The Right Conservative Position on the Environment

FrontPageMag.com ^ | November 2, 2001 | Robert Locke

[Radioheart]

The Right Conservative Position on the Environment
By Robert Locke

The war on terrorism is rightly dominating ideological discussion, but it would be a mistake to forget other issues. While public attention is elsewhere, ideological shifts can occur which will burst into prominence when terrorism, inevitably, recedes as an issue. And a key issue in this regard is the environment. continue…

[sauropod]

Please post the whole article.

[ouroboros]

bump

[Cincinatus' Wife]

These ten points give us a principled ideological framework for supporting the environmental measures that are actually worthwhile while refusing to go along with the dangerous liberal version of environmentalism and all it entails. I do not claim these are original ideas, and conservatives have been applying them in the daily cut-and-thrust of politics for years. What is somewhat new is the idea that we need to not just apply these concepts but make known to the electorate that these are the concepts we are applying. We need the public to know in a detailed and explicit way that we have a coherent ideology on the environment and that this is it. We need to get the electorate to grasp at an intuitive level that we DO stand for a form of environmentalism, just not the liberal form. The electorate strongly suspects we don't like environmentalism at all, a suspicion that grows when all we can say is that we're against liberal environmentalism. It needs to be told, explicitly, the nature of what we are for. We can fight for a generation on these points.

You'll have to take your children out of public schools to combat the environmentalist wacko education being fed to them.

[Willie Green]

The U.S. Congress remains head-over-heels in love with OPEC oil:

Lawmakers OK a hold on Great Lakes oil drilling

[annalex]

Don't know if ouroboros bumps you; here's a second bump just in case...

Difference #1: Conservative environmentalism believes environmental protection is a good like any other, i.e. a thing that one rationally trades off against other goods to obtain.

Difference #2: Conservative environmentalism genuinely believes in science; liberal environmentalism is quite happy to exploit mythology.

Difference #3: Conservative environmentalism is anthropocentric, not biocentric.

Difference #4: Conservative environmentalism insists on economic rationality.

Difference #5: Conservative environmentalism is respectful of property rights.

Difference #6: Conservative environmentalism believes environmentalism is not a religion.

Difference #7: Conservative environmentalism is respectful of national sovereignty.

Difference #8: Conservative environmentalism is honest about the number one threat to the American environment: immigration.

Difference #9: Conservative environmentalism is just as concerned with the human environment as with the natural environment.

Difference #10: Conservative environmentalism appreciates the way in which many environmentalist values, like the concept of stewardship, are really longstanding conservative values.

[B4Ranch]

You are trying to screw everything up by bringing in FACTS! They don't fit in our political system anymore so quit being reasonable.

[shuckmaster]

Aw, Shucks!

[KirkandBurke]

Difference #8: Conservative environmentalism is honest about the number one threat to the American environment: immigration.

This is a key point. (not diminishing the others) Unchecked immigration, leading to overpopulation, will exacerbate the depletion of resources and corruption of the environment.

[Carry_Okie]

We need the public to know in a detailed and explicit way that we have a coherent ideology on the environment and that this is it.

These were leading ideas, ten years ago. This "coherent ideology" of his is so poorly developed as to be hardly worth the comment. He reminds me of R.J. Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute or, for that matter, PERC.

[bulldog905]

I like clean air and clean water as much as anybody else, and I love animals, but "enviromentalism", as expounded currently, has come to mean certain things to me:

1. Marxism by other Means
2. Higher Taxes and Higher Prices.
3. A loss of individual rights to local, State, National and United Nations bureacracies.

The nation-destroying(for the United States) Kyoto treaty was the prime example of what was once a good notion has turned into.

[IronJack]

bookmark

[mafree]

Thanks for posting this. I have done some activism around environmental issues but most of it was from a lefty perspective. I am now trying to find a way to deal with these issues from a conservative/libertarian point of view. I found something called eco-logic that seems to be a good place to start- they have a free newsletter.