When voters banned gill nets in Florida waters in 1994, Greg Miller felt the weight of public condemnation – that commercial fishers like him, using traditional methods, were ruthless exploiters.

Mr. Miller sold his nets. Fishing villages from Matlacha to Mayport foundered. Bankruptcies and divorces followed. It amounted to taking away a crucial tool for his livelihood, he says.

On Nov. 5, Florida voters approved an amendment to its state constitution that weakens, if not just the gill net ban, the view that hunters and anglers are morally suspect. Sportsmen like Mr. Miller are now at the helm of conservation policy, their ability to kill and claim animals by legal means preserved “forever … as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife.”

The amendment also reflects a deeper tension in America’s cities and towns over the push-pull between freedom and responsibility, especially as it impacts conservation. Some two dozen states have, in the past decade, passed right-to-hunt amendments that preserve the fundamental right for licensed hunters to pursue game and fish. In short, unless and until a different amendment is passed, these states cannot ban hunting.

When Florida voters banned gill nets – fishing nets that hang in the water and trap fish by catching their gills – in 1994, Greg Miller felt the weight of public scorn that portrayed commercial fishers like him as ruthless exploiters.

Mr. Miller sold his nets. Some gill-netters burned their skiffs. Fishing villages from Matlacha to Mayport foundered, and bankruptcies and divorces followed. It amounted to taking away a crucial tool for his livelihood, he says.

On Nov. 5, that perception shifted.

Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that counters the narrative that those who love hunting for dinner in woods and streams – instead of in grocery aisles – are morally suspect. In fact, hunters and anglers like Mr. Miller now find themselves at the forefront of conservation policy, not just here but in a growing number of states across the country. And with the passage of Florida’s Amendment 2 last month, the ability to hunt animals in traditional and sometimes contested ways is now preserved “forever … as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife.”

For Mr. Miller, passage of the new amendment shows that the public is coming around to his way of thinking. Commercial fishers aren’t barbaric roughnecks, he argues, but key cogs of wildlife management. “Fishermen are really gardeners,” he says. “We have the best view of the garden.”

Balancing freedom and order

In places like Mayport, Florida’s new amendment adds to current debates about the viability of traditional industries, like commercial fishing, which are already battered by government regulations and cheap imports.

But the amendment also reflects a deeper tension in America’s cities and towns over the push-pull between freedom and responsibility, especially as it impacts conservation. Some two dozen states have, in the past decade, passed right-to-hunt amendments that preserve the fundamental right for licensed hunters to pursue game and fish. In short, unless and until a different amendment is passed, these states cannot ban hunting.

Florida voters OK’d expansive hunting rights while rejecting an effort to allow recreational marijuana, and falling just short of the 60 percent majority needed to protect abortion access. The support for hunting stood as a reminder that the freedom to hunt in America has long ranked alongside the right to vote and own property as “a sacred democratic expression,” as Jack Davis writes in his book “The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea.’’

Environmentalists, who argue that hunting and fishing are not under threat, say the amendment putting hunters at the forefront of game management is unnecessary.

Over 4 million anglers ply Florida waters yearly, catching over 100 million pounds of fish. Yet the state has a relatively low percentage of hunters. (In Georgia, 7 out of 100 residents are hunters, versus only 1 in 100 in Florida.) Meanwhile, Florida’s robust environmentalist streak has allowed interest groups to advance nonlethal management methods.

Dive tour operators and anglers wrangle

In St. Petersburg, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) temporarily closed pier fishing on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge after brown pelicans, ensnared by fishing lines, died. The bounceback of goliath groupers in the state has pitted dive tour operators against fishers wanting to market more of their catch for consumption.

Additionally, protection for “traditional methods” raises concerns that outdated and unpopular fishing and hunting methods, such as gill-netting or steel leg-traps to hunt bears, could return, setting controversial precedents for how wildlife are viewed and treated.

“Using hunting and fishing as the first-rung approach for managing wildlife could have a catastrophic effect on wildlife populations throughout the state,” write Macie J.H. Codina and Savannah Sherman in the Florida Bar Journal.

Florida law gives all wildlife management rights to the FWC, a board that solicits stakeholder input to make decisions about closures and quotas. Florida’s newest amendment, Amendment 2, safeguards the FWC’s authority, meaning outlawed practices like harpooning manatees won’t return.

But for hunters and anglers, the amendment serves as a political shield against movements like those in Oregon and elsewhere to criminalize some forms of hunting.

In July, for example, a citizen-led effort in Oregon to criminalize hunting, fishing, trapping, and certain livestock practices failed to qualify for the 2024 ballot. The proposal defined artificial insemination of livestock as sexual assault.

In reaction to such proposals, two dozen states, like Florida, now have “right to hunt” constitutional amendments. “Science is going to continue to drive wildlife policy,” says Travis Thompson, the founder and executive director of All Florida, a nonprofit conservation group based in Winter Haven, Florida, and a co-author of Amendment 2.

John Brownlee, former finance chair for the “Save Our Sealife” campaign against gill nets, has expressed support for Amendment 2, saying that citing “traditional methods” doesn’t mean the nets are now OK to use.

But former gill-netters like Mr. Miller say that if science is key, the amendment could open the door to legal challenges to the controversial fishing method. After all, fishery biologists have been unable to attribute positive shifts in fish stocks exclusively to the net ban.

Gill nets are among the earliest human-made fishing implements. Thousand-year-old fragments from such nets built by the Calusa tribe using palm frond fibers have been found on Marco Island, near Naples, Florida. Modern gill nets can be incredibly destructive and indiscriminate. But they can also be used responsibly, as tightly regulated fisheries in Alaska, North Carolina, and Georgia suggest.

Gill nets, native fishers, and commercial boats

In Washington state, Native tribes opposed a 2023 gill-net ban proposal that would have negatively impacted several hundred non-native commercial fishers.

What drew tribal disapproval was the light in which ban proponents placed the gill net. “We oppose it on the grounds that it stigmatizes gill nets as a bad type of fishing gear,” Gerald Lewis, chairman of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council, told the state fisheries commission.

Mr. Lewis argued that the proposal eventually failed and didn’t adhere to science. The bill, he said, was less about conserving salmon than allowing more permits for recreational fishers.

Likewise, “the net ban [in Florida] was strictly orchestrated by sports fishermen trying to get rid of competitors,” says University of Washington fisheries biologist Ray Hilborn. As a result, allocation politics had wide-ranging impacts on communities and livelihoods. In short, who gets to harvest fish? Commercial or recreational fishers?

“That’s what happened in Cedar Key [on Florida’s Big Bend],” says Prof. Hilborn. “It was a fishing town that stopped being a fishing town” after the net ban.

For his part, Mr. Miller survived the net ban and now skippers the shrimp vessel Redemption, which travels from North Carolina’s Outer Banks to Brownsville, Texas, to hunt for shrimp.

He says President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to place tariffs on imports could shift the economics of fishing – though it could also drive up seafood prices.

Here in Mayport, a struggling fishing village settled by Spanish Minorcans in the mid-1700s, scrapped plans for a cruise ship terminal have given way to an effort by nearby Jacksonville to add to the slowly disappearing waterfront. A newly built fish-processing facility now anchors Mayport.

As for the amendment, it “is not going to improve regulation of the stock,’’ says Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. “But fisheries management is by its nature a quasi-political construct. So this is probably good politics for [hunters and fishers] to look at this allocation decision and say, ‘We’ve got primacy.’”