Last month, Donald Trump Jr. flew to Colorado to speak for his father’s presidential campaign to reporters gathered in Fort Collins at an annual “media summit” on outdoor sport and conservation policy.

He seemed to know he wasn’t the kind of person reporters steeped in the subject-matter expected to be interviewing.

“Look, I’m not a policy wonk,” he said more than once during the roughly hour-long question-and-answer session.

Trump Jr. has made headlines for being a big-game hunter and at the summit he held up his dedication to hunting and fishing as his main credential.

“Hunters are the original conservationists,” he said. “Hunting kept me and my brother out of the kind of trouble you can get into as rich kids in New York city.”

He said that climate change science is “complicated” and that he would advocate for a middle-way government approach to addressing climate-related challenges – an approach that would “preserve habitat,” he said, while also “keeping the country competitive with the rest of the world.”

He conceded that his father, while no expert on conservation issues was nevertheless a staunch defender of gun rights. He said that he would act as an informal adviser to his father in a Trump administration. “I will have his ear,” he said.

Trump Jr. was called in as a last-minute replacement speaker at the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership Western Media Summit, substituting for Don Peay, head of Utahns for Trump and founder of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and associated lobbying group Big Game Forever.

Peay is well-known in western hunting and fishing circles and he is a controversial figure, partly for being seen as serving the interests of wealthy outdoors sports enthusiasts at the expense of not-wealthy outdoors sports enthusiasts, who make up the bulk of hunters and fishers in the country.

Peay has argued that current U.S. conservation policy, where wildlife is viewed as a public resource, is a form of “socialism.” His organizations oppose efforts to maintain larger wildlife ecosystems and advocate instead for hunting populations of natural predators such as bears and wolves. The effect would be to create “game farms” of moose and caribou, said Valerie Conner, conservation director for the Alaska Center for the Environment, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News.

Conner was quoted in the context of a story about Corey Rossi, former Alaska director of Peay’s Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife group. Rossi was heading a project similar to ones promoted in Colorado and Utah by Peay’s groups that aim to give private landowners “special rights to hunt big game, even out of season, and to be able to sell those rights to whomever they want,” the paper reported. News of the project raised alarm bells.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who would win by privatizing more hunts in Alaska,” said Mark Richards, co-chairman of grassroots group Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. “It would be the (organizations) that get the permits to auction off, and the wealthy hunters who could afford to buy them.”

Privatizing public natural resources is an increasingly hot-button issue in the West, as the high-profile Bundy family-led standoffs over national public lands over the last two years have demonstrated.

Indeed, two days before Trump Jr. came to speak in Fort Collins, undercover FBI agents thwarted a plan hatched by a Utah militia group associated with the Bundys to bomb Bureau of Land Management buildings and vehicles in Arizona. Court documents allege the would-be bombers hoped to create a confrontation similar to the 2014 two-week standoff over grazing rights at the Bundy Ranch in Utah.

At the summit, Trump Jr. distanced the campaign from the view that states should take control of federally controlled public lands.

“”This is where we’ve probably broken away from a lot of the traditional conservative dogma on the issue, in that we do want federal lands to remain federal,” he said, arguing that giving control to states would end in cash-strapped legislatures selling off public lands to private investors and developers.

“That’s not to say that the states shouldn’t have a larger role perhaps in managing some of those lands,” he added. “I think, you know, their scientists are there, they’re on the ground, they understand those issues, I think, certainly better than a lot of bureaucrats in D.C.”

“The land has to remain accessible to the public,” he said.

Trump Jr. played down the plan to have Peay speak for the campaign at the summit.

“He’s just someone I know,” said Trump. “He has different views, though,” he added quickly. “He wasn’t going to be giving his views. He was going to relate our views, not his. They’re two different things.”

Then he smiled, shook his head and hustled out of the room. He was headed to the airport to fly to Scotland and join his father at the reopening of the Trump Turnberry golf course on the day of the Brexit vote.

The scrambling nature of the Trump Jr. appearance in Fort Collins came amid growing concern about the apparent lack of staff and planning that the campaign had invested in winning swing-state Colorado. A week later, the Trump campaign hired Patrick Davis as its state director. Davis said the campaign has “not yet” tapped a go-to spokesman on public lands and conservation issues.

Hillary Clinton’s Colorado campaign by the middle of June had already been working the state hard. California U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson represented Clinton at the media summit.

An avid outdoorsmen and award-winning conservationist, Thompson is also the definition of a policy wonk. A long-serving member of Congress, he was twice co-chair of the Sportsmen’s Caucus and has sponsored a raft of bills advancing major national and state conservation efforts.

– john@coloradostatesman.com