I’m an environmentalist, and I’m a conservative. I didn’t start out that way, in fact I started out as an environmental activist, a fairly radical one. I was involved in some of the earliest actions of Earth First, was designated one of the top 100 grass roots activists by the Sierra Club, and helped put together ad hoc groups in Ohio and Arizona directed at specific issues—controlling coal surface mining in Ohio and protecting mountain lions in Arizona. I changed my “environmental politics” because I came to believe that mainstream environmentalists—the great majority of whom are liberals—are more interested in expanding the role of government than in fixing what’s wrong with the environment. Or in sustaining or enhancing what’s right. And because liberals operate by, within, and through the government to control an ever greater portion of our lives—where we get our health care, what kind of cars and food we can buy, how we dispose of our trash, raise our children, etc.—any increase in government power is an increase in their power. Liberals, in other words, measure success, environmental and otherwise, in terms of their ability to control more of the environment (and therefore of us) via government regulation. Conservatism is the home of the free market, of rewarding people for producing outcomes, not applying policies. What does that have to do with the environment? I know a rancher who has managed the habitat on his ranch to such a state of health that it hosts one of the largest known populations of an endangered bird (a flycatcher). An adjacent preserve of similar habitat hosts none. Leftist environmentalists have lobbied to remove the flycatcher habitat from the rancher’s management and increase the size of the preserve. A conservative environmentalism would reward the rancher for his success and empower him to increase the number of flycatchers even more. Does the conservative approach bring problems? Of course it does, but so does the liberal approach—just ask those flycatchers. If you’re interested in producing results rather than regulations, and dealing with the problems of the former rather than the latter, you’ve come to the right place. [NOTE: This website is under construction. Please excuse the clumsy programming. For more info on the problems that can be created by directing environmental solutions toward applying policies rather than achieving results, see below.]

Better Than Protection The 40 acre study area on National Forest Lands pictured above, the Drake Exclosure, is located on U. S. Forest Service lands in the Verde River watershed about 100 miles north of Phoenix. The Drake has been removed from utilitarian use (in this case, cattle grazing) since 1947. According to the standard dogma of modern liberal environmentalism the one and only sure way to return the land to health and sustain it as healthy is to limit human use of it, ideally to zero. The land in this photo, then, must be very healthy. It has had more than 60 years to heal. But take a look at it. It's as bare as a parking lot, and, during the 60+ years it has been protected 90% of the plant species that existed on it when it was made off limits to use have died out. To call this land healthy, or even to say it is healing is absurd. It's especially absurd when you apply that same way of thinking to the land outside the exclosure (pictured on the right). If using the land harms it, and only land that is protected is healthy, this land, which is unprotected and grazed by cattle from a nearby ranch must be very unhealthy. But it is where the grass is growing, and those grasses are all native.

These two photos were taken on the same day. The photo on the left was taken from inside the Drake Exclosure looking out. Notice the bright green grass in the background. It's outside the exclosure. The photo on the right was taken from outside the exclosure looking toward it.

 

How About Another Example?

The photo below also shows an exclosure that is protected from use and the area outside it, which is grazed. This exclosure is located in the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara, California. Notice the difference in color between the grasses inside the exclosure and those outside. It's subtle but obvious. The amber grasses inside the exclosure are ripgut brome, a nonative annual that is an aggressive invader. The pale green-tan grasses outside the exclosure are purple needle grass, a native perennial that is the California State Grass. Perennial grasses hold the soil better than annuals. Via their extensive root systems, they provide a more effective means for rainfall to enter the soil rather than run off or evaporate, and they are green for a greater portion of the year providing a more reliable source of nutrition to animals wild and domesticated.

Transforming a grassland from mostly perennial plants to mostly annual plants is a process known as desertification. The land inside the exclosure is becoming a desert.

Again, if we identify success in managing the land as a matter of applying the policy of protection, the land inside the exclosure is healthy even though it is more hospitable to a nonnative invader than it is to the native perennials that once lived there.

According to the same way of thinking, the land outside is unhealthy even though the native species that environmentalists value most highly are still are able to live there, and even though it has resisted the desertification experienced by the exclosure.

In other words, according to contemporary environmentalism, if we protect the land we are a success, even if the results we achieve are the exact opposite of what we intended.

And if we use the land, even if we achieve the results we intended (or, in this case, the results identified as best by environmentalists), our efforts are a failure, because using the land is supposedly bad for it, and the only way to have land that is healthy is to protect it.

I can't think of a stronger way to make the case that contemporary environmentalism based on the principles of liberalism is blind, ineffective, absurd, and, most absurd of all, a threat to the environment.

More to come...