Can we agree on being green?

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: Book review

Getting to Green: Saving Nature: A Bipartisan Solution

Frederic C. Rich

W.W. Norton. 368 pages. $26.95

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Prairie Crossing: Creating an American Conservation Community

John Scott Watson

University of Illinois Press. 232 pages. $29.95

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In his State of the Union address, the President called on the nation to "make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water." He called protecting the environment "a cause beyond party and beyond factions."

The year was 1970 and the President was Richard Nixon. He would go on to create the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and sign several landmark pieces of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act (1970), Clean Water Act (1972), and Endangered Species Act (1973). All passed with large majorities of Republican support. No one considered this odd, because environmental protection was a key conservative cause. William F. Buckley Jr. called it "overdue for government to assert its responsibility in these matters." Barry Goldwater was a member of the Sierra Club.

Fast forward to 2016. It's been more than a quarter century since the U.S. federal government passed a major environmental law--the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, a response to acid rain signed by George H.W. Bush. The Re publican Party is almost uniformly hostile to environmental regulation, if not the environment itself. Greens, reviled by conservatives, have won a few battles but largely failed at the national policy level. Federal spending on conservation and enforcement has fallen precipitously. Most Americans say they support the environment, but rank it low on their list of priorities. In the 2012 general election presidential debates, the issue of climate change never came up.

"How is it possible that, at the same time when the need for environmental action has never been more compelling, the green agenda has been stalled, with half the country actively hostile and the other half not caring very much?" asks Frederic Rich in Getting to Green. "The answer is clear: politics."

From the anti-environmentalism of Ronald Reagan, to the deliberate disinformation campaigns of rightwing think tanks underwritten by the fossil-fuel industry, to the obliging ignorance of the Tea Party, the historical affinity of conservatives for conservation has been broken. The hyper-partisanship of the last two decades, Rich writes, has...