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Giving Gaia Her Due: Conservative Environmentalism
The environmentalist movement is filled with loons. That’s obvious enough. Frank Soto dismembered the extremists in his great recent post “Gaia Demands a Sacrifice“. As always, Frank is precise in his reasoning and hilarious in his takedown, but there is something of the knee-jerk in here, something that has cost conservatives much. Environmentalism should be a conservative cause, and, even amidst the lunacy, there is something to be said for Gaia and man’s place with her.
Reid Buckley made this point in a 2009 article at The American Conservative:
But within the hysteria and exaggeration of political activists, mostly of the Left, too often supported by cooked science, there is often a kernel of legitimate concern, be it economical, sociological, aesthetic, or environmental. We conservatives have shut our ears.
Why are we deaf? Is it because we have no alternatives? Buckley wondered whether, on the environment and elsewhere, conservatives have left themselves with ridicule as the only response to the left:
For 40 years, smug, snide right-wingers have made merry mocking Greenpeace fanatics and ecological doomsayers without learning a blessed thing about the precariousness of the ecology and the effect of human action (not to speak of avarice) on it, as when we promiscuously exfoliate the rain forests or condemn yet one more green acre on the southeastern shore of New Jersey to the desolation of heedless urban development. We conservatives are so self-satisfied that we have incapacitated ourselves from peering beneath the antics of idiots and the wild exaggerations of scruffy environmentalist kooks to the gathering of real dangers that their hysterical rhetoric obscures.
There are environmental disasters. To deny this, or to reassure ourselves that the market alone will take care of it, is naïve and even dangerous.
The market can create horrific ugliness.
I live in Montana, a state of wondrous beauty. But it is also a place of environmental degradations that are beyond comprehension. In Butte, long the center of copper mining in the US, the Anaconda Company — which operated the mines and smelters for nearly a century and which left the state in 1978 — bequeathed a pox of ugliness one and one half miles wide and nearly 1,800 feet deep. Once among the largest open pit mines in the world, the Berkeley Pit, which is right in the middle of town, is now full of water so filthy that insects fear to tread.
And the pit has done just what Buckley warned against:
…it is ugly, an affront to the eye, accustoming thousands of human beings to dehumanizing blows against the aesthetic sense until it is benumbed. The good, the true, and the beautiful are inseparably joined. One cannot damage one without doing harm to the others. Those who fail to comprehend this are morally in error on the dialectical front, though they may be personally virtuous.
Butte is a sad place.
Disdain and mockery may trigger the visceral satisfaction that comes from a sense of superiority, but it will gain us nothing if we fail to recapture a conservative ecology. Writing in The Guardian, Paul Foote argues that environmentalism lies deep within the conservative heart:
As the grandfather of modern conservative political thinking, Edmund Burke, put it: we are “temporary possessors or life renters” of this world and have a moral obligation not to squander our natural inheritance, lest we “leave to those who come after … a ruin instead of a habitation.” Respect for the past and responsibility to future generations creates a duty to conserve our resources and protect the environment.
A modest proposal is for conservatives to remember their roots. “Home is where one starts from,” Eliot said. Humans have natural affection, not just for home sweet home, but for their community and their nation. But as Burke said, “to be loved our country must be lovely.” A conservative environmentalism naturally springs from the understanding of man as creature in the world living together with those other walking shadows who seek the peace which home and community afford, and who also understand that it is wrong to soil one’s own nest. Foote adds:
A conservative argument for championing environmentalism involves marrying the principles of responsibility, conservation and security to an emphasis on the local environment. It is about guarding our green spaces, the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we live and work on. It is the environment people see, experience, enjoy or hate – but in any case it is the immediate context of all our lives
Conservatives have a duty to enter the environmental debate, and not merely to call out the crazies. Conservatives need to offer an alternative ecological philosophy that is grounded in love—of country and community. Otherwise we will surrender what should be our issue to leftist environmental monopolists who are sure to send us into a nightmare of “global initiatives” that will only further the ecological entropy and rob us of the very thing conservatives most cherish: home.
Conservatives were once out in front on the environmental cause. As Governor of California Ronald Reagan laid out the conservative ecological position in quite certain terms:
“[There is an] absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment. . . The bulldozer mentality of the past is a luxury we can no longer afford. Our roads and other public projects must be planned to prevent the destruction of scenic resources and to avoid needlessly upsetting the ecological balance.”
This means that a conservative environmental philosophy must recognize and honor sacrifice. It will sometimes be necessary to say no to the new factory, the strip mall, or the pipeline, not merely because they pollute, but because they are ugly, dehumanizing, and a breach of the trust we hold for coming generations. We need to remember, as Burke wrote in The Vindication of Natural Society, that “the great error of our nature is not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable acquirement; not to compound with our condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit after more.”
Sometimes Gaia must be given her due.
Published in General
And what to do when the government is the polluter? Big problem.
This is not an issue that breaks cleanly left and right.
Michael Dukakis, Democrat, as governor, flew to Texas to sell the offshore oil drilling rights to George’s Bank at the oilmen’s convention. When George H.W. Bush was elected president shortly thereafter, he stopped the leases from going through.
President Reagan in 1982 signed, with a flourish and ceremony, the toughest law that has ever been passed against dumping partially treated sewage in any waterway anywhere in the country. It called for expensive tertiary treatment.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve been up against the EPA and other “environmentalists.” They are the U.S. government, and so they win.
It’s hard to know what to do because I see these issues now as being all about money. The “environment” is as complicated as our existence itself. What’s important to one person is less important to another. Who wins? The person with the power and money. And that is usually the government these days.
One of the first things conservatives might consider in redirecting environmental problems to the more local level (cities, states) is to offer the interstate compact as a more efficient and effective approach than the EPA. Basically, an IC is an agreement between 2 or more states to form a alliance to manage interstate issues. From the Wiki article you can get a general idea how this works and some examples of compacts now in place.
Some issues are not made for this approach. But problems like river pollution, the broader consequences of mining or logging, might be amenable to this approach.
If it was so “easily apparent”, why would the residents not have been aware?
Republicans here on Cape Cod are often more strident in protecting the environment here than the Democrats. When arguments devolve into political battles, however, the sides quickly become Democrat or Republican, accusations flying every which way. Truly, the Democrats often turn issues into political issues just to get support for their side. It’s an interesting and frustrating dynamic. They know if they can turn something into a partisan issue, the press will pick it up and run with whatever version the Democrat who first called them told them.
My son spent three years in Montana, and he brought home pictures of the pit Mike has described. My son could not imagine how it could have gotten so bad. It must be horrible to live with it. It is a crime, and once the company is out of business, there’s no one left to take responsibility. Truly a tragedy.
The example used, a mine that was opened in the 1920s and closed in the 1970s, betrays the weakness of the argument.
The truth is, there is such as thing as “conservative environmentalism”, and it can be seen in pretty much every new industrial project in North America. Or, at least, those few that actually manage to get past the regulatory gatekeepers.
Take the Alberta oilsands for example. Alberta is Canada’s most conservative province, and oil is pretty much considered the most evil of conservative industries.
So, you’d expect the landscape around Fort MacMurray to be a wasteland, just like the left-wing celebrities claim.
It isn’t true. Oil developers in northern Alberta spend a lot of money and make use of a lot of expertise to minimize the ecological impact.
http://www.capp.ca/environmentCommunity/Pages/default.aspx
My apologies.
From the tenor of your comments I assumed this was your position, that error is mine. Could you more fully explain your ideas on how interstate compacts could serve as a means to resolve interstate issues? The wikipedia article was interesting but did not satisfy me.
Granting your position for the sake of argument, what alternatives do you suggest? Are you satisfied with the work the EPA currently does or do you have something substantial to offer in replacement such as Mr. Rapokoch’s suggestion of interstate compacts?
Roberto:
I think our discussion got a bit overheated. My apologies.
I’m doing some research on ICs. I have some familiarity with them from my law practice days, but it’s been a while so I feel the need to dig deeper. I’m hoping to post something by the end of the week. One difficulty with such agreements is that the Constitution requires Congressional approval of them. This is tough in these days when Congress wants to nationalize policy. But reaching agreements is a natural human habit, although sometimes a long and painful process, and whenever those most directly affected are involved there is much more chance of compromise, despite natural animosities. ICs would have the singular advantage of limiting authority to those states that agree. That in itself is a salutary thing.
As someone who spent 30 years in the corporate world working on environmental and safety issues and for a few years prior to that doing government related work I have a few comments.
1. I agree generally with Mike that in the 70s and the 80s environment was less of a partisan issue.
2. The degree of environmental improvement in the US since the 1960s is remarkable.
3. The problem is that for environmentalists it is Never Enough which means (1) more and more complex laws and regulations to address smaller and smaller problems and all of their solutions rely upon more centralized control; (2) refusal to acknowledge how much improvement there has been since this undercuts their constant alarmist din and (3) refusal to acknowledge the effectiveness of the current system (the reason the tar sands projects in Canada are environmentally protective is that, contra to the environmentalists claim, current regulations are very effective.
4. By my comment above I am not advocating continuing the current regulatory scheme which is overly complex and often counterproductive and, given the current state of adminstrative law, actually encourages sloppy and lazy decision making and regulation by agencies.
For some interesting thinking on alternatives to the current approach I suggest looking at two Montana based organizations:
PERC
FREE
Very interesting. I was aware of PERC, but enjoyed FREE principlally because of some articles by Kevin Williamson, espcially this one: http://www.free-eco.org/insights/article/politics-poverty It’s somewhat in line with the point of my post, that conservatives need to reclaim the environment/ecology debate before the left makes an unsolveable mess. Williamson discusses the conservative need to refocus attention away from the 1% garbage of the left, towards a conservative vision that pushes getting people out of poverty. It’s quite interesting.
It’s interesting that Mark’s argument about the Berkely Pit came down to aesthetics. He could have done so much better to support his argument. There’s more to it than that (the water is highly acidic; though there are naturally created lakes that also are).
We have a very mobile society. Regarding the the Berkely Pit itself, if people in Butte don’t like it, they can individually decide to move. That pit has been there long enough where people who have stayed in Butte did so with the utmost freedom from economical circumstances to move.
It does look like an eye sore. But he does concede it didn’t ruin the whole state of Montana. His argument seems to be mines are bad and dams are good. Well, we need mining too. Perhaps what happened to Butte could have been mitigated. Perhaps it still can.
As for the issue of local versus federal government control, I’m for local control. And that doesn’t necessarily contradict being a reasonable environmentalist.
Al:
My argument has more to do with suggesting environmentalism grounded in the love of home than with actual public policy, so I didn’t go into great detail on the ecological consequences of the pit, which are considerable. I expanded on this some of my comments. The water in the pit isn’t just acidic, it is filled with arsenic, cadmium, copper remnants, and more. The pit is a mess and is, if memory serves, still the largest Superfund site. Among the risks is that if the water reaches the ground water it may well spill into Silver Bow Creek, at the headwaters of the Clarke’s Fork River, one of the nations most beautiful waterways which extends from Butte to Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho and then into the Columbia River.It is far more than an aesthetic issue.
But what I’m trying to encourage is a recapture of the environmental cause from the globalists who i believe are the greatest danger, both to the environment and to the US.
As for people moving from Butte, I think the issue a bit more complicated, but will respond when my eyelids are less heavy.
There are plenty of “natural” lakes that are toxic and filled with heavy metals, without any action from mankind. They are this way for similar reasons to Butte: those materials are in the ground anyway, and they leach out.
But nobody is calling for “fixing” naturally toxic lakes.
So what is the difference between them? Why should one promote panic and fear, and the other one ignored?
As others have indicated, stewardship seems to be the common form of conservative environmentalism. And, like the pagan worship to which it is opposed, it is a philosophy which has existed for thousands of years.
Sadly, the Church’s understanding of the responsibility of stewardship was the only environmental philosophy not taught in the “Environmental Ethics” course at my nominally Catholic university.
Stewardship presumes ownership. In theory, public lands and waters belong to the general public. In practice, they don’t.
I would draw the lines as follows:
As and when human interaction with nature seek to improve/elevate the latter, it is a Good Thing. Stewardship, as Aaron points out, is responsible ownership.
As and when humans treat nature as its own entity (such as naming it “Gaia”), ascribing to it properties that suggest that it is best left alone or that people are the problem and not the solution, then it is a Bad Thing. It has become a pagan deity.
One of the major problems with the environmental movement is absolutism and its propensity to automatically believe all impacts of our modern world are harmful and to make everything an issue to scare the public about. In opposing this I am concerned that conservatives are increasingly adopting the opposite knee jerk reaction that nothing is a problem. The truth is science is not ideological. Are there a lot of issues where the potential harm has been exaggerated? Yes. Are there some substances or uses of material that pose substantial harm to human health and the environment? Yes.
However, I despair of any fundamental change in the situation. What I’ve seen over 30+ years is that it is almost impossible to make the most commonsense changes in laws and regulations and that the whole process ends up as additive. More is always added, nothing subtracted, which means the whole becomes more incoherent, inefficient and violative of property rights. This is true for all regulations, not just environmental.
This is not just a federal issue. It is as bad at the state and local level. See, for instance, the California Coastal Commission for true insanity.
On the topic of Gaia worship, I think GK Chesterton explained it best by stating that Nature is not our mother, but rather is like our sister, our little sister. We love her and protect her, but we don’t look at her as a source of authority.
Americans tend to agree on the need for clean air and water, and not needlessly damaging ecological resources. That said, I’m not sure if this:
. . .Is necessary. The last thing we want to do is bring anti-humanist, aristocratic environmentalism into the conservative tent. American conservatism has always been against aristocratic disdain of the burdens middle and lower-middle class Americans face. If we include anti-humanists, we will lose other voters.
I understand the appeal. All political coalitions require elites, and in some parts of the country the local elites are uniformly environmental extremists. This makes it harder for the GOP to compete in blue states, and especially along the coasts. But I don’t think the solution is to to try and appeal to the very people responsible for the destruction of their local communities.
Im not good at affirmative policy suggestions, but I could imagine a system in which companies engaging in interventions with the potential for contamination be required to post a bond or pay into an insurance fund in advance for the costs of potential cleanup, with repayment after a set number of contamination-free years.
I have seen a number of Superfund sites which are being cleaned up by the EPA at a cost of billions to the taxpayer because the perpetrator went to ground. Similar to banks and the FDIC, if the government is de facto the cleaner of last resort, it should be able to force potential liabilities to keep enough financial reserves on hand to prevent the government from having to intervene in the first place.
We have a trust fund set up in Montana to ensure that coal companies strip mining in the eastern part of the state clean up their mess. Cont.
I often tell people I am a conservationist, not an environmentalist.
The main issue I’m trying to sort out is the concept of “external costs.” Basically, those are costs that are born neither by the buyer or the seller, but instead by the community at large. So, if you sell someone a car, the pollution created by the car is an external cost. That is a potential weakness in the libertarian concept of a free market, so I don’t like it, but I don’t have a strong rebuttal for it yet.
Hovever, I did come across a lecture by David Friedman (Milton Friedman’s son), where he claimed that when he attempted to quantify external costs and external benefits of having children, he could not reliably find a net external cost. So, based on his points, I’m hoping that the environmental left assigns an exaggerated importance to external costs. Given the Left’s track record, I think that is very likely.
So are you saying, ” to heck with it all; I’ll just do what I want?” Yes, many are crazies, but I still have to live here, and I would like to keep it clean. That means that when I walk in the woods, I pick up the beer cans people thoughtlessly left behind and put it in my bag. I’ll minimize my use of pesticides in my garden because I want the honeybees to pollinate so my cucumbers and tomatoes bear fruit. It doesn’t mean that I ring my hands over my carbon footprint, but I will plan my trips because gas is expensive. My mother re-used tin foil and plastic wrap (to my great horror) not to save the earth, but because she grew up during the Depression and to do otherwise was wasteful. It’s just common sense. For many years I have worried that when man-made global warming is widely accepted for the hoax that it is, people will think it is a free-for-all – pollute and ravage at will.
Second guessing past decisions with current knowledge is a cheap shot. Move forward and remember that we were put here to subjugate the earth as directed by the Big Guy.
Here is Milton Friedman on the topic. I think this one is relevant as well.
My take away from this, if Friedman is correct is that, when people are left to make their own decisions in a free market, environmental impacts will tend to be moderated, while government intervention in the market tends to lead to overproduction or underproduction, leading to a variety of negative impacts, including environmental impacts.
An example I would add to the ones Friedman mentions is the government’s subsidy on corn. This has lead to overproduction of corn and a number of undesirable effects, both for the environment (feeding corn to cattle producing runoff pollution) and for consumers (high fructose corn syrup is put in everything, without the consumers asking for it).
I’m a conservative and a conservationist. I love to garden so I have rain barrels and compost bins. I limit my use of chemical fertilizers and go organic when I can. I capture the water from the sink and shower while they are warming up and use it on my landscape. As a result, my yard is a little paradise of birds, flowers, fruits and vegetables. But I have no desire to live in a yurt. Conservatives must find the balance between saving the planet and destroying society. Technological advances help us to maintain our standard of living while reducing our impact on the earth. We should constantly strive to find a better, cleaner way of doing things.
On the other hand, windmills, ethanol, or that atrocious solar thermal energy plant in California have a far more negative impact than any benefit they provide. They only exist because of government subsidy.
Just sell the water to Northern California. A nice clean pipeline, a little filtering….
Did the mining company own the land in question when they mined it?