‘An Environmentalist With a Gun’: Inside Steve Rinella’s Hunting Empire – The New York Times
“With “MeatEater” on Netflix and a growing roster of podcasts, Steven Rinella is teaching a new kind of hunter about how killing animals can be part of loving nature.”
The New York Times magazine feature article in February 2022 ‘An Environmentalist With a Gun’: Inside Steven Rinella’s Hunting Empire‘ is a compelling, thoughtful introduction to hunting as conservation, and its place in our modern world. Steven Rinella is both hunter and conservationist.
Writes Natalie Ivis, “With “MeatEater” on Netflix and a growing roster of podcasts, Steven Rinella is teaching a new kind of hunter about how killing animals can be part of loving nature.”
This touchingly authentic and new narrative focuses on the symbiotic relationship between hunters and nature, ensuring that future generations enjoy the same beauty, adventure and wonderment of our wild. It also provides a summation of the many points of view around the act of hunting. Steven Rinella not only explains hunting and all the debates about hunting, he explains why we hunt.
“To be a hunting celebrity in America in 2022 is to sit at the center of a particularly messy tangle, where any number of controversies are constantly snarled together: over guns, meat, animal rights and trophy-hunting; over the urban-rural divide, the use of public lands, the very way we think about wild animals and wild places in this country”
Continues Ivis “For years, Rinella has talked, written about and modeled hunting in ways that connect with all kinds of people — and not just hunters, who make up about 4 percent of Americans and tend to be more politically conservative. In surveys, more than 70 percent of Americans say they approve of regulated hunting; the percentage is even higher when getting food is the explicit goal.
“One of the best things that Steve and MeatEater have done is to introduce people to hunting through food,” Land Tawney, the president and chief executive of a national nonprofit called Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, told me. “It’s not just about killing things and high-fiving.”
Is this the future of hunting, connecting urban people back to nature in the raw?
“Rinella is arguably the country’s most famous hunter. The final episodes of his show’s 10th season will become available on Netflix in early February. (The first six seasons ran on the Sportsman Channel, a fishing-and-hunting cable channel.) He’s the founder of a rapidly growing lifestyle brand, also called MeatEater, whose tagline is ‘your link to the food chain’.” That the hunter lifestyle is proving to be a television hit can be attributed to a curious confluence of meta-events and lifestyle overhauls. Until very recently, the percentage of the population that hunts has been in a decades-long free fall, prompting headlines like this one from the BBC in 2019: Are U.S. Hunters Becoming an Endangered Species?.”
“Then the pandemic hit, communal indoor activities shut dow.n and Americans poured into the outdoors — crowding national parks, reserving campsites, hitting the road in R.V.s and camper vans. People bought and borrowed guns, bows and fishing poles and set out, while socially distanced, into waters and wilderness. Sales of fishing licenses spiked. Nationally, the number of people getting hunting licenses started climbing, too, particularly for new hunters. California had 43,000 first-time hunters in 2020. When I called the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to ask about hunting participation in 2020, the guy I talked to whistled and said, “What a whirlwind.”
“Data suggest that the demographic of these new hunters and anglers is younger, more urban, more female and possibly less white — a notable shift, considering that 97 percent of hunters in the U.S. are white, and 90 percent are men. Rinella’s efforts to speak to the broad spectrum of outdoors people can at times seem acrobatic; guests on his podcast have included the Fox News host Tucker Carlson as well as the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, and Rue Mapp, the chief executive of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit that connects the Black community with nature and conservation. Maybe we are all on Rinella’s island, fishing and hunting and cooking over the campfire together. Maybe, even as we disagree about so much, we can find some shred of mutuality out in the wild.”