In the same way Nixon was the only president who could “go to China” after spending nearly his entire political career as an ardent anti-communist, the Republican Party, and conservatives in particular, are the only ones capable of saving the environment.
There is a tremendous opportunity open to the Republican Party, a window left open by Democrats unable to effectively communicate legitimate concerns about the future of the environment. No one will debate that the recent generation saw Democrats take ownership of environmental issues. But in the past decade or so, and in particular since Al Gore’s infamous documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the left wing in the U.S. has fallen prey to its most familiar problem: letting extremists dominate the debate and thereby scaring away mainstream America.
There is tremendous pushback against global warming now, after years of intentional inculcation by the UN, international and domestic scientific groups, and the media harmonizing over the dangers of global warming and catastrophic climate change. Some of this pushback is ridiculous, but there is a legitimate reason to distrust transnational elites. For one, they don’t have the best interests of Americans in mind. And whether that is right or not is beside the point, what is important is that messages that are not honest or authentic about U.S. interests don’t get very far in this country.
So with Democrats once again floundering on their own turf, Republican’s find themselves with a golden opportunity to steal back an idea that once belonged to them.
What’s that, you say? Republicans used to care about the environment? That seems cynical to say because of a legacy of big business co-opting the GOP in the past two decades. Rod Dreher, opinion columnist for the Dallas Morning News and author of the wildly successful book, Crunchy Cons, reminds us about conservatism’s recent history with environmentalism.
“It’s true that Reaganism, for all the good it did, also mainstreamed a kind of conservatism that viewed environmentalism with contempt. Scorning environmentalists as tree-hugging kooks became a way of proving one’s right-wing bona fides.”
And so distrust of anything “green” became part and parcel of contemporary versions of conservatism. But that strategy has taken conservatives away from an issue that truly belongs to them. And belong to them it does, for what is conservatism without “conserving.”
The legacy and philosophy of Teddy Roosevelt are instructive here. In a characteristic address to the National Editorial Foundation in June 1907, Roosevelt said the following:
"In utilizing and conserving the natural resources of the Nation, the one characteristic more essential than any other is
foresight.... The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life."
This is a basic tenet of conservationism: protecting the beauty of our natural landscape and treating our natural resources with respect color the health of our society. Nature sustains us in a way that commerce, art, and politics cannot.
The unalloyed abuse of our environment over the past 30 years therefore sickens our culture. Democrats and left-wing activists have hijacked the debate, frightening normal Americans into believing catastrophic consequences are already underway. Only Republicans, with their long history of conservation, can reclaim this issue and explain it in a way that neither threatens nor scares mainstream Americans. It will take a bold conservative leader to talk about environmental issues, leaving aside the dogma of unchecked free-markets. Dreher quotes the strident anti-communist Republican congressman John Saylor, who, speaking in favor of the 1956 Wilderness Act, said:
“The stress and strain of our crowded, fast-moving highly mechanized and raucously noisy civilization create another great need for wilderness…In the wilderness, we can get our bearings. We can keep from getting blinded in our great human success to the fact that we are part of the life of this planet, and we would do well to keep our perspectives and keep in touch with some of the basic facts of life.”Can you imagine Republican leaders talking like this today? Probably not, but then again, it was Nixon who went to China. The world is topsy-turvy enough for it to happen again.
Zachary Adam Cohen is the creator of Farm to Table: The Emerging American Meal, a reality-TV show based on the local sustainable food movement. He blogs at Farm to Table, Huffington Post, and can also be found on Twitter.