Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics before Reagan

Foreword

xii Conservative Conservationists William Cronon American citizens who came of age after about 1980 are accustomed to elections and policy debates in which the two major parties align themselves pretty predictably on environmental issues. Ask either a Democrat or a Republican what they expect a dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist to do at the ballot box, and both will almost certainly answer that such a person would vote Democratic much more often than not. Democrats, after all, are comfortable with the idea that government in general, and the federal government in particular, has a vital role to play in enforcing environmental regulations to prevent air and water pollution, improve energy efficiency, protect endangered species, reduce exposure to toxic chemicals, respond to the threat of climate change, and other such interventions. Republicans are much more likely to be doubtful about the effectiveness of such regulations and concerned about their impacts on taxes, property rights, economic prosperity, and political liberty. And so most of us just naturally assume that being an environmentalist means being a Democrat. Those with longer historical memories, though, will recognize that there is considerable irony in this seemingly inevitable partisan alignment. It was, after all, the Republican Theodore Roosevelt who first used the bully pulpit of the White House to promote the conservation of natural resources, permanent protection of public lands, and government regulation of corporate misbehavior. The national forests as we know them today are largely the result of Roosevelt’s partnership with Gifford Pinchot, who would go on to serve two terms as the Republican governor of Pennsylvania. Despite partisan differences, Pinchot embraced many of the conservation policies Foreword xiii of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, making Pennsylvania second only to California in the number of camps it hosted for the Civilian Conservation Corps, its expansion of the state park system, and its promotion of other conservation measures. Such activities were not unusual among Republican leaders during the first half of the twentieth century. The conservationist Aldo Leopold, today regarded as a patron saint of American environmentalism , was a registered Republican. The most striking example of environmental activism by a leading Republican must surely be Richard Nixon, whose efforts to undermine potential Democratic rivals for his second-term presidential election led to an escalating competition between the Republican White House and a Congress in which the Democrats controlled both houses. Most of today’s environmental laws at the federal level were passed with large bipartisan majorities during a surprisingly brief period in the 1960s and 1970s. Among them are the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. Not only did Richard Nixon sign all of these bills, but his administration also authored some of the most sweeping environmental reforms of the period, including the creation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. In the post-1980 world, this longstanding Republican tradition of environmental concern and commitment to conservation seems about as remote from the modern conservative movement as it is possible to imagine. Certainly Nixon’s enthusiasm for large-scale government reorganization and his willingness to create powerful new regulatory agencies to enforce environmental protection have been largely repudiated by many members of his party in the years since 1970. But it would be going too far to say that modern conservatives have severed all ties to these earlier environmental traditions or that the environmental movement did not at least partly originate from values and political convictions that we would today regard as conservative. Liberals, conservatives, and environmentalists alike forget the complexities of their own intellectual traditions when they lose track of these inconvenient political truths. In Loving Nature, Fearing the State: Environmentalism and Antigovernment Politics Before Reagan, Brian Drake sets out to recover this forgotten history by reminding us of the conservative roots of modern environmentalism . He does this in an unusual and intriguing way. Rather than provide a linear narrative of conservative and libertarian environmental thought or xiv Foreword an institutional history of the Republican Party’s changing relationship to environmental politics, he selects key figures and episodes to explore different strands of what we now recognize as modern conservatism and analyzes how they relate to the simultaneous emergence of environmentalism. By juxtaposing unexpected elements that might today seem quite unrelated, he demonstrates their hidden connections and encourages us to think more carefully about political platitudes that make it too easy to assume that conservatism is intrinsically hostile to...