I'm not opposed to the idea that conservatives should be more assertive, less apologetic and a good deal more creative when it comes to the environment. In fact, from Caleb's post below, I can't find that much to disagree with. Where I think conservatives, crunchy and otherwise, often go wrong is to leap from this first principle (conservation=good) to the assumption that leftwing greens have the right solutions to environmental problems. This is obviously part of what Jeremy and Lukacs are getting at. Maybe they're right that conservative abdication of the issue pushed the Greens toward radicalism. Though I have my doubts.

Regardless, there's been a lot of talk around here about the problems and pitfalls of ideology and what is, or is not, a mere "sentiment" as opposed to an ideology or a program. If love of nature and a desire to preserve it for posterity is going to be a core conservative value — and I see no reason why it shouldn't be — we should still be cautious about making it into an ideological stance or political program defined by those who preach the loudest about the environment.

Indeed, one major disagreement I have with Rod's prescription is his tendency to conflate love of nature with Green public policies. His concerns about asthma in Dallas support many of his positions on this front and I simply don't find them persuasive. See this, for example.

Part of the problem is that it is taken as something of a given that the "cult of individual freedom" — to use Jeremy's phrase — is bad for the environment. I would like to see more evidence of this. Obviously, free market economics can be bad for some environmental goods — sometimes in the short run, sometimes in the long run. But free market systems on the whole are better at protecting the environment than non-free-market systems. Indeed, America's environment is indisputably better off than it was fifty or a hundred years ago (periods many in here are quite nostalgic for). If you talk to libertarians who study environmental issues — Steve Hayward, Ron Bailey, Jonathan Adler, Peter Huber et al — they will make very persuasive arguments in favor of free-market solutions to envrionmental problems. These solutions depend on property rights and other notions central to conservative principles. And, they depend on getting outside of the cliché that "environmentalists" always know what's best for the environment.

In order to give these voices a fair hearing, the first thing one must do is drop the caricature of free market economics as inherently bad for nature and fundamentally uotpian. Neither of these things are true.