Bringing conservatives back to the conservation movement

by Marc Gunther

Sometime in the last decade, conservatives left the conservation movement.

Lynn Scarlett, the new director of public policy at The Nature Conservancy, wants to bring them back. It's a big – and important – job.

Fortunately, she's not alone. Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, leads the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University, which aims to "unleash the power of free enterprise to deliver the fuels of the future". A group called the Conservation Leadership Council, which is led by Gale Norton and Ed Schafer, who were interior and agriculture secretaries during the George W Bush administration, is "encouraging conservative voices to join the conversation about the environment".

Furthermore, prominent business leaders, including John Faraci, the CEO of International Paper, and Jim Connaughton, a vice-president at Constellation Energy and a former White House official, also belong to the council.

"There are solutions to environmental problems that are consistent with conservative principles," Scarlett told me last week at The Nature Conservancy headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The business-friendly NGO works across party lines and has branches in all 50 states (and in 35 countries).

And Scarlett has the right credentials – pun intended – to reach Republicans and business leaders, many of whom have turned away from environmentalism. She served as deputy secretary of the interior for eight years, and before that she spent 15 years at the libertarian Reason Foundation, rising to become president of the think tank "dedicated to advancing free minds and free markets". She's also a lifelong and passionate birder.

Here's why her work matters: No major environmental law has been enacted by Congress without bipartisan support.

President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The first President Bush backed the 1990 expansion of the Clean Air Act, which helped curb acid rain and introduced the principle of cap-and-trade into environmental law. And as recently as 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain supported climate regulation. Going back much further, a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, was perhaps America's greatest champion of national parks.

In Scarlett's view, conservatives in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and beyond generally supported the values of environmentalism – protecting land, air and water from pollution – even as they criticized "the tool kit", meaning top-down, command-and-control rules that expanded federal power, created a drag on economic growth and mandated specific actions or technologies.

I've met Lynn Scarlett and wish her well.  There is one thing though...Nixon, Bush I, McCain and Teddy Roosevelt were or are not conservatives.  Anyone interested in free market environmentalism should visit the PERC website.