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Yow. This article struck me as preaching to the choir, but then I went back and read it carefully. I had thought it was saying "Environmentalists are morons". I still suspect that is the underlying message, but the author does allow for the possibility of "sensible people who care about clean air and water."

It's always stuck me as contradictory that I see so many posts here ridiculing environmentalists. It seems to me a black-and-white issue: it's cheaper to keep a river clean in the first place than it is to try and restore it once it's been trashed; if we don't try and stop companies from dumping toxics into the bay, then for every dollar they save by not dealing with their own waste I'll have to spend ten as a taxpayer to clean up later; if we don't limit logging in Washington State then we're letting the loggers drive the fishermen out of work (seems like they gotta share the pie); if we restrict EPA enforcement efforts then we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and we'll end up paying for Superfund cleanups out of taxpayer dollars.

I'm very pro-greed and very anti-stupid. Seems to me like the longer we keep the golden goose producing, the richer we get. Sensible environmentalism seems to me like the good kind of greed, which is long-term greed. Look at the benefits of water that purifies itself and air that refreshes itself, two products of a healthy environment: that's a golden goose worth guarding.

Why on earth isn't the environment a top priority for people who consider themselves conservatives? Why does it seem like a conservative response to wacked-out environmental policy is to eliminate, rather than to fix? Why does Rush Limbaugh stop at ridicule instead of commenting on the underlying issue, which is waste-not-want-not, and inherently patriotic and conservative?

I feel like a real conservative. I'm the last generation of U.S. citizen that will remember drinking from streams in the lower 48 without high-tech water purification devices. Where's the environmentalist strain of the conservative movement these days? Can anyone point me to some authors/books/websites?

Sensible environmentalism seems to me like the good kind of greed, which is long-term greed.

That also benefits your children and your grand-children, etc. I agree. The environmentalist movement is not about the environment and it never has been. The Green Party champion is a socialist and that should tell people something.

I am disgusted with certain Japanese shoving the Kyoto Protocol down everyone's throat (because the treaty was introduced in Japan) when the air in Japan is so bad.

The problem here is we are not dealing with sensible environmentalists, we are dealing with terrorists who would rather see all the people dead than anything else. Perhaps the reason many conservatives seem so anti-environment (and we really aren't) is because the enviro terror movement have put us off of it. Sure, of course we should take care of the earth God gave us, but I won't see people put out of jobs or dead because of a stupid fish... God said people come first before animals, we are take care of them, but not let them replace us in His view.