Hard Green

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MOTHER: You often mention in tributes to national parks and forests that they should be expanded and maintained. You claim on these matters that conservationists have an "unanswerable case for government intervention of some kind." Could you tell me what kind of intervention you might favor?

PH: I favor the one that extends as far back as Teddy Roosevelt a century ago, and it's very simple. If we attach value to great wide-open unspoiled spaces and the wildlife they harbor, at some point the scale of those things clearly is too large for individual owners, or even groups of individual owners, to encompass or manage. And then government's role is to define those spaces through democratic process. That is essentially what the conservation movement has done for a century.

MOTHER: It's no secret that, at least in the opinion of the environmentalists I've spoken to over the years, your theories are more than just controversial.

PH: Oh, sure. Given the level of vitriol which I've attracted ...yeah, of course I'm controversial. But I would say this: I think environmentalism ...there really are two schools of it. I think I fit really quite comfortably in one of those two schools, and I am really an utter pariah in the other. The school I feel very comfortable in is the one rooted in traditional conservation and with people who really are out there managing wide-open spaces, working to protect them. With those people I will have disagreements about details, but never about the big picture. The school that really disagrees with me, as profoundly as anybody can disagree with me, are people who are not really interested in wide-open spaces. They're interested in dictating energy policy, in chasing molecular pollutants, in doing very large, international or global models of long-term scenarios with sweeping policy implications. I don't disagree with the objectives they say they're protecting. I very strongly question whether the objectives they claim to be advancing are in fact being advanced by the policies they advocate. Even within groups ...half of which I admire ...I see the same schisms. I mean, the Sierra Club began, obviously, as a sort of conservation movement-centered body. But the best I can tell, half of the pronouncements that issue from it these days are sort of off-the-wall and not supported factually. And it gets worse from there. When I read Al Gore's book (Earth in the Balance, Plume/Penguin, 1993), the thing that really stunned me was that until he rewrote the introduction this year, you wouldn't find a mention of Teddy Roosevelt, or of the national forests and the conservation movement. How could one write an entire book on the environment without giving more than a single sentence to the fact that we've been reforesting this continent since 1920?

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