The Izaak Walton League of America (IWLA) is making a push to get outdoor writers to focus more on population, "an issue that's fundamental to our audience."

The 40,000-member, 83-year-old conservation group, with strong links to hunting and fishing enthusiasts, writes that despite widespread public concerns with sprawl, off-road vehicles, loss of habitat, and invasive species, people generally don't "put the pieces together to identify the underlying common thread -- our increasing population and never-ending appetite for growth." The group commissioned essays from five outdoor writers to highlight the issue and their own coverage of it in various publications.

"We hope to inspire other outdoor writers to tackle the issue, too," the group writes in its 20-page four-color booklet, Population Growth and Outdoor America.

Writing essays for the booklet were Holly Endersby, an outdoor writer in Idaho; Shawn Perich, who writes a regular column for Minnesota Outdoor News from his home on Lake Superior's North Shore; Scott Strouder, of Riggins, Idaho, a writer with Trout Unlimited; Phil Shook, an outdoor writer and photographer in Larchmont, N.Y.; and Joel Vance, a writer with the Missouri Conservation Department.

Along with the 20 page 8 by 11-inch Outdoor Writers' Perspectives piece, IWLA, under its Sustainability Education Program, also published a 5.5 by 8-inch Outdoor Journalist's Guide to Population Issues, drawing an apparent distinction between the "writers" commissioned for the earlier essays and the "journalists" who are the primary audience for this work.

The journalist's guide opens with a two-page forward by Baltimore Sun environmental columnist and Chesapeake Bay author Tom Horton who, in a separate Sun column, praised the League for having the backbone to take on the population issue. This issue, he wrote, is one that many other national environmental organizations shy away from. In the Sun column, Horton disclosed that he had been an author for the IWLA population booklet but not that he had received $500 for writing the piece. An IWLA population staffer says there was no quid pro quo, implied or otherwise, for Horton to write a glowing column about the league's activities.

"No matter how successful we are at reducing per-capita impacts on nature -- from slowing sprawl development to upgrading sewage treatment plants -- the number of us 'capitas,' growing without limit, will erode and eventually reverse much of that progress," Horton wrote in the foreword to the book.

Horton decried what he called "the myth" that technology "will bail us out," and he acknowledged that writing about population is difficult for many journalists because "issues around immigrants and family size must be approached with sensitivity and respect.

"Making population 'news' when few traditional newsmakers speak about it is hard," Horton wrote in the booklet. "When totting up the benefits of new malls, conventional economics doesn't subtract losses of wetlands or the pollution-absorbing ability of the forests we replaced with asphalt."

The companion journalist's guide consists of an introduction by IWLA sustainability education program director Jim Baird; a "Demography 101" primer, a chapter on population and environment connections; and a graduate student's literature review on population in the outdoor press, which concludes, in part, that "population growth is an established topic when writing about the outdoors." The booklet also includes a collection of "good hooks" for writers to use as entry points for discussion human population growth, a brief resources section, two additional outdoor writers' tips for covering the issue, and a section on "Sensible Solutions."

IWLA's campaign to promote population issues in the outdoor media is supported by funding from the Lucille and David Packard Foundation, the Richard and Rhonda Goldman Fund, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Hewlett Foundation population program resources also support population and media programs of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, publisher of this newsletter.

For copies of Population Growth and Outdoor America: Outdoor Writers' Perspectives or An Outdoor Journalist's Guide to Population Issues, reporters should contact IWLA, Sustainability Education program, 707 Conservation Lane, Gaithersburg, MD. 20878; (301)548-0150; E-mail: sustain@iwla.org.