The Hyundai Indoor World Series will join ATA Show Week in 2027, elevating the NFAA Rushmore Rumble to a 500-point international event. ATA President and CEO Jeff Poole highlighted how this addition brings world-class competition together with industry leaders at the Indianapolis event in January.

Yamaha U.S. Marine Business Unit has appointed Scott Hersey as Pro Staff and Sponsorship Manager, managing Yamaha's professional angler programs and tournament sponsorships, including the Bassmaster Elite Tournament Series and Coastal Conservation Association STAR tournaments.

Delta Waterfowl achieved record revenues exceeding $50 million in its 2025-26 fiscal year, enabling expanded duck production, habitat conservation, and hunter education programs. The organization operated 51 Predator Management sites and 16,525 Hen Houses, adding 170,000 ducks to the fall flight, with plans to increase production to 200,000 ducks in 2027.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected a lawsuit by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Giffords Law Center against the ATF, ruling the plaintiffs lacked standing. Circuit Judge Consuelo M. Callahan determined that litigation cannot be based on speculation about future unlawful conduct.

Pheasants Forever and Michigan's Department of Natural Resources host a free Great Outdoors Jamboree on September 13 at Lake Hudson Recreation Area, featuring archery, BB gun shooting, kayaking, crafts, and more for all ages with equipment provided.

Following six years of litigation, the Wake County (North Carolina) Superior Court has ruled in favor of the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina and 86 citizen plaintiffs, finding the State violated its legal duty to protect coastal fisheries under the public-trust doctrine. 

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks lands in Madison County are under Stage I fire restrictions, prohibiting campfires and open flames except in specific circumstances. The restrictions apply to fishing access sites, wildlife management areas, and state parks and remain in effect until further notice due to dry conditions and fire danger.

The Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department announces bear hunting season begins September 1, with two seasons running through November 22. Bear biologist Jaclyn Comeau reminds hunters of regulations including licensing requirements, field dressing procedures, and tooth collection for population data.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks announced changes to two Sieben Ranch Company Block Management Areas near Lincoln. Horsefly Creek now requires written permission through limited reservations with Cathy Baucus (406-442-2228), limited to 10 hunters daily with no camping. Keep Cool Hills has new designated parking areas and camping limited to three days per 21-day period.

Real Avid supports National Shooting Sports Month with expert shooting instruction from world champion Doug Koenig. The Range Ready video series covers fundamental marksmanship basics for handgun and rifle shooters of all experience levels, available on Real Avid's YouTube channel.

The Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers (AGLOW) is running "Cast Your Net," a membership recruitment drive through September 30, 2026, offering monthly prize drawings and Grand Prize conference attendance. The campaign targets outdoor media professionals, brands, conservation organizations, and tourism destinations, with SPYPOINT Game Cameras and other prizes available for new members and recruiters.

BOG, a Columbia, Missouri-based manufacturer of hunting equipment including trail cameras and shooting sticks, has renewed its national sponsorship with Whitetails Unlimited. WTU President Jeff Schinkten praised BOG's commitment and product quality, noting the company's continued support of the organization's conservation and hunting tradition mission.

Magpul has renewed its Platinum-level corporate partnership with the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) as well as sponsoring  the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC), slated for Sept. 25 – 27 in Dallas at the Westin Dallas Fort Worth Airport hotel.. 

Leo Martinez, HSCF Vice President and 2025 Outfitter of the Year, and his daughter Madison discuss their work at DEA Ranch in Mathis, Texas, exploring the connections between ranching, hunting, wildlife management, and conservation. The Houston Safari Club Foundation's Hunting Matters podcast episode highlights DEA Ranch's role in hosting HSCF's inaugural Summer Youth Conservation Education Program.

Blue Force Gear introduces the patented Integrated Stealth Harness (ISH), combining a gun belt, climbing harness, tourniquet, and travel restraint in one certified platform rated for over 3,000 pounds. The modular system allows professionals to transition from gunfighter to climber in seconds while maintaining load carriage efficiency.

Springfield Armory introduced the Kuna Tri-Lug 9mm pistol, a PDW featuring roller-delayed operation and an integrated Tri-Lug suppressor-mounting system. Available in multiple configurations with MSRPs ranging from $1,179 to $1,330, the platform includes Strike Industries FSA brace options and low-capacity variants for restricted areas.

BulletSafe is reintroducing its VP3 Level IIIA soft body armor vest in response to customer demand. The American-made vest provides NIJ Standard 0101.06 protection against handgun threats up to .44 Magnum and is available in sizes XS through 4XL with optional hard armor plate compatibility.

Galco introduces the Hornet belt holster for Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 2.0, featuring premium steerhide construction and versatile crossdraw and appendix carry positions. The holster offers comfort, speed, and concealability with an open top design and tunnel-style belt loop for stability.

Tink's offers four proven scent formulas including #1 Doe-P, #69 Doe-In-Rut, Trophy Buck, and PEAK30 to help hunters select the right option based on deer behavior and season phase. Director of Marketing Teri Quinn emphasizes the company's goal is providing hunters flexibility and information to match their hunting strategy.

GRITR Sports, a Texas firearms retailer, is expanding its suppressor selection with new arrivals from SIG SAUER, Daniel Defense, Dead Air, and SilencerCo. The latest lineup features suppressors for multiple calibers and mounting configurations, plus protective covers and cleaning kits.

One Horse, a family-owned, Veteran-founded American firearms manufacturer based in Brownstown, Indiana, will exhibit at Nation's Best Sports' 2026 Fall Semi-Annual Market in Oklahoma City Aug. 24-27. The company will showcase its Express Series and Duck Camo SD Combos with exclusive NBS member offers available in Booth 1742.

Umarex USA will exhibit at the Worldwide's Fall Show September 1-3 in Reno, Nevada, showcasing 2026 product releases and fan-favorite items from brands including Umarex Airguns, T4E, Prepared2Protect, and Elite Force Airsoft.

Heartland Bowhunter has renewed its partnership with Victory Archery for a sixth consecutive season, relying on Victory's carbon arrows for consistent performance in high-definition bowhunting. Victory Archery, a vertically integrated manufacturer and partner of Mitsubishi Chemical Group, engineers arrows using aerospace-grade technology and proprietary carbon fiber materials for superior penetration and reliability.

Federal Ammunition announced a historic partnership as the official ammunition of the Minnesota Wild for the 2026-27 season, marking Federal's first major league professional sports team sponsorship in its 104-year history. The agreement includes media placements, co-branded merchandise, and a sweepstakes offering fans the chance to win a hunt with a current Wild player.

Chief Plenty Coups State Park will host its 31st annual Day of Honor celebration on September 5, themed "Land, Leadership and Legacy." The free public event features a fun run, barbeque lunch, and performances honoring Chief Plenty Coups of the Apsáalooke tribe, with sponsorship from Aluutaalaahu Many Arrows Community Development Corporation and Friends of Chief Plenty Coups State Park.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks is hosting a fruit drive from September 8-11 in Kalispell to collect fruit donations from landowners and reduce bear attractants during fall hyperphagia. Donations support the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone while helping prevent bear conflicts in residential areas.

Conservation has a communication problem, and pretending otherwise may be one of the greatest threats to its future. We have extraordinary scientists, experienced land managers, passionate philanthropists, dedicated hunters and anglers, conservation organizations, government agencies, and local communities doing remarkable work. We have mountains of research explaining what healthy landscapes provide and increasingly sophisticated tools for restoring them. What we too often lack is the ability—or perhaps the willingness—to make millions of ordinary people care.

Conservation has spent decades becoming better at talking to itself while commercial interests have become frighteningly good at talking to everybody else. That is not a minor weakness. This is a strategic failure, because the mainstream audiences conservation struggles to reach are ultimately the voters who determine public policy, the consumers who shape markets, the taxpayers who fund programs, the philanthropists who write checks, the landowners who make decisions, and the parents who determine what the next generation considers worth saving.

The problem is not simply a shortage of information. We are drowning in information. The problem is that evidence without meaning rarely moves people. People do not care about what they do not know, and knowing something intellectually is not the same as caring whether it survives. Too much conservation communication begins with the assumption that if we simply explain the science one more time—another report, another acronym, another chart, another carefully qualified presentation—the public will eventually arrive at the conclusion we want.

Meanwhile, the interests competing for land, water, political attention and money are selling aspiration, identity, jobs, convenience, prosperity and a picture of the future. They understand something conservation repeatedly forgets: human beings make decisions through stories well before they make them via spreadsheets. A spreadsheet can prove that a landscape is valuable. A story can make someone unwilling to lose it.

Consider the wetland. For generations, a wetland was routinely dismissed as a swamp: wasted ground, mosquito country, an obstacle between somebody and something more profitable. The logical response was obvious—drain it, fill it, straighten the water and build something useful. The EPA still notes that swamps were historically portrayed as forbidding wastelands and that this perception contributed to the destruction of enormous areas of wetland.

Today, the dialect is radically different. Wetlands are understood as natural infrastructure. They absorb floodwaters, filter pollutants, recharge groundwater, protect shorelines, support fisheries and wildlife, provide recreation and strengthen communities. EPA describes them as buffers against flooding and erosion and important natural filters for water quality. The Convention on Wetlands now estimates that the world’s remaining wetlands provide benefits worth as much as $39 trillion annually. That shift did not happen because the marsh suddenly became more valuable. It happened because society finally learned to recognize—and communicate—the value that had been there all along.

That distinction should haunt everyone who works in conservation. A landscape can be biologically priceless and politically worthless if nobody understands why it matters.

History gives us an even more dramatic demonstration. In 1962, Rachel Carson took a complicated subject involving toxicology, chemistry, agriculture, wildlife biology, and pesticide regulation and gave the public something infinitely more powerful than a technical briefing: Silent Spring.

Even the title was an act of communication genius. Carson asked ordinary Americans to imagine a spring morning without birdsong. She connected chemistry to something people could hear, remember, and fear losing. The EPA says the book stimulated widespread public concern over pesticide misuse and the need for stronger controls; its own history describes Silent Spring as causing a revolution in public opinion. Ten years after its publication, EPA canceled most uses of DDT in the United States. Carson did not accomplish that by abandoning science. She accomplished it by translating science into human consequence. She made the invisible visible.

The Federal Duck Stamp offers another lesson, and perhaps an even more important one because it demonstrates what happens when conservation becomes participation rather than instruction. Since 1934, Duck Stamp sales have raised more than $1.3 billion and helped conserve more than six million acres of wetland habitat. Ninety-eight percent of the purchase price goes directly toward acquiring or protecting habitat. But the program's genius goes beyond its financing mechanism. It built a conservation identity around hunters, artists, birdwatchers, collectors, families, and outdoor enthusiasts. It put wildlife art in people’s hands and gave an individual a concrete way to say, I helped protect this.

And yet much of the conservation world still behaves as though public engagement is an accessory to the “real work.” It is not. Communication is habitat work. Storytelling is policy work. Building constituencies is conservation work. A restored wetland without a constituency can be drained by the next generation. A protected landscape nobody understands can lose its protection with a vote.

A scientifically flawless management plan without social legitimacy can collapse the moment political winds change. Sustainable conservation therefore requires more than biological sustainability. It requires cultural sustainability—a public that understands why the work matters, sees itself in the outcome, and believes that conserving functioning landscapes improves human lives rather than obstructing them.

This also means conservation must stop surrendering the mainstream. We should be talking to farmers, ranchers, hunters, anglers, suburban families, business owners, schoolchildren, mayors, developers, tourists and people who will never attend a conservation conference in their lives. We should be talking about cleaner water and healthier soil, certainly, but additionally about family traditions, local economies, beautiful places, flood protection, food, independence, heritage, opportunity, and what kind of country our grandchildren will inherit.

Sustainable conservation cannot become another tribal identity available only to people who already agree with one another. If conservation communication requires the audience to adopt an entire worldview before they can care about a river, a marsh, a grassland or a migration corridor, then conservation has made its own job unnecessarily difficult.

The great conservation movements have always understood this, whether intentionally or instinctively. They did not simply protect resources; they created people who wanted those resources protected. That is the multiplier conservation desperately needs now. One informed person can become an advocate. One inspired child can influence a family. One community that sees economic and cultural value in a healthy landscape can defend it for decades. One compelling story can travel farther than a thousand-page environmental assessment ever will. And when enough people begin telling that story themselves, conservation stops being a project and becomes a movement.

That is where lasting conservation begins—not within the hushed tones of small rooms filled exclusively with people who already understand the problem, but in the noisy public square where society decides what it values. Science must tell us what is happening. Economics can tell us what is at stake. Policy can provide the machinery for action. But story gives people a reason to turn the machinery on.

We will not conserve the places people have never been given a reason to love. We will not fund what they do not understand, defend what they do not value or sacrifice for a future they cannot imagine. If conservation wants to transform landscapes over generations, it must first compete for hearts and minds with the same discipline and drive that it brings to biology and land management.

Because without story, there is no connection. Without connection, there is no constituency. Without a constituency, conservation is temporary.

And there can be no sustainable conservation without conversation.

– Chris Dorsey

Chris Dorsey is a 30-year media veteran and conservation thought leader who is the founding partner of Dorsey Pictures, a Global 100 Production Studio, and Mission Partners Entertainment Group, a leading IMAX/giant screen natural history producer.