Conservatism and Conservationism

This is a bit of a soap-box of mine, and no doubt many readers of this post will be familiar with my rant on this, but for one reason or another, it's come to the forefront again.

For whatever reason, Alaskan politics seem to show the same links between pro-conservation policy and the left wing.  Of course, in Alaska, nobody is really anti-oil, so it's mostly a question of how quickly to drill and how much to tax Exxon.

This isn't even interesting to most people--of course conservatives are anti-environment, right?  Except it really doesn't make much sense, when you think about ideology, history, and so on.

First off, the Republican party was the party of conservation right from the get-go (almost literally... Ulysses S. Grant created our first national park in the US), and was strongly associated with conservation right on through.  For example, Teddy Roosevelt was a strong conservationist (created the Forest Service, for example).  And even as recently as the 1970s, Republicans were pro-environment (Richard Nixon, after all, created the EPA).

Further, conservatism and conservation are ideologically compatible.  If we assume that frugality and living within our means is a key conservative value--and you can question this when you look at which recent presidents have run up the deficits and which have cut them, but most Republicans would argue that fiscal conservatism is a key component of their ideology--it's hard to see how conservation of resources is any different.  Oil, coal, timber, fish... these are all resources that can't be used up too fast, or they go away, in just the same way as government revenues can't be spent too quickly without creating problems.  Frugality in resource use is not very different from frugality in government spending.

Nor is it clear that anti-conservationism is a key value of important Republican demographics.  Commercial and sport-fishermen and hunters are more often Republican than not, and these are groups that have important reasons to be pro-conservation (though their discourse sounds a little different from that of the average member of the Sierra Club).  And even though there are many conflicts between users of public lands, snowmobilers and off-roaders all favor more public land for recreational purposes.  These groups also tend towards conservatism.

Which, of course, raises an interesting empirical question--why exactly are republican politicians so anti-conservation?  But that is a question for another time.