All Of Us

The world’s first public land preserve was created by Abraham Lincoln in 1964 (later to become Yosemite National Park), and the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, was established by Congress and President Ulysses Grant (Republican) in 1872.

President Theodore Roosevelt (Republican) created five national parks, 150 National Forests, and the National Park Service, and signed the Antiquities Act which led to the creation of eighteen National Monuments. Richard Nixon (Republican) created the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Environmental Policy Act, signed the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Marine Mammals Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Environmental Pesticide Control Act. Washingtonians fondly remember “Dan Evans Republicans.”

Yet more recently, who would know? Environmentalists are all Democrats or Greens, right? It’s like bipartisanship is anathema, so whatever one side espouses the other must automatically despise. All you’ll hear on the mass media is a vast partisan divide on sustainability issues, but even now how true is it? The answer: not. The proof: Jim DiPeso, of Shoreline.

Mr. DiPeso is Vice President for Policy and Communications and a founding director of Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP), a group “founded in 1995 in response to a disturbing trend among Republican elected officials – largely at the federal level – to play down or even dismiss the importance of conservation and environmental stewardship.”

As he wrote in an email to me “In our minds, conservation is conservative. If you review the history of conservative thought, you’ll find thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk wrote about a conservative ethic that is directly related to environmental concerns – our obligation to be good stewards of what we have inherited, the inseparability of freedom and responsibility, and the cardinal importance of “prudence” – essentially, looking before you leap.”

As DiPeso puts it, “Our activities include education, advocacy, and politics. Education includes newsletters and alerts for our members; press releases, commentaries, and backgrounders for the media; and briefings and other materials for members of Congress and their staffs. In a number of states, including Washington, we have chapters that focus on local and state issues. Our Washington chapter, for examples, is working on the Hanford cleanup issue.”

“Another issue we work on is energy. Energy touches everything that’s important – the economy, national security, and both the national and global environment on which human society depends. If we get energy wrong, we’ll get a lot wrong. If we get energy right, however, a lot will turn out right. We believe that America needs an energy strategy that is a three-legged stool – efficiency, diversity, and security.”

Democrats and others are quite publicly working on these issues as well, but “(t)hat doesn’t mean Republicans must imitate Democrats; on the contrary, Republicans will have different ideas on how stewardship should be carried out. Those differences can be debated and the public can judge which side has the better approach. It doesn’t serve the public, however, to have only one set of solutions to consider.”

REP’s national office is 971 S. Centreville Road, #139, Sturgis, MI 49091 and the West Coast office is 10002 Aurora Ave. N, #36, Seattle, WA 98133, in the Oak Tree neighborhood, Phone: 253-740-2066 Fax: 206-417-1878.

You can read a wide variety of op-ed pieces DiPeso has written, and a large selection of official position papers on their Web site.

In my view the recent history of Republican/Conservative political thought, legislation, ideology and punditry seems so bleakly 'brown' that it is an exciting and hopeful thing to find someone- some group- of the so-called 'right' who instead of rejecting science understands and can articulate a different angle on environmental issues- one which may help us all come together and get necessary things accomplished.