The Conservative Case for the Environment

One of the strangest phenomena in the realm of public discourse of the last two or three decades is the extent to which conservatives have avoided the debate over environmental issues. Air and water pollution and other environmental problems affect everyone, regardless of politics, and many of the problems are acute and critical. But by and large conservatives have ignored these issues, during the very period when the environment was becoming a major political concern throughout America and the world. If, for example, one looks through Modern Age or The Intercollegiate Review one will find virtually nothing on the environment. National Review comments on practically everything in the political and social realms—and yet one finds there only a handful of not very thoughtful articles, almost all of which merely condemn some extremist fringe group or idea. The one major exception is The Heritage Foundation, which has published a few serious articles on the environment in Policy Review and in its Mandate for Leadership books.

Conservative politicians have done no better. As the Federal government and the states were tackling pollution using bureaucratic systems of regulation proposed by the Left, conservatives in Congress and the legislatures have offered nothing more than ineffective opposition. The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership III summed up the Reagan Administration’s record this way:

The Reagan Administration . . . had a rare opportunity to offer an alternative policy model for environmental controls: to place greater emphasis on developing property rights and on other solutions using market incentives. It has failed to do so and has provided absolutely no vision for a tough environmental policy based on market mechanisms. Without this vision and with its ill-chosen appointments at EPA, the Reagan Administration has lost the initiative on environmental issues. . . . It has appeared simply to offer lower budgets, federal inaction, and fewer restrictions on polluting industries. When dealing with highly charged political issues with moral and even religious overtones, a philosophy that seems to consist only of doing less cannot compete effectively with statist activism.¹

By and large, the Bush Administration and the current Republican congress have given us more of the same.

There is nothing inherently liberal about environmental concerns. In fact, as The Economist observed, “the environment is an issue without any obvious political home.”² A Roper poll that ranked Americans on their environmental awareness and commitment found that the group of the most active environmentalists contained the highest share of conservatives as well as of liberals.³

Yet, conservatives have largely abdicated the field, so environmental policy has been made with very little serious contribution from the Right. The results have been misguided policies that have not been nearly as effective as some possible alternatives, and in some cases have left our environment in worse shape than before.

It is not my purpose here to advocate any specific policies. The problem for conservatives at this point in time is more fundamental than that: we need, in the first place, to get conservatives thinking about environmental issues at all, and thinking about them in positive and constructive ways. When we do so, I believe one conclusion is inescapable: conservatives should be environmentalists.

There is a fairly well-defined and widely recognized split in the ranks of post-war American conservatism, between “traditionalists” and “libertarians” or “free-market”conservatives. George H. Nash explains “the gap between the two streams of thought”:

While libertarians tended to emphasize economic arguments against the State, the new conservatives [traditionalists] were more concerned with what they saw as the ethical and spiritual causes and consequences of Leviathan. On the whole, the new conservatives were little interested in economics. . . . Instead, they were fundamentally social and cultural critics, for whom conservatism meant the restoration of values, not the preservation of material gains. . . .⁴

Nevertheless, certain bonds did link the two independent wings of the conservative revival. Both abhorred the totalitarian state and collectivism; both tended to support private property, decentralization, and (at least in a general way) a free economic system.

It is not my purpose to advance or mediate between these two perspectives. Rather, I will argue that both philosophical positions should lead conservatives to be at the forefront in the public debate on the environment, not merely in opposition but as activists with serious proposals of their own.

When considering the implications of the libertarian position on environmental issues, I am not concerned with a radical, anti-government philosophy, but rather with those who focus primarily on economics and the virtues of the free-market. For the libertarian, the free market system is believed to be not only the most efficient means of improving mankind’s standard of living, but also the only sure foundation and protection for political freedom. From the free-market perspective, there should be great interest in solving many of our environmental problems—and indeed, there is a small group of free-market environmentalists, primarily associated with the Political Economy Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana.

In a free market, producers and consumers negotiate their sales and purchases with no outside interference and without affecting third parties. The market price of a product, which the consumer pays, includes all of the costs of making it and some profit for the producer.

However, the real cost of production in the modern world often includes “externalities,” costs that are not reflected in the price of goods and which must be paid by others, rather than by the consumers of the products. All forms of pollution are just such costs. If, for example, a factory does not properly dispose of its waste but saves money by dumping it untreated in a river, its customers get the products more cheaply, but downstream users of the river suffer damages. Perhaps they cannot use the river any more (say, for fishing or swimming). Or perhaps to keep using its water, they have to pay extra to clean it up first. If the factory processed its waste properly, the cost of doing so would be included in the price of its products and would be paid by their consumers, not by innocent third parties downstream.

As mentioned, the libertarian values the free market as a source and protection of freedom—freedom from interference by government and by others. But your freedom is decreased if someone can impose on you some of the cost of his production, or can invade your property with his pollution. Nothing in the theory of the free market justifies a producer and a consumer forcing an outsider to pay part of their costs. And your payment may be much more than just a few dollars; it may be in the form of acute suffering (e.g., illness from breathing polluted air or drinking polluted water). Wherever there is pollution, the libertarian should be devising ways to make sure that the market works properly. The costs of production need to be “internalized” in the market price of goods in some way that also maximizes liberty.

The liberals who have dominated environmental policy attempt to force producers to bear the full costs of production by means of governmental regulation, enforced by ever growing bureaucracies. But a command and control system, besides infringing on freedoms, is seldom the most efficient or effective means of accomplishing the goal.

Command-and-control generally delivers less clean-up per penny than more sophisticated alternatives. . . . Regulations tend to load high costs onto some producers, low costs onto others. . . . Command-and-control often means telling polluters what technology they must use to clean up. But government rarely knows best. As regulations are often tougher for new entrants to an industry than for existing firms, they may discourage new investment—even if it is cleaner than the old.⁵

We obviously, then, should look for the most efficient and least intrusive means of getting all costs included in market prices. There are several possible mechanisms: effluent taxes, treating pollution as an invasion of property rights (giving owners proper legal recourse for environmental “trespassing”), tradeable pollution permits, as well as many other “market-based environmental policies [to] give businesses and individuals an incentive not just to meet regulatory requirements but to go beyond them.”⁶ However, this is not the place to advocate any specific approach to particular problems, but the concern for those problems needs to be there, on the part of libertarians above all.⁷

Many other kinds of environmental problems should also be of direct concern to the libertarian. Libertarians are, on principle, opposed to subsidies and governmental regulations in general. But many of the environmental problems we face are the direct result of governmental actions, and would not have developed otherwise. Here we can look at only a few examples.

Government agencies systematically mismanage natural resources, often with devastating effects to the environment. Perhaps the most obvious evidence can be seen in the mismanagement of our public lands. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service control hundreds of millions of acres, mostly in the western United States, and for many years they have allowed these lands to be plundered and even destroyed at the taxpayers’ expense. “The federal land bureaucracies have used taxpayer funds to subsidize economic activity that would never have taken place in the absence of subsidies. Perversely . . . American taxpayers have been financing the destruction of environments they increasingly value.”⁸

As with many regulatory agencies, an “Iron Triangle” develops, with a relatively few rich and powerful people who want subsidized use of public resources, some powerful Congressmen beholden to them who get control of the relevant Congressional subcommittees, and the agency that happily does the bidding of the other two groups and is rewarded every year at appropriations time.

And what happens to the resources being managed? Look, for example, at the national grazing lands. The Forest Service and the BLM have allowed them to be devastated, “cow bombed,” by massive overgrazing for many years. For this privilege, the ranchers pay less than a fourth of the going market rate to lease similar private land, and the government loses money on the deal every single year. Congress makes sure that the grazing fees are kept low and the agencies kept properly subservient⁹—for which the agencies will get their rewards through appropriations and new projects, and individual bureaucrats will get their promotions.

Likewise, the Forest Service loses hundreds of millions of dollars every year in below-cost timber sales. With its system of “idiot forestry” (as the late Senator Herman Talmadge called it), the Forest Service is destroying our national forests by cutting timber too cheap to cover its costs.¹⁰ The result is a devastated forest, erosion from the cleared land which then pollutes the rivers and destroys them as fisheries and for recreation, and damages water supplies downstream as well. For years, Congress even subsidized, with a specific annual appropriation, the systematic destruction of America’s last great rain forest, the Tongass in Alaska.

The system works just fine, as long as no outsider figures out how much the taxpayers are losing and how much damage is being done to the land. But, as has so often been noted, those who benefit from the system have an intense and constant interest in maintaining it, while the individual taxpayers being fleeced have only a very limited motive even to learn what these mostly obscure agencies are doing, let alone to fight to stop the raid on the Federal treasury. The system also distorts markets by giving subsidies to some producers (e.g., western ranchers) but not to others (ranchers in states without federal lands). So, the Iron Triangle system mismanages resources and subsidizes the destruction of nature, which obviously ought to be stopped.

These are just a couple of instances where governmental policies distort markets, add to pollution, and damage natural resources. There are many other cases. Overall, the Economist concluded, “in all sorts of ways American policy rigs market incentives in favour of pollution.”¹¹ Free-market enthusiasts should search out all those policies and work to get them changed.

Another area of great concern today is hazardous waste disposal, and here, too, market-oriented proposals would be much better than the current system of regulation. Modern industry uses large amounts of toxic materials, which have to be safely disposed of somehow. “It is in hazardous waste management, if anywhere in environmental policy, that the infamous ‘command and control’ approach is to be found.”¹² The result is a burdensome system that is not the most effective, and could only be made effective with an enormous and very expensive enforcement effort. A market-based system would be an attractive alternative.

Rather than fining a generator or transporter for instances of detected improper disposal, why not pay for proper disposal?. . . If the amount of the payment is tuned correctly, the source should have an incentive not to try to conceal its waste . . . but rather to work to collect the reward. Presto! The terribly difficult monitoring problems seem to be solved. Toxic wastes all end up in the right places. ¹³

And to keep the reward system from being adrain on taxpayers, it could be instituted as a deposit and refund system.¹⁴

Finally, from the market perspective, we may take a quick look at tax structures. Current taxes raise revenue but often do economic harm because they penalize jobs and profits. Shifting to “green” taxes (e.g., on effluents or on use of certain raw materials) could raise revenue and do some good at the same time, by protecting resources and making polluters pay the costs that they now pass on to others. ¹⁵

Libertarians should be interested in environmental policy not just because market mechanisms can be effective in reducing pollution, but because pollution itself is evidence that the market is not working correctly. Pollution is also evidence that our freedom is being infringed.

Granted, market mechanisms may not work to protect the environment everywhere. “The bits of the planet that have no single owner (the sea, the rain forest, clean air) are the most vulnerable. Only governments have the power to protect them.”¹⁶ Governments, for example, may still have to control fishing and whaling in the open seas to keep commercial operations from completely wiping out all these creatures. ¹⁷

But wherever possible—and that includes the vast majority of our environmental problems—libertarians should be guiding the public debate and proposing ways to use market incentives rather than command and control to solve our problems. This will be even more important in the future, because “the most intractable sources of pollution will increasingly be small companies and individuals, not big firms. It is easier to police a big power station or chemical company than lots of garages, farmers or shoppers. The best hope of getting small polluters to clean up will be to give them the right price signals.”¹⁸

One major objection that business interests always raise against any and all efforts to protect nature or clean up our environment is that they will harm economic growth. Several observations here may put this objection into proper perspective, and lead us into a consideration of the traditionalist position.

In the first place, “not all growth is good. Metastasis is growth too”—even National Review was willing to print that.¹⁹ Moreover, in order to preserve the ability of our economy to grow in the future, it is critical that we protect the environment now. “The real limits to growth are (a) the capacity of the environment to deal with waste in all its forms, and (b) the threat to resources which play no direct part in world commerce. These ‘critical’ resources—the ozone layer, the carbon cycle, Amazonia—are treated as free goods when in reality they serve the most basic economic functions: that of enabling people to survive.”²⁰ If we have to give up producing a few more gadgets in order to preserve them, we obviously should do so.

In some ways, cleaning up the environment can even help economic growth. The technology needed to clean up our environment and keep it clean will itself be “one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global economy well into the twenty-first century.”²¹ The country that is at the forefront of developing this technology will reap huge benefits in jobs and income for its citizens. “America’s fast-growing environmental-services industry is already worth $130 billion a year—and its capital is California,” which “has the toughest environmental rules in the world.”²²

Finally, a clean environment, while expensive, may be considered the latest in a series of added costs that have successively contributed to our quality of life. Not many years ago, the same arguments were made that reasonable working hours and safe workplaces would be a burden on business and barriers to growth. But now they are universally accepted as proper expenses. So, too, must a reasonably clean environment be accepted as worth the cost, and a good in itself.

American conservatism of the traditionalist perspective is in many ways quite different from the free market one.

Shocked by totalitarianism, total war, and the development of secular, rootless, mass society during the 1930s and 1940s, [these conservatives] urged a return to traditional religion and ethical absolutes and a rejection of the ‘relativism’ which had allegedly corroded Western values and produced an intolerable vacuum that was filled by demonic ideologies.²³

From this traditionalist perspective as well, conservatives should be environmentalists.

Conservatives have all too often been willing to go along with business interests when they opposed environmental protection. The free-market position, we have seen, does not justify such passivity. Traditionalists provide an important corrective from a very different perspective.

Many “traditionalist” conservatives are quite critical of unregulated capitalism. They view unregulated capitalism as an integral part of the materialism and hedonism they so dislike in the modern Western world; they spurn the civilization that has grown up around the capitalist order. They believe that unregulated capitalism has placed great burdens on the way of life they think necessary for the development of human freedom along virtuous lines. . . . [Their] primary concern is to emphasize the importance of culture and virtue.²⁴

Russell Kirk is perhaps foremost among the traditionalists. He adopts Edmund Burke’s “concept of society as joined in perpetuity by a moral bond among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born—the community of souls. . . . And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption- society . . . is the end for which Providence has prepared man.”²⁵ Likewise, Richard Weaver “was profoundly concerned by the growth of ‘mass plutocracy’—the ‘greatest danger’ America confronted. He distrusted advertising and lamented the popular views that man was a being of merely ‘appetitive function’ and that material goods . . . could save us.”²⁶ He praised the old South, because it was “the last non-materialist society in the Western World.”²⁷

Kirk decisively rejects the “practical conservatism [which has] degenerated into mere laudation of ‘private enterprise,’ economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests.”²⁸ He “Indignantly denie[s] . . . that his conservatism could or should be identified with businessmen.”²⁹ Other leading traditionalists concur. Peter Viereck admonishes conservatives to “conserve the humane and ethical values of the West rather than the economic privileges of a fraction of the West.”³⁰ Stephen Tonsor contends that the traditionalist conservatives “are not now, nor will they be, identified with the American business community. They are clearly identified with natural law philosophy and revealed religion.”³¹

From a traditionalist perspective, just as we have inherited our culture and must preserve it for future generations, so have we inherited this earth, and we have to take proper care of it as good stewards. As Margaret Thatcher stated when she announced her conversion to environmentalism, “No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.”³² The principle of stewardship, and consequently of “sustainable development,” should lead conservatives to accept their duty to design our economy so that we produce our goods in a way that does not impair the planet’s ability to provide for future generations.

Closely related to the notion of stewardship is one of the cardinal virtues for the traditionalist conservative: piety, which includes a proper veneration for this earth. For Richard Weaver, nature is one of the things we should “regard with the spirit of piety.”³³ One of the reasons he defends the older South is because the “ancient virtue of pietas” dominated its thinking.

There existed veneration for the transcendent and the order of things; there was reverence for nature. . . . Man was the creature, not the Creator, and it was that most ancient vice, hubris, that contended man was self-produced and thus entitled to war on creation and the nature of things.³⁴

A sense of piety should also lead the conservative to be in the front lines of the battle against the wanton destruction of nature by man, which Weaver thought was nothing less than a “sin.”³⁵ We should condemn, with Russell Kirk, “the modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining . . . [as] evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.”³⁶

For the traditionalist, the highest political virtue is prudence. Russell Kirk calls prudence “that transcendent conservative virtue . . . which Burke so often commends.”³⁷ William Harbour explains:

Prudence is supposed to be the guide by which the political leader is to mediate general principles by practical considerations in order to deal with the specific considerations of the moment. . . . Prudence is the key word for the Conservative whenever it comes to dealing with specific political problems. ³⁸

Prudence should also lead the conservative to take the vanguard in confronting some of our most daunting ecological challenges.

We are, for example, pumping enormous quantities of “greenhouse” gases into the atmosphere, which may alter the world’s climate far more rapidly than nature’s own cycles. Of course, we do not now have conclusive proof of what the ultimate effects will be. But “environmental policy . . . often requires that decisions be made on the basis of incomplete knowledge, because of the grievous risks posed by lack of action.”³⁹ Atmospheric scientists say it may take another decade of study before we will have anything close to certain knowledge. But it is virtually impossible to remove those gases from our atmosphere. If we do not change our ways in the meantime, we will simply compound the risks with another decade’s generation of greenhouse gases. Prudence would dictate that we should follow Stephen Schneider’s advice:

The prospect of climatic change occurring on a global scale ten to fifty times faster than typical natural average rates of change is not one we should relish. The possibility of major environmental surprises increases with the rate at which climate changes. Moreover, if there are things we can do to slow down this rate of change that simultaneously will provide multiple benefits, then it would seem logically compelling to take them seriously. . . . The prudent course to follow would be making high-leverage investments, a common business practice that seeks to earn multiple benefits on the same investment. Using fuel efficiently not only reduces CO₂ injection, but also cuts acid rain, reduces the health effects of air pollution in cities, reduces the dependence of our energy security on unreliable resources, and improves our long-term competitiveness by cutting the energy cost of manufactured products.⁴⁰

Likewise with species preservation. Our attack on planet earth is destroying habitat at such an enormous rate that entire species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at an ever accelerating rate. Preserving diversity of species and the necessary habitat is another matter of good stewardship. We do not know what roles most of those organisms play in the ecosystem. We do not know what benefits we might be able to obtain from them. In the often-quoted words of Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, “the catastrophic reduction of species diversity throughout the world is the crime future generations are least likely to forgive us for.” Again, sheer prudence would dictate that we should follow the first rule of the mechanic: when you take something apart, save all the pieces.

In many ways, modern technology has put an enormous premium on the traditionalists’ virtue of prudence. Robert Solo warns:

Throughout his habitat on earth, man’s technologies have been formed on the assumption that the autonomous system that produces the environment needed for life cannot be reached by what we do nor destroyed by us. And here, I think, a crucial change has come. The life system itself is no longer beyond the reach of man’s technology nor beyond his power to disarrange, degrade, and destroy. This is a danger no age has ever faced before .⁴¹

It is a danger that cries out for conservatives to take the lead in advocating prudence.

The traditionalist should be active in efforts to preserve nature, especially in our parks and wilderness areas, for other reasons as well. The traditionalist wants to conserve our heritage, or at least the good parts of it, including those that make America unique. One significant factor in developing the American character was wilderness. As one of its foremost advocates contends, “wilderness is a fundamental constituent of the national culture, an indigenous part of Americanism, bearing qualities that set it apart as a contribution to civilization.”⁴² Now that our wilderness is virtually all gone, conservatives should be involved in preserving what little remains, just as we would want to preserve any major historical building.

The very concept of a national park is an American invention. The traditionalist with a concern for virtue should be at the forefront of efforts to preserve these and other natural areas for recreation. Michael Frome, an advocate for wilderness, calls the contemplation of nature “the most ennobling kind of recreation.”⁴³ Richard Weaver shows how important it is in the modern world:

What humane spirit, after [exposure to modern journalism and advertising] has not found relief in fixing his gaze upon some characteristic bit of nature? It is escape from the sickly metaphysical dream. Out of the surfeit of falsity born of technology and commercialism we rejoice in returning to primary data and to assurance that the world is a world of enduring forms which in themselves are neither brutal nor sentimental.⁴⁴

And he wrote that before the age of television!

The traditionalist perspective perhaps suggests fewer specific remedies for environmental challenges than the free market one. But both are authentically conservative positions. “Both implicitly accept, to a large degree, the ends of the other” and they fight together “against the collectivist Leviathan state of the twentieth century.”⁴⁵ The traditionalist would perhaps be more willing to advocate actions by the government to preserve the natural areas that have historically belonged to it. Since the market by itself might not be able to preserve a sufficient amount of natural habitat, the libertarian should be willing to accept that.⁴⁶ If, on the other hand, the libertarian can devise market mechanisms to solve pollution and protect the environment, the traditionalist might well be disposed to endorse them.

As we have seen, there are good philosophical reasons for conservatives of both kinds to be in the forefront of the public debate on environmental policy, devising proper measures to solve all of the different kinds of environmental problems we face.

Moreover, it is dangerous to leave these issues to be dealt with exclusively by the Left. Their propensity for governmental control and bureaucratic regulation, besides infringing ever more on our freedom, is seldom the best or most efficient way to solve environmental problems.

It is lamentable that more conservative intellectual activity has not been directed toward conservation of our environment. If conservatives had been engaged in environmental issues from the very first, we might have avoided a lot of dead ends and been spared much bureaucratic meddling. All of us would now be better off politically, economically, and environmentally.

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Notes

1. Nolan Clark, “The Environmental Protection Agency,” in Charles L. Heatherly and Burton Yale Pines, eds., Mandate for Leadership III: Policy Strategy for the 1990s (Washington, D.C., 1989), 217–8.
2. “Costing the Earth, A Survey of the Environment,” The Economist (Sept. 2, 1989), 5.
3. Marshall Ingwerson, “On the Environment, Americans’ Words Are Louder Than Deeds,” The Christian Science Monitor (Aug. 2, 1990), 2.
4. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington, DE., 1996, 2007), 73.
5. “Costing the Earth,” 7.
6. Robert N. Stavins, “Clean Profits,” Policy Review 48 (Spring 1989), 59.
7. For an excellent analysis of many possible market-based environmental policies, see the two volumes of Project 88 (Washington, D.C., 1988, 1991), sponsored by Senators Timothy Wirth and the late John Heinz.
8. John Baden, “Crimes Against Nature,” Policy Review 39 (Winter, 1987), 36.
9. Just how subservient these agencies have been can be seen in an instance discovered by the General Accounting Office. “They reported the case of a BLM area manager who caught a rancher cutting trees without authorization in a sensitive riparian zone and ordered him to stop. Word came down through political channels that the BLM manager was to apologize to the rancher—and deliver the wood to his house” Robert Conniff, “Once the Secret Domain of Miners and Ranchers, the BLM Is Going Public,” Smithsonian (Sept. 1990), 34.
10. Jeremy Kalmanofsky, “Subsidized Timber Sales Raise Public-Benefit Issue, ” The Christian Science Monitor (June 20, 1991), 10–11.
11. “Green My Lips,” The Economist (Feb. 17, 1990), 19.
12. Clifford S. Russell, “Economic Incentives in the Management of Hazardous Waste,” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 13 (1988), 262.
13. Ibid., 265–6.
14. Ibid., 267.
15. “Money from Greenery,” The Economist (Oct. 21, 1989), 16–17.
16. “Costing the Earth,” 4.
17. See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968), 1243–8, for the classic explanation of why a resource no one owns, a commons, will be rapidly depleted.
18. “Money from Greenery,” 16.
19. David Horowitz, “Making the Green One Red,” National Review (Mar. 19, 1990), 40. Gross national product figures can be misleading here. For example, the costs of trying to clean up the oil spill in Prince William Sound were added to the gnp, so would mathematically appear to be “growth.”
20. “Costing the Earth,” 5–6.
21. Joan Berkowitz, quoted by Brad Knickerbocker, “Green Conservatives,” The Christian Science Monitor (Feb. 4, 1992) 13.
22. “California Cashes in on Cleaning Up,” The Economist (Nov. 16, 1991), 79.
23. Nash, Op. Cit., xv.
24. William R. Harbour, The Foundations of Conservative Thought (Notre Dame, IN, 1982), 109–10.
25. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 7th ed. (Chicago, 1986), 10–11.
26. Nash, Op. Cit., 189.
27. Richard Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay (New Rochelle, NY, 1968), 391.
28. Kirk, Op. Cit., 455.
29. Nash, Op. Cit., 183.
30. Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (New York, 1949), x.
31. Nash, Op. Cit., 123.
32. “Costing the Earth,” 3.
33. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948), 172.
34. John P. East, The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders (Chicago, 1986), 64–5.
35. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 171.
36. Kirk, Op. Cit., 44–5.
37. Ibid., 184. 38.Harbour, Op. Cit, 62–3.
38. Strock, “Putting Our Habitat in Order,” Policy Review 45 (Summer 1988), 40.
39. Stephen H. Schneider, Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (San Francisco, 1989), 283–4.
40. Robert Solo, “Problems of Modern Technology,” Journal of Economic Issues 8 (1974), 863.
41. Michael Frome, Battle for the Wilderness (New York, 1974), 49.
42. Ibid., 89.
43. Weaver, Op. Cit., 112.
44. Frank S. Meyer, “Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism,” Modern Age 4 (1960) 356, 360.
45. Stavins, “Clean Profits,” 62.