The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist.

• Author: Hess, Karl, Jr.

Conservative environmentalists are an endangered species. I consider this odd given the conservative bent of environmentalists, their drive to preserve and restore, and the moral certitude that anchors their green cause. I consider it even odder given conservatives' environmental turn--their deep concern for America's moral climate being the best example. Yet conservatives and environmentalists mix about as well as oil and water.

Gordon Durnil--Republican Party stalwart, Dan Quayle advisor, and former Bush appointee to the U.S.--Canada International Joint Commission--finds this odd as well. In his new book, The Making of a Conservative Environmentatist, he argues that conservatives are by nature and nurture environmentalists--or at least they should be. Careful to lay out his own conservative credentials, even belaboring them at times, Durnil dispels the notion that environmental values are the exclusive property of liberals and Democrats. Concern for our environment, he notes, should have nothing to do with left or right; ideology comes into play only when the talk turns to solutions.

Durnil's message is aimed in part at the Republican Right. Conservatives, he argues, could actually have an edge on liberals in the green elysian fields. "To conserve our natural resources," he writes, "is not a liberal philosophy; it is a conservative philosophy. To protect the individual from assault on person and property also fits with a conservative philosophy."

Unfortunately, this vital message--a message I hope the Right hears, but fear it will ignore--is obscured by what follows.

For starters, his idea of what constitutes an enviromnentalist is baffling. For Durnil, true environmentalists are the legions of angry, working-class men and women victimized by air- and water-borne toxins. That's why he was disappointed with the past Congress: Instead of taking action on real environmental issues--like sun-setting chlorinated compounds-it just passed a bill "regarding a desert in California." He is right in part; many victims of toxic poisoning are indeed bonafide environmentalists. But what about the middle-class aesthetes that he dismisses--the legions of angry men and women who fought the Forest Service to save western forests and spotted...