Conservation vs. environmentalism

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Conservation and Environmentalism are competing philosophies of the environment. Political conservatives generally favor "conservation" and political liberals generally favor "environmentalism".

Progressive Era

Both Conservationism and Environmentalism arrived in politics during the Progressive Era

In the early 20th century there were three main positions. The laissez-faire position held that owners of private property--including lumber and mining companies, should be allowed to do anything they wished for their property.



Environmentalism was the third position, led by John Muir (1838-1914). Muir's passion for nature made him the most influential American environmentalist. Muir preached that nature was sacred and humans are intruders who should look but not develop. He founded the Sierra Club and remains an icon of liberalism. He was primarily responsible for defining the environmentalist position, in the debate between Conservation and environmentalism.



Since 1970


But is the environment a secondary issue, commanding insufficient attention from political candidates to play a major role in politics? What cannot be ignored is the success with which the Republican party, beginning in the late 1970s, harnessed populist distrust of the federal government, the Democratic party, and the modern environmental regulatory state, and argued the alternative was the conservative agenda promoted by Republicans. In the West the most prominent organs of the federal government include the federal land agencies that oversee vast sweeps of the landscape. The growth of the Republican party's political power in the West was made possible by the rise of popular opposition to public lands reform. Successful Democrats in the inland West and Alaska typically take more conservative positions on environmental issues than Democrats from the Coastal states. Taking the conservationist position, conservatives drew on new organizational networks of think tanks, industry groups, and citizen-oriented organizations, and they began to deploy new strategies that affirmed the rights of individuals to their property, to hunt and recreate, and to pursue happiness unencumbered by the federal government.[1]

Further reading

  • Flippen, J. Brooks. Nixon and the Environment (2000). excerpt and text search
  • Glenn, Brian J. and Steven M. Teles, eds. Conservatism and American Political Development (2009), two chapters on conservatives and environmental issues since 1930s excerpt and text search
  • Gottlieb, Robert. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (2005), liberal history

See also


  1. Turner (2009)