Green Republican Presidents

Presidents Day is the day we set aside to honor those men who have led our nation through times of blessing and challenge, from Washington and Lincoln to Obama.

I have the utmost respect for the office of the presidency regardless of who is occupying it, even when I disagree with the occupant politically. Wish that went both ways, but that's OK. In the past century Republican presidents have gotten a bad rap on the environment. But thanks to Al Gore's internet I have a forum to make a small dent in that myth.

For instance...

I'm enjoying Brand's T.R. - The Last Romantic immensely, as much for the anecdotes about Roosevelt's forays into his research on wildlife and natural history as for the glimpse the author provides into the challenges public utilities faced in a quickly-growing urban New York in the 1800s.

T.R. was a New Yorker with an enormous appetite for the outdoors. This passion - and an eye on investment - eventually led him into cattle ranching. He soon leading the charge to improve conservation in open spaces of the newly settled West.

With minor exceptions, all grazed their herds on public land, to which no one west of Washington held legal title. On the open range it was first come, first served, a principle that invited abuse. Without putting the matter in so many words, all involved understood that they faced the dilemma of the commons, where each individual's pursuit of self-interest, in the form of grass for more of his cattle, threatened the ruin of all, in the form of degredation of the range and a massive dying off. Only by some concerted action, some self-denying compact, could the community avert the disaster. (p. 186)

Theodore Roosevelt chartered a stockmen's association in the mid-1880's to address just this problem in the Dakotas. He carried this conservation ethic with him to the White House, where over 170 million acres of American West were set aside and preserved by his administration. Places like Crater Lake and Mesa Verde and Lassen Peak and the Grand Canyon.

He associated himself with and was influenced by John Muir, a Christian naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club. He traveled to Yosemite National Park with Teddy Roosevelt in 1903.

Muir had been exploring the area since 1868, later publishing his journal of these explorations and becoming a big proponent of preserving the wilderness in the area. On the trip with Roosevelt, Muir told him about how California was exploiting the park's resources (allowing logging, livestock, etc.), which led to Roosevelt's signing a bill in 1906 to take control of Yosemite Valley (along with the Mariposa grove of giant sequoia) out of the hands of the state and into the hands of the federal government.

Roosevelt's signing of The Newlands Act in 1902 placed the federal government in an activist role in water management and reclamation. He created the US Forest Service in 1905. He would eventually "bolt for the Progressives" for many reasons including Taft;s failure to uphold new land management efforts at Interior. Clearly he was a man for his time - perhaps a bit ahead of it. T.R.'s historic association site has more.

Now, that Eisenhower was a busy guy.

During the Second World War he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with responsibility for planning and supervising the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45. In 1951, he became the first supreme commander of NATO.

As President, he oversaw the cease-fire of the Korean War, kept up the pressure on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, made nuclear weapons a higher defense priority, launched the Space Race, enlarged the Social Security program, and began the Interstate Highway System.

Both a president and a cattle farmer, he was also keenly aware of the need for sound soil conservation and animal husbandry. He also promoted the peaceful use of nuclear power as a cleaner and more sustainable form of energy, something many conservatives and progressives agree on today.

It wasn't the guy in the cardigan sweater that nationalized our country's environmental efforts. We'll get to him in a moment.

No, after decades of national focus on war and human rights, and in response to environmental damage caused by a half-century of industrial and military expansion, Richard Nixon established the EPA in 1970.

Our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food. Indeed, the present governmental structure for dealing with environmental pollution often defies effective and concerted action. Despite its complexity, for pollution control purposes the environment must be perceived as a single, interrelated system. Present assignments of departmental responsibilities do not reflect this interrelatedness.

Many agency missions, for example, are designed primarily along media lines--air, water, and land. Yet the sources of air, water, and land pollution are interrelated and often interchangeable. A single source may pollute the air with smoke and chemicals, the land with solid wastes, and a river or lake with chemical and other wastes. Control of the air pollution may produce more solid wastes, which then pollute the land or water. Control of the water-polluting effluent may convert it into solid wastes, which must be disposed of on land.

Similarly, some pollutants--chemicals, radiation, pesticides--appear in all media. Successful control of them at present requires the coordinated efforts of a variety of separate agencies and departments. The results are not always successful.

A far more effective approach to pollution control would:

• Identify pollutants.
• Trace them through the entire ecological chain, observing and recording changes in form as they occur.
• Determine the total exposure of man and his environment.
• Examine interactions among forms of pollution.
• Identify where in the ecological chain interdiction would be most appropriate.

In organizational terms, this requires pulling together into one agency a variety of research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities now scattered through several departments and agencies. It also requires that the new agency include sufficient support elements--in research and in aids to State and local anti-pollution programs, for example--to give it the needed strength and potential for carrying out its mission. The new agency would also, of course, draw upon the results of research conducted by other agencies.

In short, Nixon was the first president to re-make government to match what environmentalists had been saying for years. Living things and their habitats and human impacts needed to be considered as a system, not as individual issues.

His successor was largely known for his stewardship of the nation after Nixon's Watergate. What Gerald Ford is less known for was his faith and his appreciation for and stewardship of creation.

Gerald Ford was "Darned Good Ranger."

In the summer of 1936, the summer he turned 23 years old, Gerald Ford worked as a seasonal park ranger at Yellowstone National Park. Ford later recalled his time as a park ranger as “one of the greatest summers of my life.”

Canyon District Ranger Frank Anderson, Ford’s supervisor during his summer at Yellowstone, described the future president as “a darned good ranger.”

During his relatively short tenure in office Ford added 18 new sitesto the National Park System including Valley Forge National Historic Park and Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site.

On the occasion of Ronald Reagan's memorial, Grist's Amanda Griscom recaps the Gipper's track record on conservation.

Republicans for Environmental Protection, an organization that has been a staunch critic of Bush's environmental record, posted a glowing In Memoriam to Reagan on their website Monday: "REP America joins every citizen in bidding a sad farewell to President Ronald Reagan. His wilderness protection achievements are an enduring legacy for the American people. President Reagan signed into law 38 bills that added more than 10.6 million acres of spectacular forests, mountains, deserts, and wetlands to the National Wilderness Preservation System."

Also on Monday, the Los Angeles Times published an article praising Reagan for his environmental record as governor of California. The article quotes Reagan biographer Lou Cannon touting Reagan's gubernatorial eco-legacy as one of the high points of his career: "To me, the environmental achievements are enduring. Who the hell remembers or cares what the taxes or the budget was in 1967, but long after, people are going to be able to use the John Muir Trail without having to hit a highway."

She then goes on to rail about Ronald Reagan's attempts to "gut" EPA in the 80's. Let's put this in context, shall we?

In the short decade after Nixon signed the agency into law, EPA's budget grew over 500% - from $1 billion in 1970 to over $5.5 billion. Most of that was during the Carter era. EPA's workforce had trippled from 4,000 to 13,000.It ceased to be an effective coordinator of national environmental efforts and was now a bloated bureaucracy.

Reagan's historic wins for both terms of office was not because voters wanted to see the environment destroyed. It was because he convinced Americans that individual responsibility and stewardship, not government largess, was the best hope for the nation and conserving her environment.

His picks of Gale Norton (who emphasized a return to community-level engagementat EPA) and James Watt at Interior were made along these lines. By the way, it was Grist's Glenn Scherer who invented a dominionist James Watt by inserting a ficticious apocryphal quote in Watt's testimony to Congress. The real quote that represents the conservation and faith ethic of Watt, and most likely his boss too, was this:

I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns. Whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations.

Bush 41 will be forever linked to his "read my lips" broken pledge and Gulf War I. But few connect him to the success of the Clean Air Act Amendments. The revision of the Clean Air Act was deemed to be the most significant environmental legislation ever passed. Elimination of leaded gasoline was just one result. Through the implementation of the CAAA at the federal and state level, dozens of highly polluted cities saw remarkable improvements in air quality.

While many are pressing Obama to make EPA a cabinet-level office (vice agency), something the Clinton-Gore Administration failed to accomplish, it was George H.W. Bush who first considered working with congressto bump EPA to this status way back in 1990.

And what to make of his son?

W's administration may best be known as when conservatives - particularly evangelicals - first began finding their political voice on the environment. Whether this was due to his being too green or not green enough will be debated for years.

What will become less debatable is George Bush's stance on conservation was not as unpopular - nor as ineffective - as progressive greens and media mavens led us to believe.

The only 2003 Gallup pollasking about public support for Bush's policies on the environment found 53 percent approval and 37 percent disapproval, with 10 percent having no opinion. Approval for Bush's environmental policies outpolled disapproval in all published Gallup polls conducted since Bush's inauguration. Polls show that Americans of all political persuasions do support environmental protection -- but apparently tend to be more comfortable than not with the conservative Bush Administration's approach to it.

Let me offer two striking examples of this: The first was the dramatic recovery of Iraq's Mesopotamian Marshlands, a place some call the cradle of civilization, after their near-destruction at the hands of Sadaam Hussein. The accomplishment by non-governmental agencies like Eden Again, the United Nations Environmental Programme, and the US Army Corps of Engineers went completely unreported by a media and political class that didn't want to see any success in Iraq.

Bush was also flogged daily on climate change. Rather than adopt the onerous Kyoto Protocol he sidestepped Gore's preaching on the IPCC's highly-politicized and apocalyptic predictions and dialogued with China and other Pacific nations. His leadership on the discussion to reduce CO2 emissions to energy, national security and economic growthare driving most cogent thought on global control of CO2 today. As a data point, U.S. CO2 generation actually dropped 1.3% in 2006, while the rest of the world saw significant increases.

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As I scan through this summary, it strikes me that most of these presidents were ranchers or farmers. That makes sense. Farming and ranching is hard, hands-on work. The government can't run your farm or water your crops or drive your combines from D.C. Farmers know that the land and the rain are a Providential gift to be thankful for and carefuly managed. They also know that proper farming leads to good crops which bring profit to the community and sustains the farm. Similarly, sustainable hunting and grazing are also possible, and necessary.

It's not that a progressive urbanite doesn't have a say. Of course he does. He understands the impact of large numbers of people packed into a small place and how that can stress nature. But more often than not the characteristics of conservation brought forth by Republican presidents have garnered the disdain of Washington's progressive class or chattering liberals in Hollywood.

We should listen both to the Texas rancher and the Chicago activist. These presidents certainly have done and said things worth considering.

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Photos: Roosevelt and Muir via treehugger.com; Eisenhower via National Park Service; Nixon via astuteblogger.blogspot.com; Ford via environment.about.com; Reagan via University of Texas archives; GHW Bush via boston.com; George Bush via lewrockwell.com.