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When Republicans were green

by REP Policy Director Jim DiPeso
published in the Dallas Morning News on April 3, 2005

In our dependence on foreign oil, we could learn something from great conservatives of the past. They believed that conserving natural resources helped keep America strong.

Younger Americans may be skeptical that conservation and conservatism were ever acquainted in the first place. Skepticism is understandable, especially when the party of Theodore Roosevelt and fiscal responsibility sometimes seems to have morphed into the party of Tom DeLay and maxing out the national credit card. This weird Washington ideology of reactionary populism, crony capitalism and eat-up-the-seed-corn delusionism propagates the idea that nature is a vast left-wing conspiracy.

As a Republican, I believe that this is not the traditional conservatism that values humility, frugality, coupling responsibility to freedom and showing piety toward creation.

Several weeks ago, The Economist magazine urged President Bush to make a serious run at being a conservationist. The magazine cited conservation achievements from Republican leaders of yore. And it discussed how conservation matches up with ideals that any conservative ought to find appealing, such as national security, economic strength, taking pride in our country's natural beauty, carrying out our stewardship duties to God's creation and the impacts of toxic pollution on the unborn.

Theodore Roosevelt, a great Republican president, set the gold standard for conservation. He had a lifelong personal interest in wildlife and the outdoors, but his conservation achievements reflected much more than personal interest. He strongly believed that using natural resources with care and efficiency was essential for protecting the nation's strength and keeping our country prosperous and secure for generations to come.

In 1910, he said: "Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of ensuring the safety and continuance of the nation."

How is that relevant today? The only way to lessen our dependence on foreign oil is to lessen our dependence on oil, period. By using so much oil, we are failing to heed George Washington's warning about the dangers of foreign entanglements. We are funding both sides of the war on terrorism. We are giving our money to the world's worst governments. We are involving ourselves in old blood feuds in strange lands that we don't understand well.
And we are sowing the seeds of future conflicts for those last pots of black gold in the Middle East.

Now, Theodore Roosevelt is our conservation champion, but he was not an anomaly, as some of our anti-environmental Republican friends sometimes insist. Unless you're a Herbert Hoover scholar, you won't know that he had an interesting conservationist streak in his political makeup. He expanded the size of our national park system by more than a third and he had some interesting ideas about conservation as a moral imperative.

Hoover valued individual freedom, opposed bureaucratic regimentation and worked for a strong economy. While he supported material prosperity, he worried about its shadow side. He was concerned that Americans would lapse into a kind of moral decadence unless they were exposed to rigorous personal challenges. He believed that outdoor recreation was the cure for hedonistic excess.

Along those lines, Russell Kirk, the writer who supplied the intellectual capital for traditional conservative thinking in the mid-20th century, worried about us becoming slaves to creature comforts. He wrote: "The thinking conservative ... ought to contend with all his strength against this particular degradation of the American mind and heart. The conservative knows that material production and consumption are not the purpose of human existence."

A generation later, similar moral imperatives drove a conservative Republican congressman to co-sponsor one of the great conservation achievements of our history: passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. John Saylor, R-Pa., was a hard-line anti-communist who served in Congress from 1949 until his death in 1973.

Yet he was an ardent conservationist who spoke of wilderness in terms of the most profoundly conservative ideal of them all -- the need for humility, to see our place in a much larger world that is rather indifferent to our daily dramas, for acknowledging our faults, fallibilities and limitations, for avoiding hubris and leaving ourselves large margins.

"In the wilderness, we can get our bearings," he said. "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."

Today, more of our country's population lives in ever-growing cities. Technology has become a ubiquitous feature of our lives. Technology has done many wonderful things for civilization, but over time, we have allowed it to separate us from a deeper understanding of larger natural forces that make our lives possible and worth living.

We may get so wrapped up in our admiration for technology that we lose sight of larger realities that ecology imposes. We blithely approach thresholds that we should not cross.

We see a stubborn resistance to acknowledging what scientists are telling us about global warming and a stubborn clinging to a belief that economically sensible reductions of carbon emissions are impossible. As writer Bill McKibben likes to say: "The laws of Congress and the laws of physics are on a collision course, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield."

As our civilization races around the track at higher and higher speeds, it is the role of true conservatives to raise the caution flag, to ask the hard questions. Are we being prudent? Are we avoiding the danger of taking too many chances with the natural systems that sustain our existence and enrich our lives? Are we leaving ourselves sufficient margins for error?

Bad habits depart reluctantly. Patients resist doctors' warnings to change their ways, but delay only makes change that much harder.