Books

'Loving Nature, Fearing the State' probes intersection of environmentalism and conservatism

Loving Nature, Fearing the State

By Brian Allen Drake (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books/University of Washington Press, 264 pages, 2013, $34.95)

Last month Alaskans elected staunchly pro-development statewide candidates for Congress but overwhelmingly approved an initiative that could prevent the contentious Pebble mine from breaking ground near Bristol Bay. The returns were curious because they indicate that a substantial number of voters chose a U.S. Senate candidate who openly backs the proposed project and frequently rails against environmental restrictions, then turned their ballots over and supported preservation. Observers can be forgiven for asking, "What gives?"

In "Loving Nature, Fearing the State," a flawed, somewhat unfocused, but nonetheless important examination of the relationship between conservatism and environmentalism from the 1950s to the 1970s, historian Brian Allen Drake offers insights into what might have been going on in the minds of Alaska's notoriously right-leaning voters. Drake explores this history from four focal points, at least two of which shed valuable light.

The first major theme in this book is the complicated environmental legacy of Arizona senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Though remembered primarily as the man who set the GOP on its present course by denouncing almost all things involving the federal government, Drake points out that long before he entered politics, Goldwater was known in Arizona as a nature photographer and was the 70th person to float the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Conflicting ideals

The Goldwater that Drake evokes deeply loved his state's natural landscape, a passion that frequently conflicted with his conservative principles and resulted in a voting record on environmental issues that swung radically between support for massive reclamation projects that altered that landscape and preservation bills that barred development.

Goldwater never made peace with the two conflicting ideals that pulled at his conscience. The preservationist in him ultimately regretted his vote for the Glen Canyon Dam, yet by the Reagan era he was equally remorseful for his support of all the major environmental bills that passed during the Nixon years. For Alaska readers, Goldwater's shifts in thinking and rationales will bring to mind two-time governor Wally Hickel, another politician whose environmental record is far more nuanced than his detractors would have us believe.

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Another area explored is the rise of free-market environmentalism. Although often lumped in with the Wise Use movement that emerged in the 1980s, in practice it's a very different way of thinking. Whereas self-proclaimed wise users were never seriously interested in anything but exploiting land for profit, free-market environmentalists recognize the value of a commons and the damage that unrestrained capitalism can do to it. Where they break with mainstream environmentalists is their eschewal of federal solutions to environmental problems in favor of a patchwork of private ownership, cap-and-trade deals for pollution and tort law resolutions.

The free marketers' ideas have been widely attacked but never truly tried, so their viability remains unknown. Drake does an excellent job of presenting their proposals as well as the counterarguments. What's most worthy of note, however, is the free-market critique of federal oversight of lands and the environment, a system that has created cozy relationships between agencies and the very industries they are supposed to keep under control. Left-leaning environmentalists who think conservatives are incapable of understanding this problem would do well to explore the free marketers' evaluation of how the present mess came about.

Hits and misses

Drake is far less convincing when he tries to tie the anti-fluoridation movement of the 1950s and '60s to the larger environmental activism sparked by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." While concerns about fluoride in drinking water arose in the same time frame as worries about the growing presence of chemicals in our lives, Drake downplays the fact that the movement was (and still very much is) driven by what Richard Hofstadter famously labeled "the paranoid style in American politics."

Backed heavily by the far-right John Birch Society, anti-fluoridation activists lacked the scientific support for their claims that opponents of pesticides and other pollutants possessed. Anti-fluoridation's legacy is not that of an environmental issue, but rather as the precursor to today's anti-vaccination movement, dependent as it was upon pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, outrageous claims and manufactured hysteria. It transcends political boundaries.

Drake's final topic, the legendary author and activist Edward Abbey, is an odd choice. Anyone familiar with Abbey's writings knows he was no liberal, but he certainly wasn't a conservative either. He was a small-scale anarchist and a staunch anti-statist who hated government and corporations equally.

Drake offers incisive commentary on Abbey's life and work, both of which his book's title perfectly summarizes. Though widely viewed as a naturalist, Abbey was far more engaged with politics than environmentalism, something Drake recognizes more clearly than many of Abbey's readers. What he never quite manages to do is tie those views to conservatism. Thus the chapter on Abbey feels like an appended essay rather than a piece of this book.

The hero here is Goldwater, and in him Drake presents what might be a model for drawing conservatives back into the environmental movement, which they originally started. It's a hard sell, but as Alaska's recent election highlights, the market for sustainability is there among conservatives. If anything, the Pebble vote indicates a desire for the conservative ideal of local control, not federal management, a position Drake echoes: "Postwar environmentalism was a movement broad enough in its ideas and values that it literally had something for almost everyone across the ideological spectrum and could be molded and remolded to accommodate a wide variety of political philosophies."

If America is to successfully address its environmental challenges, we need to find our way back to that point.

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based writer and critic.

David James

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer, and editor of the Alaska literary collection “Writing on the Edge.” He can be reached at nobugsinak@gmail.com.

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