Some years ago, I saw the legendary radical environmentalist Dave Foreman give his famous “howl with the wolves” talk at a university campus. As he had done before hundreds of audiences, he delivered an impassioned defence of wilderness and wild things, at end of which he invited the entire auditorium to join him in howling, which the crowd did lustily, rising to a crescendo of voices and emotion. It was a command performance. Foreman, fire-breathing guru of the eco-saboteur underground, was best-known as the co-founder, in 1980, of Earth First!, the shadowy group dedicated to spiking trees to stop logging and destroying machinery to block environmentally damaging development. His book Ecodefense: a Field Guide to Monkeywrenching is the movement’s operations manual. He has been trailed by the FBI and convicted of conspiracy to commit sabotage.
When the campus crowd quietened down, waiting for his next move. Foreman told them that few among them likely knew that he was a gun-owning, card-carrying, conservative – and yes, a Republican.
The auditorium went silent. The poster-boy ecoterrorist, a conservative Republican? It seemed an impossible contradiction, an oxymoron. Every environmentalist knows that Republicans are anti-environment and pro-development. But Foreman asked the room to reconsider. What could be more conservative than conservation? What could be less conservative than squandering the long-term capital that must sustain future generations for the short-term profits of a few? He quoted Edmund Burke, the great English legislator of the late eighteenth century, that society is “a partnership not only between those who are now living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” A true conservative is a conservationist, Foreman said; if not, he is a fraud.
It is easy to forget, in the current global climate of hyper-polarisation and the hostility of the US’s current Republican Party to environmental protection, that many of the country’s most important conservationists have historically been Republicans, including several presidents. Theodore Roosevelt created the National Park system, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were sportsmen who extended the parks legacy, and Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969, just as the environment became a national issue. In fact, Nixon signed a passel of the most celebrated environmental laws, now considered “bedrock”: the National Environmental Policy Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act – measures often opposed at the time by Democrats. Today, these laws are under determined assault in the name of conservativism.
Dave Foreman co-founded the Wildlands Project to save the earth’s biodiversity by promoting the reconnection of severed landscapes
It is worth reminding ourselves that the deepest roots of American and British conservationism are in the conservative tradition, and its greatest champions were originally among patrician, landowning classes. From the nineteenth century until 1980, conservation was a bipartisan or non-partisan issue. Members of conservation groups were often as likely to be conservatives as liberals, perhaps even more so. Foreman told me, when I talked with him before his death in 2022, that when he started out as a young activist working for legislative passage of the Wilderness Act (1964) “it really was bipartisan. I talked to the Republican(s)… as much as I did to the Democrat(s). And there were Republicans who were very open and approachable.”
What happened that the original conservation party should have strayed so far from its roots?
The short answer is the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, partly on an anti-environmental platform. But the Reagan “revolution” turned on much larger movements and realignments in American politics, in which environmental issues got caught up.
The ascendancy of the religious right as a major player in the Republican party, and its obsession with enforcing morality, brought a new tone of stridency and radicalisation.
The Republican base shifted from the declining, industrial Northeast to the South and the West, with profound implications. President Nixon’s “southern strategy” of race-baiting and supporting segregationists had worked, bringing white conservative southerners, Democrats since the Civil War, to the Republican side – and they brought their traditional resistance to government dictates on land use along with them.
Along with the regional shift came a rise in the importance of money in politics, and the need for politicians to make common cause with wealthy patrons, which in the West especially meant extractive industries such as logging and mining, heavily dependent on public lands for their profits, and thus pushing a sharp, anti-regulatory, anti-environmental protection agenda.
The most catalytic and corrosive factor, though, was the cycle of radicalisation and polarisation that attended the Reagan “revolution”. The great liberal movements of the era – civil rights, the antiwar movement, women’s and gay liberation, and the environmental movement – coincided and attracted a lot of the same people, leading many conservative Republicans to identify environmentalism with long-haired hippy protesters instead of as part of a traditional conservative value system.
Within the Republican party, a subset of interest groups and ideological factions seized on these changing stereotypes to advance a radical anti-environmental agenda, both to benefit large corporate contributors and because of an ideological hostility to regulation and public control over lands and profitable resources. From his vantage point inside the environmental movement, Dave Foreman saw the equal and opposite reaction unfold: “Just as Reagan took conservativism and Republicanism into an anti-conservation, anti-environmental stage, so did leaders of many of the national conservation groups… marry themselves to the Democratic party, and I think these things sort of happened simultaneously and also they fed on each other.”
Frustrated at the gridlock emerging in Washington and alarmed by the unabated pillage of the wild, Foreman retreated to his native New Mexico and founded Earth First! around a campfire, with the battle cry: “No compromise in defence of Mother Earth!”
In the UK, Margaret Thatcher, who often seemed like Reagan’s twin sister, went her own way on the environment. During her “green period” of the late 1980s, she boldly talked about global warming, acid rain and the ozone layer, bringing them into the national and international conversations. Her speeches were important and galvanising, but her commitment fell short of substantive action, and her interest was short-lived: her government went on to gut public transport, encourage urban sprawl, and privatise water and sewerage, with disastrous results. Still, the strident rhetoric and culture-war polarisation that took hold in the US failed to transform British politics to the same degree.
By the 1990s, Dave Foreman had become convinced a new approach was necessary, and co-founded the Wildlands Project to save the earth’s biodiversity by promoting the reconnection of severed landscapes. Rewilding, as this vision is called, has inspired movements all over the globe to rethink the maps of their territories: to reimagine and reconnect pieces of land and water to create unbroken refuges of functioning nature. One such place is Britain – one of the most nature-deprived countries in Europe – where the vision is beginning to take hold. In Scotland, which ranked 212 out of 240 for the poor state of its nature, rewilding is advancing, with more than 150 rewilding projects already, including notable large land projects – in the Cairngorms, Central Highlands, Argyll, Sutherland and elsewhere – and successful reintroduction of beavers, golden eagles, pine martens, native oysters, wildcats and even possibly, wolves. Deep, broad public support now exists on its goals, making credible calls for Scotland to become the world’s first “rewilding nation”. Significantly, rewilding requires cooperation across the political spectrum, not least because it hinges on the cooperation of private landowners.
These too, are part of Dave Foreman’s legacy.
Wade Graham is an author, environmentalist and academic. He lives in LA
