The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist.

Conservative environmentalists are an endangered species. I consider this odd given the conservative bent of environmentalists, their drive to preserve and restore, and the moral certitude that anchors their green cause. I consider it even odder given conservatives' environmental turn--their deep concern for America's moral climate being the best example. Yet conservatives and environmentalists mix about as well as oil and water.

Gordon Durnil--Republican Party stalwart, Dan Quayle advisor, and former Bush appointee to the U.S.--Canada International Joint Commission--finds this odd as well. In his new book, The Making of a Conservative Environmentatist, he argues that conservatives are by nature and nurture environmentalists--or at least they should be. Careful to lay out his own conservative credentials, even belaboring them at times, Durnil dispels the notion that environmental values are the exclusive property of liberals and Democrats. Concern for our environment, he notes, should have nothing to do with left or right; ideology comes into play only when the talk turns to solutions.

Durnil's message is aimed in part at the Republican Right. Conservatives, he argues, could actually have an edge on liberals in the green elysian fields. "To conserve our natural resources," he writes, "is not a liberal philosophy; it is a conservative philosophy. To protect the individual from assault on person and property also fits with a conservative philosophy."

Unfortunately, this vital message--a message I hope the Right hears, but fear it will ignore--is obscured by what follows.

For starters, his idea of what constitutes an enviromnentalist is baffling. For Durnil, true environmentalists are the legions of angry, working-class men and women victimized by air- and water-borne toxins. That's why he was disappointed with the past Congress: Instead of taking action on real environmental issues--like sun-setting chlorinated compounds-it just passed a bill "regarding a desert in California." He is right in part; many victims of toxic poisoning are indeed bonafide environmentalists. But what about the middle-class aesthetes that he dismisses--the legions of angry men and women who fought the Forest Service to save western forests and spotted owls, and the grassroots greens who now struggle to save islands of biodiversity? No matter what Durnil may believe, American greens are firmly rooted in the spirit and symbol of wilderness--in what Henry David Thoreau called the "preservation of the world."

But Durnil's weakest point is his failure to give conservative solutions to environmental problems. Other than a moral stricture that people ought to do what is right, the heart of his policy menu is zero tolerance for toxic pollution. Chemicals, he adds, should be presumed harmful until proven harmless. The idea has its appeal--after all, why should the government allow the person or property of any American to be damaged, even by trace amounts of toxic chemicals? But in a real world of uncertainty and shades of gray, it's a recipe for disaster. Science is no better at proving chemical innocence than juries are at proving the innocence of the accused. "Not guilty" maybe, but never "innocent."

Conservatives reading Durnil will be struck by the probable consequence of the policies he advocates: bigger government. And environmentalists will be troubled by the narrowness of his policy interests: not a word on the hundreds of environmental issues that have little or nothing to do with persistent toxins--like the endangered salmon, the loss of topsoil on Midwestern farms, and the plight of several hundred million acres of public grazing lands.

Conservatives and environmentalists alike will be perplexed by Durnil's silence on the rising star of free-market environmentalism, a libertarian menu of market and private property solutions to land, wildlife, and air issues that entail minimal government. Why does he--indeed, why does the Republican Congress--deftly avoid any discussion of the innovative ideas that could build a positive and caring conservative environmental agenda? Karl Hess is an environmental writer and a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute.