Wanted: A conservative conservation agenda
Amonth ago, a fishing buddy in Utah called me in a lather. His senator, Republican Mike Lee, had just used the existence of public lands to compare present-day Utahns to the mistreated subjects of England’s Medieval royal forests. “Their houses were razed and their historic rights trampled!” Lee proclaimed. He promised to introduce legislation to sell, transfer, or otherwise divest of our public lands — our national forests, our national monuments, even, perhaps, our national parks.
My friend couldn’t understand it.
“What is going on with Senator Lee?” he asked. “I have been a Republican my whole life, and there is nothing conservative about transferring public lands from public ownership.”
My friend’s views are by no means uncommon. They aren’t just shared by the overwhelming majority of anglers in my organization, Trout Unlimited, where Republicans and independents outnumber Democrats by a 2-to-1 margin. They are also shared by a whopping 97 percent of sportsmen and women, including 73 percent of those who voted for President Trump, according to a recent survey.
The words conservation and conservative share the same Latin root: “conservare,” mean- ing to keep or hold in a safe state.
Making public lands available for sale to the highest bidder is not conservative. It’s reckless.
It was conservative politicians who largely created the rich fabric of public lands that make America the envy of the world, and that Sen. Lee’s proposals would diminish.
In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant named 2 million acres of land in the northwest corner of the Wyoming territory, Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. President Theodore Roosevelt protected 230 million acres of public land and created the U.S. Forest Service. President Nixon signed into law the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. President H. W. Bush strengthened the Clean Air Act and helped solve the scourge of acid rain.
All these men were, of course, Republican presidents.
What our nation needs today from true conservatives is reaffirmation of a conservative conservation agenda. This agenda would be guided by a few key principles that should strike a chord with right-leaning Americans:
Where taxpayer dollars are spent, they should be leveraged and spent efficiently. Spending that encourages private philanthropy and state funding should be a priority. For example, in Pennsylvania over the past decade, my organization received approximately $1 mil- lion in Chesapeake Bay Program funding and used that to leverage an additional $4 million in investment from private philanthropists and state programs.
The most durable efforts are local. Government is more effective at a local level. So, too, with conservation. Witness then-gov. Jim Risch — another Republican, by the way — leading a collaborative process in 2006 to protect nearly 9 million acres of public land in his state of Idaho.
Address issues before they become festering problems. Anticipating opportunities is more effective than cleaning up messes. For example, Congress should act on a bill to treat renewable energy development on public lands as a leasable mineral, just like oil and gas, thereby creating a revenue stream for states and counties, and to support restoration work. Demand for renewable energy on public lands is low today, but it will not be in 20 years.
Conservation is the single most optimistic and affirmative idea that conservatives gave America. What could be more conservative than taking collective action today to make the world a better place for our kids tomorrow?