to feed a large population of their livestock for much cheaper than they would otherwise. In areas the cattle is concentrated, the flora and undergrowth is decimated, the livestock leaving behind large portions of land that contain little more than muddy hoof prints and cow pies.

Frustrated, I let out a long sigh. The cows looked up from their feed in unison to stare at me while they chewed their cud. I had been bumping into cattle the whole trip and not seeing many elk, and that trend was to continue, at least for that day.

While I walked back to my camp in the dark, I heard wolves calling from nearby. Wolves, too, were extirpated from the American West by the turn of the last century. Eventually, wolves were captured in Canada and released into Yellowstone National Park, where it is thought the wolves that are here now migrated from.

I never heard that bull bugle again. Defeated, I headed back to camp in the dark. I ate some snacks wrapped in plastics, and headed to bed in my tent.

What is the Anthropocene?
This vignette of a recent elk hunt is a perfect example of the concept of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is a developing concept that we have entered a new geological epoch defined by human activity and influence on the environment and climate. Some believe we entered this new epoch at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when methane and carbon levels began to rise due to human activity, and others believe the beginning of the Anthropocene should be in the 1940s when nuclear testing became widespread.

Think of it like this: no matter how remote of an area you may think you’re in, like the one I was elk hunting in, its environment has been heavily altered by humans. This new era is predicated on the concept that there is essential no unaltered or untouched nature left on Earth; that even remote regions of the Amazon where uncontacted tribes still live traditional lifestyles are still being impacted by human activity like climate change and the global impacts of nuclear testing. Even somewhere as remote and inhospitable as Antarctica still has humans occupying it and reshaping the landscape, and there are thousands of satellites and junk in Earth’s orbit. Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature explores this very topic, and is considered an important text in this field.

Why Does it Matter?
Understanding the impact humans have on the climate and the environment on a global scale helps reshape the way we think and talk about wilderness, ecology, and the natural world in general. When we begin thinking of human impact on our environment on a global or even a national scale rather than solely in terms of local economic benefit, we are confronted with some tough questions about how we live in modernity, especially in the West: Is the way we live sustainable? Does Earth have a carrying capacity for humans? Does the way we’ve been managing land and wildlife in the United States work? What can we do to ensure we leave our descendants a world that’s actually inhabitable? And so on.

As global temperatures continue to rise, forever chemicals are found in fish in our oceans, pharmaceuticals are in our water supplies, a garbage patch twice the size of Texas rotates in the Pacific ocean, microplastics are found in fetuses blood, and discarded mylar balloons are found deep in the wilderness, these are questions that, whether we like it or not, we have no choice but to confront. Whether or not we do anything about them, is another story entirely.