On July 11, a man named Nathaniel Pryor Reed died. He was 84 years old. He’d fallen immediately upon having hooked a salmon in a river in Quebec and never regained consciousness, which is perhaps the most wonderfully prosaic way for him to have died because, without Nat Reed, this country would have been a much different, and a much more ruined, place.

He was one of the first prominent members of the environmental movement that rose in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. He probably saved the Everglades from being just another part of Florida’s landscape buried underneath strip-malls and an airport. He got garbage dumps banned from the Everglades so they would no longer attract bears, so he helped save the Everglades not only from predatory capitalists, but from actual predators as well. From The Palm Beach Post:

In helping create the Big Cypress preserve, Reed also helped kill what would have been the world’s biggest jetport, a sprawling complex envisioned for the middle of the Everglades. Would the Big Cypress have happened “if the propaganda for developing the site into a major supersonic jetport had not raised the environmental issues at a time in our nation’s history when environmental issues were national news?” Nat Reed asked in a recent essay. “The answer is an emphatic ‘No.’ ”

But his greatest achievements came as an environmental activist within the halls of government. He was an environmental aide to several Republican governors and, in 1971, he was named the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The president at the time told him that he didn’t really know or care much about environmental issues, but that he wanted an environmental legacy bigger than his predecessors—one predecessor in particular—and that he didn’t care how Reed did it, as long as it didn’t get the president in trouble. Reed went to town.

The Florida Everglades Joe Raedle Getty Images

He stayed on at Interior for six years, which was two years longer than the president stayed in his job. He was instrumental in shepherding the Clean Water Act through Congress and, in 1973, Reed co-wrote the monumental Endangered Species Act, which one historian has called the “Magna Carta of the environmental movement.” There were only four votes against it in the House, and the Senate passed it unanimously. It consistently polls in the 70s and 80s across both party lines. The president who signed it said,

I congratulate the 93rd Congress for taking this important step toward protecting a heritage which we hold in trust to countless future generations of our fellow citizens. Their lives will be richer, and America will be more beautiful in the years ahead, thanks to the measure that I have the pleasure of signing into law today.

The president in question was Richard Nixon, who was a Republican.

So was Nat Reed.

This is because environmentalism was an article of faith for Republicans ever since Theodore Roosevelt set down a marker for it. It was a bipartisan article of faith for almost as long. Back when it began, it began as “conservationism,” and hunters and fishermen were on board, too.

Bryce Canyon, 1960 Archive Photos Getty Images

Sixteen years before he wrote his seminal Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, one of the founders of the conservation movement,

Control comes from the co-ordination of science and use. This book attempts to explore the possibilities of such coordination in a single, limited field-the conservation of game by management. Its detail applies to game alone, but the principles are of general import to all fields of conservation. The central thesis of game management is this: game can be restored by the creative use of the same tools which have heretofore destroyed it-axe, plow, cow, fire, and gun. A favorable alignment of these forces sometimes came about in pioneer days by accident. The result was a temporary wealth of game far greater than the red man ever saw. Management is their purposeful and continuing alignment…We seem to have two choices: try it, or hunt rabbits.

Just as Nat Reed was hooking that 16-pounder in Quebec, the administration of another Republican president* was poised to gut Reed’s masterwork, the Endangered Species Act. From CNN:

Among the proposed changes announced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Thursday is allowing officials to consider economic impact when enforcing the ESA. "We propose to remove the phrase, 'without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination'" the proposal states. Another suggested shift in the policy would also end the service's practice of providing future "threatened" species with the same protections as endangered species automatically. Instead, protections for future threatened species will be determined by "the species' individual conservation needs."

(That last sentence is rather a hoot. How do they propose to identify “the species’ individual conservation needs”? Invite some sage grouse to the House of Representatives to testify? Louie Gohmert would be unfairly overmatched.)

The sage grouse. HELEN H. RICHARDSON Getty Images

And the most recent effort to hobble the ESA, well-funded by the usual suspects, also was snuck into the National Defense Authorization Act, much to the consternation of the Pentagon, which couldn’t seem to make up its mind on the issue. From The New York Times:

In a one-paragraph position paper made public Wednesday, the Pentagon said the GOP provision was "not necessary to protect military testing and training" and said the department "urges its exclusion" from the defense bill being negotiated by House and Senate leaders. Lucian Niemeyer, assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment, said Wednesday that military installations are "not experiencing significant mission impacts related to the management" of the sage grouse, lesser-prairie chicken or the American burying beetle, another threatened species targeted by the GOP bill.

Giambastiani, in his email Thursday, challenged the accuracy of Niemeyer's statement."The administration, the Defense Department and the Interior Department support the provision in question and believe that it could help the department avoid any negative readiness impacts on military facilities should the species be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act," he wrote. "Importantly, several vital military installations are impacted by sage grouse populations in, around or underneath the airspace used by the Department of Defense on a daily basis."

But, as it turns out, and as anybody would have guessed, the Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Sage Grouse are threats not to national security, but to the ability of some wealthy corporate vandals out west to make a buck.

The birds have become flashpoints in an ongoing battle over whether they warrant federal protection that hinders mining and other development from Kansas to California.

Second only to its deliberate courting of the remnants of American apartheid in the middle of the 1960s, the modern, movement-conservative Republican Party’s abandonment of its long history of environmentalism is a profound betrayal with profound consequences for us all.

(And it didn’t start with this president*, either. It started when, at about the same time that the Republicans absorbed the resistance to the civil rights movement, it also married itself to the money interests in the south and west. That helped give us President Ronald Reagan, who gave us Interior Secretary James Watt, and attached Republican policy to the extremes of the Wise Use movement.)

Extinction to own the libs. This is not what Nat Reed, a great man now gone, would have thought a Republican was.



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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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