Twenty years is a long time to keep any outdoors program running, and Pennsylvania's Wildlife Leadership Academy just hit that mark. If you've never heard of it, don't feel bad, I only ran across it myself a few years back, but tell you what, it's the kind of thing I wish every state had a copy of. Outdoor News covered the anniversary this week.

The Academy runs immersive field school programs for high school-age students, and the whole point is living the work instead of reading about it. Hands-on wildlife biology, habitat work, hunting and fishing heritage, conservation history. The kids who go through it come out the other end as certified Conservation Ambassadors. That title isn't just something pretty for a resume, the way I understand it, the hope is they carry it back home with them.

What I like most about the model is it doesn't treat conservation like something that happens in a classroom. You want a teenager to care about a whitetail herd or a trout stream, you put boots on them and get their hands dirty. That's how my old man did it with me down in southern Missouri, except his classroom was a gravel road and a johnboat. Same idea, just organized a little better.

And I'll offer an opinion here, and I want to be clear it's mine: I believe state agencies everywhere are graying out, and I don't see enough young folks lining up to replace the wildlife biologists and conservation officers who are heading for retirement. I can't hand you a study on that, it's just what my eyes tell me after a lifetime around hunters and land managers. But if I'm even half right, programs like this one are where the fix starts. Maybe some of these students end up wearing a Game Commission patch someday, maybe they don't. Either way you end up with more people who understand the resource, and that counts for something.

Now, I've said before that hunters and anglers are the financial engine behind wildlife conservation in this country generally, through Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson and the licenses we buy every year. That's a broad truth about the American conservation model, not a claim about this Academy's bank account, which from what I can tell runs on grants and partnerships like most programs of its kind. Money only does so much anyway. Somebody has to want the job. Somebody has to be standing in a cold creek at dawn counting bugs and loving it. For two decades now, this Academy has been finding those somebodies.

So happy twentieth to them. And if you've got a teenager at home who lights up around animals and woods and water, look into your own state's version of this. Worst case, they learn something. Best case, you get a wildlife biologist out of the deal and free fishing advice for life. That's what I call return on investment.