This Earth Day, conservatives should… conserve

Home Opinion This Earth Day, conservatives should… conserve
This Earth Day, conservatives should… conserve

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Throughout my childhood, my family went on yearly camping trips to the Rocky Mountains.

My parents both studied science in college and graduate school and often pulled my siblings and me to the side of the hiking trail to teach us the names of the wildflowers or to show the hoofprint left by a deer. As much as I wanted to pick the flowers to take back to camp, my dad held me back, telling me to leave everything as I’d found it.

“If everyone picks the flowers, there will be none left,” he would smile at me.

As a kid, I obeyed my dad because I trusted his common sense. Today, though, I see a tendency in the conservative movement to dismiss such ideas. “That’s the mantra of the left,” we shudder, perhaps with visions of scruffy Sierra Clubbers hand in hand with an orange Dr. Seuss character.

The environmental issue divides Americans, but it shouldn’t.

April 22 is Earth Day, and Republicans should think more and do more for the dignity of the environment. We are conservatives, but we forget that in order to conserve the highest things, we have first to conserve the lowest (and earthiest) things.

At Hillsdale, in particular, we spend so much energy pursuing philosophy, politics, and quantum theories that we miss out on the physical world that gave rise to all these disciplines.

“There are more important things to worry about than recycling,” I’ve heard my peers say as they throw pop cans in the trash. While the government continues to grow and restrict private liberty, and abortion and euthanasia remain legal, who cares about dolphins and manatees and seahorses? Who cares about the piles of outgrown plastic toys and diapers in landfills that will never decompose?

The natural world is crucial to the western tradition. Plato taught that all nature is an image and incarnation of something higher. Aristotle wrote that we come to know everything through our senses. The liberal arts stand on the principle that the natural world necessarily leads man to the truth about himself and his creator.

The western tradition began — men surveying and measuring land, looking at the roundness of the sun, wondering at the stars.

These elements of the natural world are what first invited us to consider eternity, truth, and nature itself.

Let’s recall some of our conservative heroes. “Never, no, never, did Nature say one thing, and Wisdom say another,” wrote Edmund Burke in one of his letters. Republicans explain part of their lack of concern for environmental conservation with economic security and might even call this wisdom. Burke’s statement invites us to consider things we easily dismiss. If nature is teaching us something, shouldn’t we try to listen? Shouldn’t we do what we can, even if that means sacrificing some economic gains, in order to preserve it?

Many other conservative leaders like Richard Weaver and Teddy Roosevelt echoed Burke’s perspective. As Calvin Coolidge taught a group of Boy Scouts, “There is strength in the hills, if only we will lift up our eyes. Nature is your great restorer.”

These men were not dirty hippies. They were gentlemen and statesmen who grasped what a lot of us are missing (and what many liberals get right): We have a responsibility to conserve and care for the natural world.

My dad wasn’t spouting environmentalist propaganda when he told me not to pick the flowers. He was teaching me self-control and charity.

If we believe that truth, justice, virtue, and liberty are worth conserving, then we had better commit to conserving the environment that shows us those things are real. In celebration of Earth Day, collect your cans and bottles and recycle them or send a few dollars to the scientists who are protecting seahorses. Go for a walk outside and look around you. There’s lots to see.