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179 — Epilogue — The Fading Green Elephant; Or, The Decline of Antistatist Environmentalism This is all an attempt to centralize power and to give more power to the government. —Republican presidential primary candidate Rick Santorum, 2012 In the summer of 1984, President Ronald Reagan was doing a lot of talking about the environment. On July 12, for example, he arrived in Bowling Green, Kentucky, after a visit to Mammoth Cave National Park to speak to the National Campers and Hikers Association. Following routine greetings and a lighthearted comment or two, he launched into a history of environmental protection in the United States. Like so many of Reagan’s speeches, this one mixed vibrant patriotism with a defense of his administration ’s policies and some chiding of its critics, but it was unusual in the amount of time it dedicated to environmental issues, which had seldom been a major topic in his oratory oeuvre, and in how much credit it gave to federal regulation. A century before, the president observed, Theodore Roosevelt “for the first time outlined the legitimate role of the Federal Government in protecting the environment,” and thanks to the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Endangered Species Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency, American nature was now healthier than it had been in decades. Under his continued guidance, Reagan promised, that progress would continue.1 Two days later, in a radio address from Camp David, Reagan spoke again on government’s role in environmental protection. This time he was a bit more defensive. Despite what critics were saying about him and his administration , he sniffed, “our progress on protecting the environment is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington.” In fact, he said, he had been an 180 Epilogue advocate of government’s role in protecting nature since he had been governor of California more than a decade earlier, when “we took the lead” in controlling automobile emissions. The state served as a model for the Clean Air Act of 1970, and Reagan was “proud of having been one of the first to recognize that States and the Federal Government have a duty to protect our natural resources from the damaging effects of pollution.” A month before, he had even claimed that “no task facing us is more important than preserving the American land” from ecological destruction—and there was no ideological reason to deny it. “What is a conservative after all,” he mused, “but one who conserves . . . the land on which we live—our countryside , our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows and forests.” He had sounded a similar theme in January, in his third State of the Union address. “Preservation of our environment is not a liberal or a conservative challenge,” he had argued. “It’s common sense.”2 Audience members might have been forgiven for reaching for the salt. Comments like these made Reagan sound like a born-again Green, but there was a strong flavor of damage control underneath them, for the president had recently endured a beating on environmental issues. Amid howls of protest from environmentalists, Reagan had gone all-out against federal environmental management from the day of his inauguration. He had gutted the Council on Environmental Quality, a presidential advisory board created by President Nixon in 1969 as part of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969; moved to loosen restrictions on offshore oil production and mining as well as logging and grazing on public lands; slashed budgets and personnel at the Environmental Protection Agency and reduced funding for many other federal environmental management programs; used the Office of Management and Budget to apply cost-benefit analyses to “streamline ” environmental regulations; placed a moratorium on acquisition of national park land; and resisted calls to address acid rain and toxic wastes and to update the Clean Air Act. And these were only some of his efforts. Reagan also chose ideologically friendly (and sometimes less than qualified) appointees to staff environmental bureaucracies, hoping to restrain them from within. The most famous were Interior secretary James Watt and EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford, whose zealousness in pruning back their respective bureaucracies had earned the president a tongue-lashing from environmental groups. Chastened, Reagan now took a more diplomatic approach, although his commitment to eliminating large chunks of regulatory structure remained undiminished.3 Epilogue 181 What had happened? Only a decade before, Republican support for a governmental role in environmental protection was common. As governor, Reagan himself, under the influence of advisers Norman Livermore and...

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