WHY DO WE NEED A CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM?

Liberalism doesn’t work to solve environmental problems just as it doesn’t solve problems of poverty, race, the economy, terrorism...

This blog is an effort to inspire the birth of a truly conservative alternative to contemporary liberal environmentalism.

Right off the bat that brings to mind a couple of questions:

First, isn’t “conservative environmentalism” an oxymoron? Isn’t it impossible to have a conservative environmentalism because all conservatives want to take us back to the “old ways” when everything was ruled by old white men whose lust for profits and dominance over nature created all of our environmental problems in the first place?

Second, why bother? Many conservative pundits are hard at work trying to do away with environmentalism. Rush Limbaugh has described environmentalism as “the new home of displaced communists” and “one of the tentacles of liberalism seeking to envelop our planet in its evil grip.” Others regularly refer to environmentalists as “radical” and “wackos.”

Why, then do we need a conservative environmentalism?

Addressing the second question first: We need a conservative environmentalism because it would identify and address environmental problems that are real and really need to be solved. It would not dream up problems (global warming, for instance) or pervert already existing problems (wildfire, species extinction), as does contemporary liberal environmentalism, so it can use them as tools to advance leftist goals, i. e., increase the sphere of government.

We need a conservative environmentalism because there are a lot of people who identify themselves as political conservatives who are as concerned about real environmental problems as any liberal. They want to have healthy watersheds, forests, and rangelands (I know because I’m one of those people.) but we don’t want to have to sign on to (or appear to sign on to) solutions to these problems that merely grow bigger government.

Which brings us back to the first question:

Is “conservative environmentalism” an oxymoron? Actually, it’s quite the opposite. I’m convinced, and I believe that via this blog I can convince you, that a conservative environmentalism is the only true environmentalism. The reason for this is because an environmentalism based on conservative principles would deal with environmental problems/opportunities rather than serve as merely a Trojan Horse for growing government. And, as in all instances where these two approaches go head to head, the conservative approach would solve the problem or realize the opportunity. The liberal approach would merely make the problem worse and then try to convince us that even more goverment would somehow give us a different result. That’s what it always does.

What’s the definition of insanity?

TAKING ON BIG GREEN
The actions of contemporary mainstream environmentalism harm the environment as well as help it. And in the cases where that is true, the more aggressively those actions are applied, the more harm they do. To let others know about those instances in which contemporary mainstream environmentalism, which I call Big Green) creates the opposite of what it purports to be its mission is the main reason I decided to create this blog.

Here on the RightWay2BGreen, you’ll see the true face of that harm and come to know why it happens, how it happens, and how it can be avoided. Most importantly, you’ll come to know what flaw in Big Green’s conceptual basis causes it to create the opposite of what it promises to create, and you’ll learn why people who sincerely believe they love nature end up harming it and refuse to even consider admitting or correcting their mistakes.

You will read things on this blog that you will read nowhere else. You will see pictures of environmental solutions that you will see nowhere else. In fact, you will see pictures of events and achievements that Big Green insists are impossible, and that it works constantly to discredit, coverup, or deny.

You’ll also read descriptions and see pictures of environmental harm perpetrated by Big Green that you will find nowhere else. Needless to say, Big Green is working constantly to discredit, cover up and deny that as well.

Coming next: Some of those descriptions and some of those pictures.

WHAT'S THE RIGHT WAY TO BE GREEN?

What’s the right way to be green? A way that works, that achieves your environmental goals, that creates or restores health and function to ecosystems and provides a sustainably abundant way for humans to live within those ecosystems. Notice that I say sustainably abundant. I do not subscribe to the zero-sum definition of sustainability—that more for anyone means less for someone (or something) else, or as it says on a bumper sticker: “Live simply that others may simply live.”

The abundance theory of sustainability goes like this... As we produce food, fiber, and other goods and services we produce abundance for ourselves and others, including for other species. In my most recent book, The Gardeners of Eden Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature, I said it this way: You can’t have your cake unless you eat it, too. Unhealthy ecosystems, after all, only produce money for environmental groups who are able to sell them as bones of contention and stairsteps to political power.

So, what’s the wrong way to be green? A way that produces scarcity rather than abundance; that damages ecosystems by impairing or even destroying their ability to function and thus produces scarcity for all in the process. Why, you may ask, would anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist do something that harms the environment? Because they’ve made a mistake, or they’ve been fooled, and they’re doing the wrong thing when they think they’re doing the right thing, is one answer, but the more accurate answer is: for the same reason anybody does something to harm the environment—when it brings them money or power or achieves their political agenda.

Those of you who have bought on to mainstream liberal environmentalism have been sold a phony.

A WORLD WITHOUT ENVIRONMENTALISTS

How Would The Environment Fare If It Was Unprotected?

Many of us in the U. S. and in other post-modern societies subscribe to the prejudice that the use by humans (especially modern technologically-adept humans) always has a negative impact on Nature. For this reason we have invented something called “environmentalism,” along with a body of laws, rules, regulations, interest groups, a servile media and education system, taboos, fads, fashions, movies, books etc., to protect Nature from us. The assumption upon which all of the above is based is that the more we protect things from us, the more they will return to “balance” or a state we call “pristine” and the better off we will all be. This is true, we are told, even though our standard of living may be diminished drastically. We will be better off, we are told, because we won’t keep making things worse until we destroy the planet, or end life as we know it, or all become cannibals, or whatever image some liberal Chicken Little du jour uses to convince us that we are doomed unless we follow Big Green.

One writer whom I have met and who reviewed my first book (Alan Weisman) has even written a book named The World Without Us. It is described as a “penetrating, page-turning, tour of a post-human Earth.” Actually, there are already a number of places here on planet Earth that show us what a “post-human Earth” would be. With that in mind I offer the photos that accompany this post as illustrations after the fact for Alan’s book or for a sequel called The World Without Environmentalists.

The photo sequence below shows an exclosure in central Arizona, the Drake Exclosure, which was set aside in 1946 to study what a “World Without Us” would look like. The top photo shows the exclosure in 2004 after 58 years of the remedy contemporary liberal environmentalism tells us will restore nature to health, diversity, and balance. The second photo (below the first) shows what the land outside the exclosure, which has continued to be grazed by a local rancher’s cattle and used by humans for firewood cutting, off-road vehicle recreation, hunting, etc, looked like that same year. The third photo was taken on the same day as photo #2 from a point inside the exclosure looking out. Notice which way the elk tracks are headed.

Is this piece of the Earth better off without humans or without environmentalists?













































OTHER EXAMPLES OF A WORLD WITHOUT US
(AND OF THE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF BIG GREEN)

DESERTIFICATION On Wupatki National Monument, adjacent to former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt’s family’s ranch in Northern Arizona, the amount of bare dirt (soil without plants on it) has more than doubled in 13 years of preservation or “World Without Us” management). In contrast, four trials of using cattle to encourage plant growth on a study plot on the Babbitt Ranch monitored by EcoResults (a not-for-profit I helped found) increased plant cover by native grasses by an average of 20% per trial.

ENDANGERED SPECIES A ranch along the Gila River in New Mexico hosts one of the largest known populations of an endangered bird—the southwestern willow flycatcher. Two adjacent preserves, examples of “The World Without Us,” host none of those birds.

NATIVE PLANTS On a preserve near Santa Barbara, California, where I live today, exclosures have been constructed to protect areas of native grasses from human impact on the theory that the current invasion of California grasslands by plants from other continents is caused by the damage done to those habitats by more than a century of human use. After 15 or so years of post-human management the exclosures have proven more hospitable to the invaders than the natives. The protected areas have become almost pure stands of invaders, while outside the fence, where the land continues to be grazed, and thus be used by humans, there are healthy stands of natives grasses right up to the fence.

VERNAL POOLS In Central California, when cattle grazing was removed from seasonal wetlands called vernal pools, Nature Conservancy scientists found that post-human management made these concentrations of native diversity and endangered species vulnerable to invasion by nonnative plants. This invasion caused some of these seasonal wetlands to dry up before the rare plants and animals that inhabit them could spring to life and reproduce. In as few as 3 years of “protection” these areas, which have been called one of the highest concentrations of rare and endangered species on Earth, have literally disappeared.

To their credit a number of mainstream environmental groups, including The Nature Conservancy, Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, and more have recognized this situation and have facilitated the return of grazing to these unique areas. Still, the other situations I described above, and plenty more like them, have experienced no such progress.

My experience and my examples come mainly from ranching and rangeland management in the American West, but the phenomenon I am describing occurs in other types of habitat with other kinds of management, too.

HAWAII On the Hawaiian island of Kauai farming was removed from the Hanalei Valley to benefit native birds. When bird populations began to suffer, farming was restored, and the birds came back.

INDIA In Cattle and Conservation at Bharatpur: A Case Study in Science and Advocacy, Michael Lewis describes a situation in Bharatpur, India, in which the grazing animals belonging to surrounding villagers were removed from an area of wetlands that had been created as a hunting reserve for the local maharaja and recently converted into a park. Nine villagers were shot to death achieve this removal. Since the villagers and their livestock were forcibly removed, the marshes, ponds, and canals have become clogged with plants the cattle used to eat. As a result bird numbers have begun to drop as has the tiger population, which used to be one of the most dense in the world. As of 2003, the Indian Government was struggling to deal with this apparent anomaly in environmental theory: Removing the impacts of humans is not supposed to cause parks to deteriorate.

In all of these examples, and plenty more, the remedy mainstream liberal environmentalism or big green has identified as the only way to deal with our environmental problems—reducing human impact—has failed to achieve its goal. It has failed to save endangered species, improve habitat, and encourage the survival of native plant species. In every case I have listed it did the exact opposite of what it set out to do: it exterminated the endangered species it intended to protect, destroyed the habitat it was intended to restore, made areas more, rather than less, susceptible to invasion by nonnatives, and hastened the desertification of land it was supposed to preserve.

LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM IS BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT There are plenty of sources who say environmentalism is asking for too much, is too expensive, puts animals before humans, is wreaking havoc on our economy, is a religion, etc., but few if any are saying what you have just read: that contemporary liberal environmentalism and its cure for everything environmental—reducing the impact of humans—is bad for the environment.

The irony of what you will read in the Rightway2BGreen is that it doesn't call those of us who are concerned about the environment "wackos", it makes the case that we need to swap Big Green for a conservative environmentalism that judges the worth of an action on its results rather than on how well it fits a liberal, anti-capitalist, misanthropic agenda.

A LIBERAL SOLUTION TO THE

"OVERPOPULATION PROBLEM"

The other day, I was discussing the environment with a liberal friend when we got to a lull in the conversation and he said all the actions we were talking about, restoring rangelands, saving endangered species, revitalizing watersheds, were better than doing nothing, of course, but they were all futile because in the end there are just too many people on the Earth. For that reason, he continued, the only thing that could really make a dent in the Earth’s environmental problems would be for about half of the people to disappear. Actually (after acknowledging that what he was going to say wasn’t “politically correct”) he said that the entire planet would be better off if about half of the people now living would be killed in a nuclear war or a plague or something equally as horrible.

As happens frequently in situations that make me uncomfortable, I couldn’t think of a clever and appropriately devastating rejoinder to make on the spot, so I just grunted and acted disinterested and hoped he would change the subject.

Later on it occurred to me that I should have called him on what was a totally cruel, tasteless, stupid, and completely empty comment—I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be responsible (by wishing it) for the death of a couple of billion people, but when it comes to liberals, I’m not so sure anymore.

A good retort to his comment, it occurred to me, would have been to say, “Knowing how you feel about peace and love and all that I’m sure you would never condemn anyone else to be nuked or plagued or to committ suicide. Nor would you ask them to do it in your stead. So, I assume what you just said means you, and the other people who think like you, are volunteering to remove yourselves from the planet in order to save it from overpopulation and all the problems that it causes. I want to commend you for that because it is so courageous and self sacrificing, I’m totally in awe. When do you plan to do this? And is there anything you’d like me to do for you after you’re gone?”

While I was kicking myself for not having said the above, another thought came to mind that was much more of an awakening and absolutely chilling. It occurred to me that liberals really are removing themselves from the earth, and that they really are committing mass suicide, and they are doing it at a really startling rate. Shades of Hale-Bopp and Jonestown!

At that point I remembered a couple of environmentalists I knew, and a couple more I’m aware of, who killed themselves because they thought they were “part of the problem.” I thought of a woman in England whom I had heard had herself sterilized so she couldn’t increase her carbon footprint by producing other humans. I thought of myself and my wife who had essentially done the same thing—We didn’t have kids at least partially because we swallowed the “Earth is overpopulated” propaganda, too.

I also thought of an article by Mark Steyn called “It’s the Demography, Stupid”). In this article Steyn pointed out that in the U. S. there are only 2.07 births per woman. In Ireland 1.87. In New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76, and in Canada 1.5, which is well below replacement rate. Germany and Austria come in at 1.3. Russia and Italy at 1.2; and Spain is at 1.1, which is only about half replacement rate. This means, Steyn points out, that “Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%.”

In America, demographic trends suggest that the majority of this attrition by far is happening among liberals. Steyn notes that, “In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.” By 2050, the 100 million more Americans who will be alive will be mostly red-staters.

The next time you talk to a liberal tell him or her goodbye, thank them for their sacrifice, and ask them if you can have their Prius or, better yet, their wine collection.

Ed Abbey, guru of modern radical environmentalism, promised his followers that they would live to “piss on the graves of their enemies.” It appears that he may have had it backwards.

But before you start thinking that liberalism and liberal environmentalism contain the seeds of their own suicide, you should consider the fact that this movement is a very, very good recruiter.

Conservative environmentalism needs a good recruiter and that’s what we’re trying to do with this blog.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP

This is a reprint of an article I wrote about 15 years ago and published in a number of media. No one has yet taken me up on the challenge

TIME FOR A SHOWDOWN ON THE WESTERN RANGE

Some arguments can’t be resolved with words. They have to be settled mano a mano out in the real world where success and failure are a matter of results not rhetoric. You can argue forever about whose horse is the fastest, but the only way to find out is to race them. One place where we need a good horse race these days is in the interminable argument over whether or not to remove grazing from the public rangelands of the American West.

Most of you, I’m sure, are wondering what’s to argue about. Everyone knows what’s wrong with those lands—that they’re overgrazed, overtrampled, and polluted with cow splats. And everybody knows who’s to blame—all those filthy-rich welfare ranchers and their ravenous cows and sheep. Some scientists claim that livestock have wreaked more havoc on the West than all bulldozers and chainsaws combined. Some even say that the damage they have created is so severe it may never heal.

So, what’s the hold up? The way to save the range is getimoff and lockitup, right! Remove the cows and the ranchers and everything will return to nature. Well, if that’s what you believe, I’ve got a challenge for you.

What would you do if I offered to bet you that, if we took two identical pieces of Western rangeland side by side, and you used the getimoff and lockemup approach on your side, and I put cows on my side, lots of em, and left them there until they had eaten just about everything, and then I took them off until the plants grew back and did that over and over again, that my side would be healthier than yours?

Would you break your fingers trying to get me to “shake on it” before I changed my mind? Would you put your life savings on the line? Would you tell all your friends that you had found a sucker so dumb that you were already spending your winnings?

Before you start counting, there’s a couple of things I ought to tell you.

First, I ought to tell you that there has been a change in the way some ranchers manage their animals. Some ranchers have begun emulating the way natural grazers graze, concentrating their animals by means of temporary fences, herders, or tasty enticements and moving them about the land in the manner of a herd of bison pursued by wolves or Native American hunters and drawn by the lure of fresh pasture and the next waterhole. Grazing in this way, natural ungulates don’t overgraze, but they do mow, de-thatch, reseed, and fertilize, performing the same functions you and I perform to keep our own grasslands, our yards, green and healthy.

These methods have been used to restore grasslands to health on lands damaged by mining, off road vehicle damage, roadbuilding, and catastrophic wildfire. They have been used to cover piles of toxic mine waste with green and growing plants. Last but not least, livestock have even been used to revegetate land damaged by overgrazing.

Anti-grazing activists dismiss these successes as self-serving rancher hogwash, but when I first made my challenge four years ago in a magazine that was distributed nationally (Range), no one took me up on it. Because that magazine was read mostly by ranchers, I made the offer again, more recently, in the newsletter of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that has been most critical of grazing. Again, no takers. This past December (2000) I made the challenge again at The First National Conference on Grazing Lands. Still no takers.

The reason I’m doing this is not to whitewash the damage grazing has done and is still doing. It is to make a point. What better way to let you, the American Public, know that ranching (livestock grazing) can be the most effective tool we have to restore health to certain ecosystems of the West than by having the opposition back down from a challenge like this. Or to have them take the challenge and lose out in the open for all to see.

I say it’s the most effective tool because, in most of the successes I listed above, the getimoff and lockitup alternative had been tried and failed. In other words the showdown has already happened, and they lost.