Loving Nature, Fearing the State

A "conservative environmental tradition" in America may sound like a contradiction in terms, but as Brian Allen Drake shows in Loving Nature, Fearing the State, right-leaning politicians and activists have shaped American environmental consciousness since the environmental movement's beginnings. In this wide-ranging history, Drake explores the tensions inherent in balancing an ideology dedicated to limiting the power of government with a commitment to protecting treasured landscapes and ecological health.

Drake argues that "antistatist" beliefs--an individualist ethos and a mistrust of government--have colored the American passion for wilderness but also complicated environmental protection efforts. While most of the successes of the environmental movement have been enacted through the federal government, conservative and libertarian critiques of big-government environmentalism have increasingly resisted the idea that strengthening state power is the only way to protect the environment.

Loving Nature, Fearing the State traces the influence of conservative environmental thought through the stories of important actors in postwar environmental movements. The book follows small-government pioneer Barry Goldwater as he tries to establish federally protected wilderness lands in the Arizona desert and shows how Goldwater's intellectual and ideological struggles with this effort provide a framework for understanding the dilemmas of an antistatist environmentalism. It links antigovernment activism with environmental public health concerns by analyzing opposition to government fluoridation campaigns and investigates environmentalism from a libertarian economic perspective through the work of free-market environmentalists. Drake also sees in the work of Edward Abbey an argument that reverence for nature can form the basis for resistance to state power. Each chapter highlights debates and tensions that are important to understanding environmental history and the challenges that face environmental protection efforts today.

Brian Allen Drake is a senior lecturer at the University of Georgia.

"[A] deeply researched and thought-provoking book, which is sure to be of interest to both environmental and political historians."

"The brilliance of this book is how it shows that conservative ideas and values will remain important to the environmental movement, even if many self-identified conservatives cynically ignore them."

"Since 1980, Reagan-style political conservatism and environmental preservation have been locked in a state of near-constant warfare. Historian Drake (Georgia) reveals that for most of the 20th century, the moderate and conservative Republican Right actually had been ideological kindred spirits with postwar Left-leaning environmentalists."

"Original and wide-ranging research…[that] fills the void in the history of the environmental movement."

"[An] important examination of the relationship between conservatism and environmentalism."

"This well-written and informative book is an important addition to the scant literature on the role of conservative and libertarian thought in shaping the postwar environmental consciousness. Loving Nature, Fearing the State is suited for upper-division or graduate courses in environmental history and the postwar United States. It should stimulate fruitful discussions among a generation of students who have little exposure to environmental problems outside the framework of polarized politics."

"Drake’s book fills an obvious void in the literature, and he should be commended for creatively pulling from across a wide landscape of antistatist political thought in the postwar period about the environment, especially in the West…[the] lively writing will keep readers engaged and certainly heading back to Abbey’s writings and Goldwater’s complicated legacy."

"Drake’s analysis succeeds in highlighting the complex and contradictory ways that conservatives have engaged in modern environmentalism....[he]contributes both to the growing literature on the rise of the conservative Right and to studies on the American environmental movement, an intersection that has been explored by few other scholars."