For too long, environmental conservation has been a cause championed by liberals. Even though most members from both sides of the political spectrum, myself included, recognize the importance of environmental preservation and want to work to protect our planet, only liberals seem to lay claim to the issue.
This is happening for two reasons. For one, the media have only advertised regulation-increasing policies as environmental progress. Leftist environmental activists love to promote regulations and bureaucratic solutions as “progress” toward preserving the environment. Additionally, the conservative media have never embraced the idea of a right-wing environmental effort, preferring to focus criticism on the extreme elements in the environmental movement.
Herein lies the problem: We need to recognize that unabashedly liberal ideas to environmental preservation are not the only viable solutions, and sometimes they aren’t viable at all.
My first example is the spikedace disaster in the upper Verde River in Arizona. Environmentalist groups sued the U.S. Forest Service to prevent cattle grazing on the riverbanks to try to preserve the spikedace, a species of fish. The environmentalists won, and regulations were enacted to inhibit cattle grazing. This was lauded as environmental “progress” even though the spikedace disappeared from the area shortly after. Because the cattle were gone, there were no animals to eat the shrubs and bushes that soon overgrew the river banks. This changed the river’s ecosystem entirely.
In another case, consider the radical push by liberal environmentalists to replace every American light bulb with a CFL (the long-lasting, spiral-looking ones). Nancy Pelosi’s “Greening the Capitol” installed more than 13,000 of these in our nation’s legislative home. The only problem being that the CFL light bulb contains enough mercury that, if broken, can be harmful to fetuses, pets and human health in general.
There needs to be an alternative, one that invites citizens to participate in environmental preservation willingly, instead of forcefully by increasing bureaucratic regulations. A conservative environmentalist approach would promote individuals to use their own creativity to produce rewards and achieve measurable environmental results, not compounding regulation.
Instead of blanket regulations to solve a distant problem, the government should work to promote individual participation in the conservation effort. Bureaucracies are restrictive and risk-adverse. For bureaucrats, “cover your ass,” is the modus operandi.
They’re much more worried about doing something now that might be criticized later than they are about taking an initiative to cure an immediate problem.
What have the Feds done to stop or clean up the spewing oil in the Gulf? Virtually nothing. In fact, they seem to have stymied some promising initiatives that have been proposed.
For instance, Gov. Bobby Jindal has asked for the construction of barrier islands to prevent the oil from flooding into the Louisiana marshlands. Kevin Costner has proposed a plan involving a new centrifuge that may help clean up the spill. I am not saying these are the right or wrong solutions, but this represents the private innovation necessary to handle the greatest environmental challenges.
The government is “evaluating” Costner’s centrifuges, but this is an emergency. What’s the holdup? In these two cases, it’s as if the house is on fire. Jindal and Costner have shown up with some newfangled fire hoses and the Feds are saying, “Whoa! We have to take a long, slow look at those things before using them.”
Liberal environmentalists will continue to believe humans are the problem. I advocate that we are the solution to promoting sustainable solutions to a nature-human cooperative.
Mike Rowe, of “Dirty Jobs,” says the green movement should be renamed the “brown movement” because individuals do the dirty work and interact with the environment daily, unlike the lofty and removed “green” politician. I agree. It is with the citizens that the most good can be accomplished toward preserving the environment.
Bryan Griffin is a first-year law student
