Of that, I have little doubt. Perhaps I should have included the phrase “for some”; I’m not trying to paint all those with religious beliefs in a certain light, nor am I attempting to limit the “we cannot affect the Earth” to only believers. However, IME, that’s been the underlying justification when I’ve heard the argument.
Again, not trying to overgeneralize to everyone, just to give a (minor) contributing factor that is applicable to some people.
I understand that you are relating your experience, and I appreciate it.
Strange that religion is being associated with anti-environmental.
In the Environmental group I am most active in, about half the members are active in their churches also.
I don’t know the exact breakdown, but we have Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Unitarians, a few Buddhist and several other flavors of Protestant.
Then a bunch of us are agnostic, non-practicing something or atheist.
We all get along pretty well in a common effort.
Go figure.
Jim
Hunters tend to be conservative. Hunters are also the biggest environmentalists in the US. If not for hunting then there literally would not be the national parks and wildlife refuges that we now know.
Hunters raise twelve times as much money for wildlife conservation as all the other taxpayers combined. (Cite is a factcard I was given at my hunters safety course.)
Of course democrats, being traditionally the party of larger government and more government control over things, tend to favor more government regulations regarding the environment. Unfortunately many simple minded people equate this with only them caring about the environment. That’s just not true.
I would be interested in the stats behind that fact card, but I agree with much of what you say.
Anglers and Fishing Captains are usually our best allies. Rather than making huge commercial harvest they respect the sea and usually support limits when fish populations begin to drop. They came out in large number to protest a sewage plant that my group turned up as a pollution source. Same with one rogue foreign owned Chemical Company that was polluting the local bay.
When we were part of a coalition to stop a garbage incinerator from being built, it was local medical associations that joined with us.
Through the efforts of environmental groups, anglers, concerned citizens and property owners that have been convince and seen proven that property value is higher if the creeks run clean, the Hudson is no longer the sad joke it was in the 70’s and the Navesink and Shrewsbury Rivers in NJ are clean enough that a small oyster industry has restarted.
The Shore communities worked with COA & other environmental groups to reduce dumping and the beaches are much cleaner than they were when I was a kid.
I fear the gutting of the Clean Air & Clean Water acts.
Jim
It’s the extremists. When I see a PETA ad or read about one of those hippies who lives in trees, even I want to go pollute some river, just to distance myself from them. And if a liberal is ashamed of the extremists, then of course conservatives will want to stay far, far away from environmentalism. For many Joe-Blow Republicans, the only contact they’ve had with environmentalism has been those overgrown hippies. People look at things called the “Clean Air Act” and just think hippie alert! hippie alert!
Which is, of course, why we need to highlight the efforts of hunters and fishermen and change the average American’s notion of what an environmentalist looks like. Sometimes image is everything.
On behalf of Environmentalists everywhere, PETA is not an environmental group. I am not sure what they are, but we collectively disown them.
Jim
This is one of the reasons I think the Dems should dump gun control as an agenda item. It doesn’t fly with the moderates, and it keeps hunters from feeling “at home” with the Dems, something that many of them might do, given the Dems’ better track record on the environment.
As someone who was all for gun control, it seems we have made a lot of progress on this issue and the regs have at least caught up to where I think they should be.
I think you are right; the Dem’s should back off the gun control issue and try to appeal to hunters.
On the other side, I think it is time for more republicans to champion the ideals of Teddy and be in favor of conservation (a very conservative action) and trust busting.
They want to work and be poor? Doesn’t sound like the American Dream to me. Maybe you’re hanging out with neocons and don’t know it or something.
But they’d LIKE to be rich, wouldn’t they? Granted, there are a lot more people who WANT to be rich, than who ARE rich. That doesn’t mean that the dream of being rich isn’t a motivating factor among the many who would LIKE to be rich but aren’t.
As I said, tropical islands may not be everyone’s idea of paradise, but that’s the idea, isn’t it? I mean, how many mine OWNERS live near their mines? How many oilmen live downwind of petroleum distillaries? Hmmmmmm?
Where are the examples? Most conservative business owners live in the same macro-environment as least some of their customers and workers. Many hugely successful businesses, regardless of the political philosophy of their founder, are neutral or beneficial for the environment
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I don’t think you’ll find a LOT of mine owners living in the mountains of West Virginia … do YOU think that? Etc. etc.
Fine. MOST conservatives don’t care about the environment. You’re right, there needed to be a qualifier there.
Note bolded phrase.
Maybe it’s just the folks who get on television but it seems as though a lot of environmentalist aren’t just pushing to save the environment they’re also pushing a social agenda along with it. Perhaps that’s why environmentalism is perceived to be a liberal issue even though most people, regardless of political affiliation, probably enjoys having clean water and air.
Marc
I think you might be right. Especially the semi-crazy only semi-lucid Hollywood stars that promote enviromental issues. For every one that knows what they are talking about, there are 5 that are just trying to bolster their image.
Jim
I can definitely attest that many conservatives do care about the environment, but feel turned off by the “mainstream” environmentalist movement. In this case, mainstream organizations seem to be the ones who get the attention and the money, the ones who are important regardless of their actual politics or membership.
There’s also a serius problem whereby many of them, for no known reason, give pollution-happy Democrats a pass while screaming about the slightest infraction - or even completely made-up issues - if it targets a Republican. I know many poeple on this board hate Bush. IIRC, his review of Clinton’s water regulations did not go down well here. Let’s review what happened:
Now, environmental groups were screaming as if Satan himself were smoking wolf puppies while driving his SUV through Yellowstone and shooting bears. At no point did I ever hear one single group lay out why the rules were a good case, and what the actual impact of the more stringent water-quality rules, and how it would help me. No, it was taken as a given that it was somehow better. I recall more than one groups acting as if cancelling these brand-new regulations, which no one had particular gone out on a limb for, would be tantamount to inviting Dow Corning to dump their waste directly into our water supply, just like they had during those awful, awful Clinton years.
Tellingly, I never saw actual public health advocates endorsing the new regs.
To be honest, before this event, I was somewhat sympathetic to environmentalist movements. After this, I decided I was not ever giving any of them my money. This was some sort of ham-fisted political hack job. In any event, Bush passed the new regs. The issue immediately died, and no further mention of it was ever made by environmentalists. I saw neither apology nor embarassment on their parts.
So yeah, there’s a perception that the people who supposedly care about the environment are really just Democrat support groups wearing green. And I think that’s sad, because just a generation ago conservatives were a major part pof the environmental movement. Now, I feel like we’re just not welcome. Even if we have similar goals, we’re not allowed in the club.
Well, one might argue that the reason they were accepted was exactly because of the uproar that was raised by the environmental groups. There was no good justification given for the review of these rules which had already been reviewed ad nauseum.
Does that tell us about the regs or about you? I seem to recall that the regs were based on a National Academy of Sciences study.
Well, if you look at the breakdown of the votes, I think you will see that it is still largely along party lines, although with a few notable defections of more moderate Republicans. (And, in the Senate, it was a filibuster that stopped it.)
By the way, although I do think the big-business alignment of conservatives plays a big role in the anti-environmentalist positions, it is curious that now even many companies are getting ahead of the current government on issues like global warming. I sometimes think that a certain amount of the conservative antagonism toward environmental issues has gone beyond their serving as lap-dogs to business and is based more on ideology and perhaps even spite.
I think this is true. Lots of watermelons* in the environmentalist movement.
Another is that too many environmentalists are whackos or Luddites. Earth First! Earth First! and the other idiots, or that fruitcake putting “tickets” on SUVs. Extremists are really bad at compromise, and so even possibly valid ideas like the resale of pollution credits gets rejected out of hand. Add to that a big dose of “four legs good, two legs bad” rhetoric, and people who need jobs being told they are not as important as Furbish’s lousewort, and you have a movement practically begging not to be taken seriously.
Regards,
Shodan
*Green on the outside, pink on the inside.
Here are more viewpoints from a somewhat similar thread I started quite a while back.
How about one of the oldest groups, the Sierra Club, they should be mainstream enough for even a Pro-Busher who is still in favor of open space and clean water.
There are many groups, Green Peace has a very liberal influence, Sierra is moderate. WWF is moderate and probably the group to contribute to if you care about the cute fuzzies of the world. They are rational where PETA is hateful.
National Audubon Society is another old and moderate group.
Look into small local groups where you can have a direct impact and they do very little with politics.
Jim
I didn’t say anything of the sort and please don’t put words in my mouth. It is not relevant whether or not they care about the common people. What I am saying is that they don’t go out of their way to pollute the environment just to spite you.
Part of this is just a perception issue too. Green Peace and the Sierra Club may be vocal but they are only one type of environmental group. Other international groups like Ducks Unlimited are very adamant about conservation and they tend to have an entirely different membership. There are many environmental groups based around hunting and fishing and just the plain appreciation of nature that I would venture to guess have mostly conservative members. Read some outdoor sporting magazines sometime. There are all kinds of environmental groups out there and many of them are very hands on instead of political and theoretical.