President Donald Trump should change the name of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the “Department of Conservation,” making Lee Zeldin the “Secretary of Conservation” and correcting the department’s core mission.
The department was created — perhaps surprisingly, to some — by President Richard Nixon in 1970. It came at the height of environmental activism. But its roots were far deeper, in the early days of the conservationist movement.
The conservationist ideal emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It found an early champion in President Theodore Roosevelt, who embraced the outdoor life — including big-game hunting, as well as exploration.
Conservationism holds that human beings ought to manage the environment, not just for its own health but also for human uses. It places human beings at the center of nature, whose beauty is endowed by human consciousness.
Environmentalism is a different idea. It holds that nature exists for its own sake, and that it is self-regulating, left to its own internal processes. It has a value beyond human uses and ought to be preserved from human intervention.
These two philosophies were represented, respectively, by two different thinkers: Gifford Pinchot and John Muir.
As the National Endowment for Humanities notes: “For Muir, nature was God, best preserved far from the degrading touch of man. For Pinchot, nature was a resource that ought to be sustainably shared among the most people possible.”
The two clashed over the question of whether to dam the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley to collect water for San Francisco’s needs. Pinchot supported the plan; Muir opposed it. But Pinchot and Muir also formed an alliance of sorts, with Pinchot championing the U.S. Forest Service — which exists, in theory, to provide a variety of human uses — and Muir’s ideas embodied in the National Park Service, which emphasizes the preservation of nature and history.
In theory, both of these philosophies can coexist. Conservationism has room for the environmentalist idea: setting some lands aside for us to contemplate the ideal of wilderness, in a sense, a human use of nature. But the reverse is not true: environmentalism, taken to an extreme, sees conservationism as a threat to nature, and tries to uproot it.
In recent decades, environmentalism has snuffed out conservationism. I lived through the transition as a child in the 1980s.
When I attended a “nature camp” at my local park district in third grade, we learned outdoor skills such as how to fish, how to chop wood, how to row and steer canoes, and how to build fires. By the time I was in fifth grade, the fishing poles and hatchets were gone; the grass had been allowed to grow tall and wild. Only the canoes remained.
The EPA was established at a time when Americans still understood the conservationist ideal, even if we had begun to embrace the environmentalist ideal as well. But today, environmentalism has almost excluded its rival completely.
The mission of the EPA has changed: instead of cleaning up and preventing pollution, the agency has focused on grandiose plans to fight “climate change,” which involve micromanaging energy consumption at the household level.
Administrator Zeldin — can we call him Secretary, please? — has already shown how capable he is. He and his team finished removing hazardous materials from the L.A. fires within 28 days — rather than 90 days or longer. He intends to slash the budget by 65% to focus on core functions. Now that we have the right person, we need to give him the right mission. And it involves the pragmatic tasks of conservation, rather than the utopian goals of environmentalism.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
