Though William F. Buckley, Jr. was hardly a member in good standing in the environmental movement, he deserves credit for dealing with the issue seriously, if infrequently. While he was not hostile to environmental concerns, he positioned himself more in opposition to the fad of modern environmentalism than as a proponent of legitimate public policies around which conservatism should mobilize.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective 

Around the same time that William F. Buckley, Jr. began to transform conservatism into a respectable force in American politics, the nation's environment was sliding into chaos.  Fish kills were occurring with alarming frequency in the lower Mississippi. Birds were dying across the nation, some species unable to reproduce for reasons scientists were struggling to understand. Lake Erie, one of the great fresh-water bodies in the world, was a near terminal victim of industrial and chemical wastes dumped indiscriminately into its once pristine waters. Air quality was abysmal in many major cities

In the midst of these events, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and changed the landscape of American public policy. Carson had first stimulated interest in the natural world with her studies of the ocean. In one of these, The Sea Around Us, Carson wrote that man "has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the oceans as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents. In the artificial world of his cities and towns, he often forgets the true nature of his planet and the long vistas of its history . . .."

A few years later, Silent Spring, published in 1962, launched the modern environmental movement. While she was not the first to take on the issues of man and nature, Carson's landmark study of pesticides (particularly DDT) mobilized the political and scientific communities to take pollution seriously as a threat to our way of life and to future generations.

Silent Spring rocked the nation with its indictment of chemical pollution. No writer since Upton Sinclair had been so effective in forcing the nation to take a hard look at industry practices, in this case the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides that Carson argued caused cancer and threatened the chain of life that stretched from the oceans to man himself.  Frank Graham, Jr., in Since Silent Spring suggested: "If America ever chooses to adopt a sane, coordinated conservation policy – an environmental policy – a great deal of the credit must go to Rachel Carson." Al Gore, in an introduction to a new edition of Carson 's book, wrote that Silent Spring marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Time magazine named her one of the 20 most important scientists of the past century and Richard Posner named her one of America's most influential public intellectuals in the second half of the 20^th century. Interestingly, Bill Buckley was another.

Carson was no eco-freak or an environmental wacko, to use the derisive terms often aimed at environmental advocates. She was a serious scientist and writer who believed human beings must live in reasonable harmony with nature or risk their own long-term health and survival. As she noted in Silent Spring, many of the destructive chemicals introduced into our land and water could survive there for centuries: "It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm."

James Buckley, in his Senate memoir, If Men Were Angels, showed more interest in the general theme of the environment than most conservatives. He wrote: "My conservative brethren often charge me with inconsistency because I favor federal legislation to bring air and water pollution under effective control. For my part, I frequently wince when reading articles in conservative journals – even that excellent one, National Review, edited by my brother Bill – that do nothing but illustrate their authors' ignorance of elementary questions of biological cause and effect." (Angels, p. 28)

He added: "Too few conservatives seem to appreciate the extraordinary complexity and sensitivity of the interdependent ecological systems on which life literally depends" and as a result could leave future generations with (quoting Burke) "a ruin rather than a habitation." (Angels, p. 28)

Carson endured sharp criticism as the chemical industry mobilized against her hypothesis. Even today, she is accused of sensationalizing the harm pesticides or herbicides did to the environment. In a recent study, for example, Bjorn Lomborg argued that Carson overstated her case. Adjusting for age, smoking and population growth, he argued, cancer was not increasing as she contended. Harsher critics have argued that the banning of DDT led to outbreaks of mosquito-carried malaria that cost the lives of thousands of people in developing countries.

Evidence that pesticides were having a destructive impact on bio-diversity has been hard to dismiss. Once some of these harmful chemicals were banned or withdrawn, the fish kills stopped, bird populations were revived, and wildlife in affected areas began to thrive again. This indicated that Carson was not weaving doom and gloom out of thin air. It also underscored the need to find ways to control harmful insects without destroying the biosphere in which we all must live.

Bill Buckley was only marginally moved by Carson or his brother's testimony. While he was not hostile to environmental concerns, he positioned himself more in opposition to the fad of modern environmentalism than as a proponent of legitimate public policies around which conservatism should mobilize. He wrote in 1978 that evidence was mounting that Carson's clarion call against pesticides may well have been the greatest hoax since the donation of Constantine.

Buckley's reservations are explained in part by the natural tensions between two wings of the conservative movement he sought to unite in common cause – free enterprise capitalists and traditional conservatives. They were not always natural allies, but Buckley more often than not sided with the capitalists even when this pitted him against a rich tradition that had shaped conservatism historically. In doing so, he not only distanced himself from his brother's plea for an enlightened conservative position on the environment, he also separated emotionally from the likes of Burke, G. K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, the agrarians of Nashville and his friend and mentor Russell Kirk.

The Agrarians

Chesterton would die in 1938, just in time to miss the destruction wrought by the engines of corporate and state power he had long challenged. Eliot would go on being a force in the world of letters. And both of them would have been pleased, one suspects, by the small group of poets and writers in Nashville, Tennessee, who in the 1920s and 1930s launched their own movement to save traditional culture from the disruptive screams of modernity. The Fugitives, as they would be called, were an interesting group of idealists. They included such giants of literature as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and men of sharp instinct and traditional mind like Donald Davidson and Andrew Lytle. Historians from across the nation would express sympathy with their worldview – among them Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Cleanth Brooks, C. Vann Woodward and Eugene Genovese.

It is no accident that they emerged as a cultural and literary force in the shadows of the Tennessee hills, not far from the Smokey Mountains. Vanderbilt was a quiet refuge in a tumultuous world. As one historian of the movement noted: "The surrounding land nurtured a conservative society whose easy manners and customs endowed the school with a gentler aspect, providing its students with a homogenous outlook and a hardy traditionalism."
– The Fugitive Movement, Linda Sue Grimes.

The Fugitives were arguably the most important regional movement to emerge in the United States since Emerson and Thoreau walked the woods of New England almost a century before. They were determined to turn back the forces of industrialism, not in the name of enslaving the poor, but in liberating man. Their dreams could not be counted on a horizon of smokestacks. They articulated this view in a political and cultural anthology called I'll Take My Stand, which has survived, amid charges of romanticism, as one of the more important cultural critiques of the century.

The historian Eugene Genovese, in The Southern Tradition, put in perspective the agrarian agenda. The movement was about preserving a regional culture, a way of life rooted in land and tradition. The agrarians, as they would become known, were not opposed to modernity, but to its excesses. "Southern conservatives have condemned not science, reason, material progress and individualism," Genovese wrote, "but, rather, the cult of scientism, atheistic and pantheistic rationalism, and a material progress that has resulted in the alienation of the individual from self and society."

By the 1930s, the issues and the nation had changed so dramatically that Emerson and Thoreau were viewed as romantics. Not surprisingly, this is precisely how the agrarians themselves were viewed in many quarters. Merrill Peterson, the great Jeffersonian scholar, would accuse them of being disconnected from reality. In seeking to emulate Jefferson, he argued, the agrarians ignored that Jefferson accommodated himself to the use of industrial and state power as it existed in his day.

The historian Richard Hofstadter likewise suggested that the notion of an agricultural America rooted in tradition, self-sustaining and noble, was pure mythology. The agrarian ideal had ceased to exist long before 1930, a victim of Westward expansion, rural greed and frontier atrocities.  By the turn of the century, Hofstadter observed, the Homestead Act had changed the frontier and the nature of the country itself. Between 1870 and 1900, more new farmland was settled than at any time in American history, but the goal was not a settled and self-reliant way of life, but profit. Farmers settled the land, and then became capitalists when they sold it for as much as they could get: "From 1860-1900, for every free farm entered and kept by a bona-fide farmer under the Act, there were nine bought from railroads or speculators or the government itself." (See Hoftadter's The Age of Reform.)

Yet nothing in Hofstadter's analysis obviated the concerns of the agrarians, who were well aware that rural Americans were vulnerable to the temptations of modern economic forces. Nor can it be denied that the Fugitives failed to thwart the industrial and commercial economy that uprooted millions of citizens. The historian C. Van Woodward observed that by the 1940s and 1950s, cities in major Southern metropolitan areas were growing at three times the rate of comparable cities in other parts of the country. For every three city dwellers in the South in 1940, there were four by the end of the decade. By contrast, for every five farmers in 1940 in the South, by 1950 it was four farmers, a remarkable decline in a short period of time. Moreover, in 1930, there were 5.5 million southerners employed in agriculture, a number that dropped to 3.2 million by 1950.

But lost causes are not necessarily unimportant ones. Genovese, once a staunch leftist, found much about the agrarian movement to applaud. For starters, the agrarians were "premature environmentalists" and their concern about the impact of industrialized life on the environment is a major theme in I'll Take My Stand.

The opening essay by John Crowe Ransom set the tone. It was so filled with backward ideas that it was 50 years ahead of its time. Ransom, like Chesterton, fought for a world full not of ambitious men but of contented men, people prepared to live in harmony with the earth. He argued that European culture, at least beyond the great cities, had reconciled itself to nature. Men and women found their spot between the rock and the shade tree and then "willed the whole in perpetuity to the generations which should come after. This had been in many respects the thrust of human society, in which man concludes a truce with nature, and he and nature seem to live on terms of mutual respect and amity . . . But the latter day societies have been seized – none quite so violently as our American one – with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature." (Stand, p. 7)

Ransom described the threat from industrialized society in the most strident terms, suggesting that industrialists should be viewed as foreign invaders, laying siege, once again, to the South.

Donald Davidson offered his views on what modern trends did to art. True artistic accomplishment was – in the final analysis — a product of rural life and could not be disconnected from spiritual and traditional forces that beat in the heart of nature, he argued. (Shades of Henry Adams here.) Several of the Fugitives disputed the idea that progress could be defined in urban and industrial terms.

"It is, in fact, impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper respect for the soil, no matter how many urban dwellers think their victuals come from groceries and delicatessens and their milk from tin cans."

So wrote Andrew Lytle, who also went on to describe the virtues of rural life in an effort to combat the negative images then prevalent in the great centers of commerce. It was during this period, for example, that James Agee wrote his harsh documentary of southern poverty, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Lytle was unimpressed with notions of progress put forward even by Tennessee native son Agee, whose literary star rose a few years after the Fugitives had disbanded. Lytle argued that while it was true that modern conveniences and culture afforded more time – the crucial question was time for what? Is the leisure time afforded us by modernity more meaningful than learning how to live in harmony with nature? Is this time filled with substance or emptiness? Is the dream of modernity a life in which the body and mind atrophy, food is less healthy, our lives imitate popular trends, our relationships formed with celebrities we will never meet, our wants determined by advertising that tries to convince us to fill our lives not with natural beauty but with useless products?

"Prophets do not come from cities promising riches and store clothes. They have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats and running with lice, and they spoke of a different kind of treasure, one a corporation head would not understand," Lytle wrote.

As Genovese observed, the noble efforts of the Southern Agrarians to confront the excesses of commercial and industrial culture were, unfortunately, lost in the clamor over civil rights. The massive resistance of the South to the rightful claims of African-American citizens did great harm not only to the racial relations of our nation, but also to the idea of local and states rights rooted in tradition, self-governance and respect for local land and culture. Genovese tackled this issue head on precisely because he believed the agrarians of Nashville represented a vital tradition that respected working men and women of small towns and rural communities across the country.

The Agrarians understood that they were on the losing side of history. The great engines of change – industrialism, modernity, consumerism – could not be turned back by fine phrases and poetic sentiment. Nevertheless, they articulated a perspective that would find a constituency as the excesses of the 20th century became more pronounced. They were the precursors of the modern environmental movement, as we have noted, and that movement emerged as a major political force in the 1950s and 1960s. They would also find a hearing in the conservative movement that Buckley launched full force in the 1950s.

Buckley had united three strands of thought into a cohesive, albeit strained, alliance. Prior to Buckley, conservatism was a hodgepodge of ideas with no real constituency. Republican candidates and presidents were generally pro-business, but had no coherent philosophy about the role of government or the manner in which Americans should be properly governed. Russell Kirk, when asked if Eisenhower was a communist, as one John Bircher claimed, responded: he is a golfer. And that is about how conservatives viewed the depth of thought in the mainstream Republican party at the time.

Buckley changed that. First, he brought into the fold prominent anti-communists such as Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham and Max Eastman. He also engaged free marketers who primarily focused on the dangers posed by government power to private enterprise. They were students of Hayek and Von Mises and would later take solace from Milton Friedman. Most interestingly for our purposes, Buckley mobilized traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk, who, while being anti-communist and pro-free enterprise, rooted his concerns more deeply in the soil of American history than either of the other two wings.

If Buckley was the "patron saint" of conservatives, Russell Kirk was certainly the dean of scholarly conservatism. His classic, The Conservative Mind, remains the definitive work on the roots of Western conservatism. Interestingly, despite their collaboration, there is little to suggest that Buckley, apart from their shared religious views and their concerns about the disintegration of personal morality, embraced with enthusiasm the social concerns that preoccupied Kirk.

Buckley spent most of his time in New York, while Kirk was a quiet scholar living in rural Michigan. Buckley was a celebrity, Kirk an obscure historian. Buckley counted as friends some of the most prominent liberals of the age, while Kirk established in Michigan a seminar to help mentor emerging conservative thinkers. Buckley had wit, style, glamour; Kirk was almost sullen at times, a man uninspired by the modern trends with which he was forced to contend. Both men shared a basic decency and mutual respect, but Buckley conversed more easily with free marketers and anti-communists (not to mention liberals) than with traditional conservatives – or so it seemed.

Kirk might have found in James Buckley someone closer to his own temperament. James Buckley, family histories tell us, was actually the more reflective of the two well-known brothers. While Bill happily engaged in games and witticisms, James (whom Bill once referred to as "the sainted junior Senator from New York") took walks in the woods and quietly explained nature to younger members of the Buckley clan.

Kirk would have related. He argued that conservatism was about a great deal more than making the world safe for consumers. And he said as much on a number of occasions, both in lectures before the Heritage Foundation and, perhaps most emphatically, in the very book that conservatives tout as their classic – The Conservative Mind.

And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near suicide, is the end for which providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.
– TCM.

Kirk was so concerned about this issue, in fact, that he brought it up repeatedly in TMC. He challenged the mythologies surrounding the entrepreneurial success story and took on the capitalist wing of the movement when he lamented: "to complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservatism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives." (TCM, p. 199.)

If there were any doubt about Kirk's own view, it is clarified in two important lectures that he delivered in the early 1990s before the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most important think tank in the country. Kirk first celebrated the memory and influence of Donald Davidson, one of the original agrarians. Davidson, Kirk argued, sought to save the American South from the rampant consumerism that had, by the 1990s, degraded American culture in a variety of ways. He stood up against the centralized state, against those who sought to homogenize America and thus rob it of its regional and rural flavor. Davidson and the agrarians generally stood against the marching orders of commercial and state power.

So I do commend to you, ladies and gentlemen, the genuine conservatism of the Twelve Southerners. It is not the only mode of conservative thought, but it is an important mode. The authors of I'll Take My Stand did not propound a rigorous ideology or display a model of Utopia: their principal purpose was to open our eyes to the illusions of Modernism. The Southern Agrarians proclaimed when I was a child that the southern culture is worth defending; that society is something more than the gross national product; that the country lane is healthier than the Long Street; that more wisdom lies in Tradition than in Scientism; that Leviathan is a devourer, not a savior.

In saluting Davidson, Kirk was making a powerful statement on behalf of traditional culture and the regional and local concerns being advocated, by this time, mostly by writers and thinkers who would be called inconsequential or, worse, liberals and leftists. To stand up for local prerogatives, local community, environmental and small business concerns in the days of Reagan and Rush Limbaugh was to risk being marginalized totally within the conservative movement. George Will, who many consider the most important conservative pundit after Buckley, summarized the issue in the mid-1970s when he wrote:

True conservatives distrust and try to modulate social forces that work against the conservation of traditional values. But for a century the dominant conservatism has uncritically worshipped the most transforming force, the dynamism of the American economy. No coherent conservatism can be based solely on commercialism, but this conservatism has been consistently ardent only about economic growth, and hence about economies of scale, and social mobility. These take a severe toll against small towns, small enterprises, family farms, local governments, craftsmanship, environmental values, a sense of community, and other aspects of humane living.
– The Pursuit of Happiness, pp. 191-192.)

Kirk, who led the fight against conservatism as capitalism, tried to measure these values. He could be accused of not always understanding the realities of wielding power in a modern industrial state, but he nevertheless did not abandon his traditionalist approach. How we live and work is important, he suggested. The now over-used cliché, quality of life, was central to his perspective. That is why, in another lecture, he celebrated Wilhelm Roepke, who had been the architect of the post-war German recovery.

Roepke was the principal champion of a humane economy: that is, an economic system suited to human nature and to a humane scale in society, as opposed to systems bent upon mass production regardless of counterproductive personal and social consequences. He was a formidable opponent of socialist and other "command" economies; also a fearless, perceptive critic of an unthinking "capitalism."
– Heritage Foundation lecture.

One can understand why a German forced to live under the Nazi state, including its rampant push for industrialism and modernity — at least with respect to the production of weapons and a military infrastructure — would be wary of any grand government or corporate schemes. Yet, Kirk clearly saw the conservative movement going in a disturbing direction. In both of his Heritage lectures, he reminded his conservative brethren, perhaps Buckley himself, that they were no longer standing athwart history yelling stop, but rather were riding the materialist wave of capitalism, and in doing so were losing touch with the permanent things Kirk spent his life defining and defending.

This transformation within the conservative ranks was vividly underscored during the 1996 presidential election, when Robert Dole won the nomination and teamed up with Jack Kemp as his running mate. Dole, in his nomination speech, appealed to the America of yesterday that Kirk and the agrarians felt had been fatally compromised. He spoke of honor, honesty and a traditional value system that had been besieged in recent years. Like the agrarians and Kirk, Dole rooted those values in a specific place. True, the Kansas prairie he described was as mythical as Oz — and yet myth is compelling precisely because it transcends literal truth and captures the imagination.

Indeed, as Dole described his hometown of Russell, Kansas, you could almost imagine the agrarians leaning over to listen a little more closely: "Like most small towns on the plains, it is a place where no one grows up without an intimate knowledge of distance. And the first thing you learn on the prairie is the relative size of a man compared to the lay of the land. Under the immense sky where I was born and raised, a man is very small . . . and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong."           

Implicit in this is a powerful mythic thread found in the rural critique of industrial and urban culture: the importance of God in nature and of nature in our cultural lexicon.  Dole touched on another agrarian issue — that great power concentrated in federal hands must be viewed with alarm. Well aware of his political awkwardness, Dole sought to make it a virtue by portraying himself as the anti-politician: "I do not need the presidency to make or refresh my soul. That false hope I will gladly leave to others, for greatness lies not in what office you hold, but how honest you are, in how you face adversity, and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places."

The irony of Dole running with Jack Kemp could not be missed. Dole had presented himself as a man rooted in history, in old values, in quiet places forgotten in America's passionate urban landscape. Yet, Kemp had burst upon the scene as the kinder, gentler capitalist, and his issues were interwoven in a modern landscape shaped by corporations and developers: free enterprise, urban renewal, and unlimited economic growth, making him the real heir to Reagan.

It was a fascinating ticket precisely because the two men were so different in style, temperament and even philosophy. And they sought to forge two contrary conservatisms — the rural tradition defended by the agrarians and Russell Kirk, and free enterprise conservatism celebrated by Max Eastman, Milton Friedman and, of course, Ronald Reagan (though Reagan's love of the ranch raised its own contradictions, but more on that later — see Chambers).

Buckley avoided these issues for the most part. Garry Wills noted in Why I am a Catholic that Buckley considered Chesterton's distributionist notions, which sought to temper the capitalist impulse, outside the conservative mainstream. While Buckley admired the great British pundit, he turned to him mainly on matters of faith. This is ironic because respected National Review contributor Michael Novak, a leading proponent of "democratic capitalism," conceded that Chesterton's critique of industrialism was important and should not to be dismissed.

Likewise, two of the intellectuals Buckley most admired, Whittaker Chambers and Malcolm Muggeridge, loved rural life. The great crisis faced by the post-World War II generation, they argued, was spiritual and land represented a profound spiritual connection to freedom. Muggeridge, who was interviewed on Buckley's Firing Line show many times, lived in Sussex, a rural area outside of London. In a video produced as part of the Christian Catalyst series, Muggeridge walked the countryside that surrounded his home and talked movingly about the rural world in which Jesus lived and taught. God is not confined to the church, he suggested, but is found in the creation that transcends human affairs, in the innocence of creatures, in the miraculous interactions of nature.

It was no accident that Chambers, after years of being embroiled in the great ideological struggle of the century (he was a celebrated reformed communist), retreated to a small farm, not far from Gettysburg, where he found a semblance of the peace that had eluded him for so much of his life.

Here I determined to root the lives of my children . . . For I hold that a nation is first of all the soil on which it lives, for which it is willing to die – a soil bonded to those who lived on it by the blood of which a man usually loses a few drops in working any field like Cold Friday.
– Cold Friday, p. 41.

In his essay, "Cold Friday," Chambers assumed a Jeffersonian mantel as he described the fields of his farm, notably the one for which his essay was named. He called Cold Friday a defiant field, with two of its sides too steep for modern farm machines to navigate, and he suggested that this obstinate geography had symbolic meaning — a defense against the great emotional upheavals that had wearied him. Chambers tied respect for his land directly to the fight against collectivist forces: "So I meant Cold Friday to be a base for my children not only against the forces of revolution in the world, but also against the climate of materialism which breeds revolutionists." (CF, p. 45)

This essay and others included in the Cold Friday collection are filled with historical references to the land, to Native American traditions, to the idea that a small piece of land, nurtured with care, was perhaps the safest redoubt for the free individual. Chambers did not live, as he might have, in the power capitals of the world, but in a quiet setting where eternal sounds connected him to deeper understanding.

Spring has come to us again — a spring that I scarcely expected to see. Twice at night the wild geese have passed over. There have been three such flights, since one night I dreamed that I saw hundreds flying overhead, so in the way we hear so much without ever quite waking to its meaning, I may have heard these wild geese honking without waking.
– CF, as quoted in introduction.

All of this underscored the inner struggles that made Chambers such a complex and fascinating character because Chambers – even as he retreated from the forces unleashed by capitalism and materialism — attached himself to capitalism and referred derisively to traditional conservatives and to conservatism itself.  "Conservatism," Chambers argued, "is alien to the very nature of capitalism whose love of life and growth is perpetual change." (Odyssey of A Friend, p. 231.)

Like many enmeshed in modernity but still tied to what Yeats has called "the memory of Nature," Chambers' struggle was symbolic of the great clash between traditional culture and modernity. He conceded that capitalism uprooted our sense of place and thus he rooted his own spiritual survival precisely in a place that he called  "Cold Friday." At the same time, he dismissed as irrelevant those who sought to preserve traditional culture in the face of economic forces that ripped apart communities, destroyed small businesses and tread heavily on the graveyards of our past. He opposed the materialist energies of the Left, but applauded materialism on the Right, even as he acknowledged that the great issue confronting Western civilization was one of spirit and faith, not market forces. (In this respect, he was a precursor to Solzhenitsyn). These contradictions are fascinating because they delineate the deep divisions Buckley sought to unite under the single term conservatism.

Chambers was a man locked in the great struggle of Western survival. His single focus was overcoming the communist threat from the East, and he was pessimistic even in that regard, as indicated by his comment that he had left the winning side (the communists) to join the losing side. When he dismissed the concerns of Kirk or Frank Meyer as "irrelevant buzz," however, he refused to embrace an answer to the most fundamental question he had asked: What in the West was worth saving?

Kirk had an answer, but not one capitalists bound to the engines of material progress wanted to embrace. Traditional conservatives understood that restoration and renewal is as much about community and spirit as it is about economics and profit. Chambers understood this intuitively, but did not embrace it philosophically. He was, as he admitted, more a man in opposition than a conservative.

Buckley, too, seemed at times indifferent to this deeper understanding of nature and self, despite his abiding love of sailing and the ocean. A search of his collected works turns up only a handful of columns that address in a sustained way the issue of the environment or the consequences of capitalism unleashed. Likewise, only a handful of the nearly 1,500 Firing Line shows deal directly with the subject. Rachel Carson, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Theodore Roszak – among the influential ecologists and cultural critics on the environment – barely make an appearance in his collected works, if they show up at all. John Kenneth Galbraith was a noted environmentalist, but he and Buckley barely touched on the issue in their exchanges.

Even so, to the extent that he did focus on the issue, the 1970s marked the high point of his interest, perhaps because his brother was active politically during this period and was himself concerned about the environment. In 1970, only a few years after Rachel Carson burst upon the national scene, Buckley wrote a column called "Conservatism and Ecology." In that piece, he worried more about the cost of cleaning up pollution than about the dangers of not doing so. He wrote: "I (as an individual and as a conservative) deeply yearn for clean air and clean rivers. But I know I cannot have them suddenly and know, moreover, that the cleaning of the environment cannot reasonably take first priority in national attention." (Inveighing We Will Go, p. 282). That same year Buckley acknowledged that pollution had reached a state of crisis that required government intervention.

"I take it as axiomatic that no one has the right to pollute the air I breathe, or the water I drink, and that the latitudinarian habits of a society whose frontier was always bigger than any of us, have finally caught up with us, generating a common revulsion. It is overdue for government to assert its responsibility in these matters." (Inveighing, p. 275)

Still, Buckley retained his skepticism of federally derived solutions even in the face of what had become a national calamity.

"What we need now to worry about is the nature of the great bureaucracy which is inevitably going to build up around the $10 billion national anti-pollution project. As my friend William Rusher so adroitly puts it, how much, after the bureaucrats have taken their share, will actually be left over for the chipmunks." He added: "The trick of course is to lay down general laws, impartially, gradually, and let the enforcement of them be done by the use of private mechanisms, and by mechanisms of the lowest feasible unit of government."

It should come as no surprise that Buckley began to question the direction of those who had embraced the environmental movement considering some who counted themselves among the environmental fold. As one example, take Theodore Roszak, who in his book, Where the Wasteland Ends, wrote: "The world cries out for revolution — for the revolutions of bread, and social justice, and national liberation. Not for a moment do I deny that fact (though my own pacifist and anarchist instincts make me dubious that violent militancy can for a certainty achieve those goals). But it needs the next revolution, too, which is the struggle to liberate the visionary powers from the lesser reality in which they have been confined by urban-industrial necessity."

Serious cultural critics like Mumford, whom Buckley once referred to as an ecologist, must have found Roszak, who worshiped at the altar of Blake, bizarre. After all, Mumford merely wanted industrial society to be more friendly to human communities – bike paths, parks, walking space, green areas, etc. He and Jane Jacobs were committed to development that served the whole community. They were as suspicious of governmental planners as they were industries and commercial enterprises that had a narrow view of a humane and holistic culture. Buckley surely agreed in part. In his run for mayor of New York City he advocated a variety of progressive initiatives aimed at making the city friendly to pedestrians and alternative transportation.

In any case, the issue had hit his radar. Rene Dubos, a French writer and an ecologist, appeared on Firing Line in 1971 with James Burnham, Buckley's ally and fellow editor at National Review. Buckley opened the show by announcing his own prejudices against the environmental position as a political and cultural obsession.

Buckley:  If we're not very, very careful, the ecology is going to go the way of Latin America and the Common Market, i.e., no one will want to hear another word about it. There are reasons for that: exaggerations, ideological profiteering, the old lure of Ludditism. Sometimes it becomes necessary to say meekly — but there is a problem of ecology.

Dubos, who had recently written, So Human An Animal, wanted to address the issue of the environment as it related to livability and human quality of life. In this regard, he followed in the path of Mumford and Jacobs. Buckley allowed Burnham to press the conservative position on the issues and played more the role of mediator.

Buckley seemed surprised when Dubos suggested: "The traditional concepts of ecology do not deal with pollution; that's a very recent problem. Ecology has been a science that has existed for a hundred years now without anybody talking about pollution. The word, ecology, when properly used refers only to the balance of living forms in nature. So the problems of pollution are a very small aspect of the total environmental problem; they happen to be of great concern to some of us . . .."

Dubos went on to discuss suburbanization and the flight from the cities, which has been driven by the desire for livable space but which is itself a major cause of pressure on the environment. Dubos argued, nevertheless, focused on the aesthetic costs — that increasingly children were being raised in the bland, uninteresting suburbs, or in inner cities that were increasingly abandoned and dysfunctional.  Sounding Jeffersonian, he argued that people raised on farms were more successful and healthier because in that environment "one has the wealth of stimuli that comes from nature, the wealth of stimuli that comes from an extremely diversified environment because an operating farm has a multiplicity of environment."

Burnham argued that the city, too, offered stimulation of a positive kind – museums, libraries, architecture, theater. "Isn't it also the case that what happens in return is that you recreate a myth of the countryside. I think in the history of this country that has been very prominent: the myth of the ideal country, and you find it today also in this whole ecology of anti-pollution movement the notion of a pure and unspoiled nature . . . and we get back to it in our dreams, our waking dreams, even when it no longer exists in reality."

Burnham then took a swipe at the assumptions of environmentalism as a cultural movement.

Burnham: I prefer clean water to polluted water and cleaner air to smog-bound air, but on the other hand it really always is a question of how clean and how clean in relation to what social energy and money and resources are going to be used for . . . Human beings have very odd choices. I know many human beings who like to look at the Hudson and the cliffs beyond the Hudson and the Milky Way; there are a great many others who like to drive in automobiles not merely to get somewhere but because the automobile to them is a very important experience . . . they have a territory, a space of their own they feel differently related to. I don't think the automobile would at all spread the way it has if on purely utilitarian grounds of transport but for the psychological and even moral functions it performs. Now you and Dr. Dubus said, and I may think, this is absurd, and he uses the word, absurd, and he uses it a number of times in his most recent book, but still in that sense human beings are rather absurd. And I somehow feel that within a very wide range they should make their choices.

Buckley: What about the function of leadership here? There is or presumably ought to be an aesthetic aristocracy, and one of its continuing responsibilities is to subsidize the symphony orchestras and the ballets and to lead the movement to clean the rivers on the grounds that the kind of positive contamination that might result from pointing to a body of water and saying look, you can actually swim in it, would itself be exciting enough to cause people to take pleasure from it . . .

Burnham: Well, then, in accord with our mode of society and with our political institutions, we who feel things like that should attempt to persuade them to do so and not, at least in my opinion, try to impose these solutions on them which may not correspond with what they want. Now as a matter of fact one of the things that worries me about this whole ecology and anti-pollution movement is the elitism, the anti-democratic trend . . .

* * *

At the close of the show, a young Jeff Greenfield questioned Burnham in what might have been the most relevant exchange of the show. Greenfield raised the issue of industries and corporations that disregarded the public welfare for the sake of narrow profit.

Greenfield: Do you see as a member of the Right, if I can use the term broadly, that there is some justification for the desire to impose restrictions on corporate and technological progress in the name of the environment? Or do you consider that ideologicalizing the whole effort?

Burnham: No, I would however say that to blame the corporations is a foolish approach and one that will not at all work in trying to clear up pollution and to have a better ecological arrangement. After all, (General Motors) is in the business, like most corporations, to make money and can't stay in business otherwise. It has no objection in and of itself to turning out cars with less pollution if they're able to be sold and if it can make a profit doing it.

* * * 

When Greenfield suggested that the automobile industry had downplayed the negative impact of pollution and carbon monoxide, Buckley and Burnham protested that this was ignorance, not malicious intent.  Burnham argued that demonizing industry and technology would not lead to a cleaner environment. Greenfield pressed on.

Greenfield: But it is proper to oppose corporate power when that power extends into harming individuals environmentally.

Burnham: Yes, but it does not automatically follow.

* * *

In 1973, Buckley invited Barry Commoner, director for the Center of Biology and natural systems, to appear on Firing Line to discuss the question: "Is There An Ecological Crisis?" The discussion illustrated the divide between the ecological movement and Buckley's priorities as a free market capitalist and opponent of expanded federal power. His introduction of Commoner underscored the differences between their worldviews.

Buckley: Although the ecological crisis is not the public obsession it was two or three years ago, whatever it is that was then happening to our soil, our skies, our air and our water is still happening – to a greater or lesser degree we hope to establish here today, among other things. Barry Commoner was never a doomsayer in the style of, say, the Sierra Club, but his analysis was nevertheless implacable. He figured we had to spend, in contemporary dollars, about 50 billion per year over the next generation to win back the good graces of the ecosphere . . . 

* * *

Buckley observed that under President Nixon the United States was spending on the environment four times what was being spent at the beginning of his term (Nixon, recall, established the Environmental Protection Agency). Commoner, nevertheless, felt that Nixon had failed to honor his commitment to seriously address environmental issues. He then proceeded to give a familiar litany of environmental challenges: dependency on oil, the failure to enforce certain regulatory requirements (environmental impact statements) and the encouragement of transportation means (trucks) that were inefficient. Buckley asked Commoner to explain why Nixon or his administration had failed to adhere to this environmental agenda, implying there were sound reasons, and then suggested:  "Well, your temptation . . . is to feel that the best way to adjust the situation to meet your own anxieties is simply to tell people what to do and simply to annul the free market decision. Now, if you want to stop people from burning up unnecessary fuel, there's an obvious way to do it which is simply to forbid them to drive their cars except on business; but this being a libertarian society, we tend to resist these easy solutions."

The discussion continued along this path, with Commoner lamenting the state of the environment and Buckley arguing that the response to these challenges should be measured and, as much as possible, rooted in economics, not ideology – that is, one can support good environmental behavior by charging extra for those products that are not environmentally sound. Yet, at times, Buckley could sound precisely like the conservative his brother criticized in his own book, such as when he suggested to Commoner that the earth was a vat or sink into which a certain amount of pollution could be dumped without noticeable impact.

B.: I think you are moralist to the extent that you resist accepting the fact that a certain amount of nitrogen oxides, a certain amount of synthetic fibers, and so on and so forth, can be absorbed without really making anybody uncomfortable except somebody whose aesthetic resentment over this, like yours . . .

C.: What's wrong with aesthetic resentment?

B.: Nothing at all, but it's primarily a moral and subjective point.

C.: No. You have invented something which I'd take a long time to straighten out – this sink, you know, it's not really there.

B.: Of course it's there.

C.: It's just not there.

B.: It's manifestly there.

C.: You, you -

B.: If your grandson pees into the Hudson River and that's the only thing that goes into the Hudson River over the course of that day, it is a substantially pure river.

C.: In your opinion.

B.: But if everybody's grandson does it at the same time, it isn't. It's just that simple.

C.: No, it is not that simple.

B.: The Hudson River will handle a certain amount of stuff.

C.: (Laughing) It's really isn't that simple because, for example, toxins become concentrated and some poor crustacean off in the corner of the Hudson is going to suffer from my grandson's pee. You know? . . . We've got an educational problem here with respect to that sink.

* * *

Commoner would run for president in 1980 and then return to his environmental advocacy work, which included his opposition to nuclear testing (over which he and Buckley debated during the Firing Line episode).

Buckley also did a show in 1968 that included as a guest the renowned anti-animal cruelty activist Cleveland Armory, who also wrote for Saturday Review and TV Guide, among other publications. In that debate, Armory argued against bullfighting and other cruel activities that subjected animals to unnecessary pain. Buckley protested when Armory tried to stretch his thesis – by suggesting, for example, that it was not coincidental that Bobby Kennedy's assassin came from an area of the world that was cruel to animals.

By the 1990s, Buckley was expressing his concern that the environmental movement seemed destined for the fields of political extremism.

"There was a certain sullenness aroused among many conservatives by the orgiastic quality of Earth Day and by some of its principal players. The quality of appreciation shown for the Earth ranged from worship to exaltation. The most conspicuous advocates reminded us of Jane Fonda. And the programs that seem to appeal to them take us back to the days when Professor John Kenneth Galbraith sat so happily in the cockpit of the Office of Price Controls during the war."

Buckley went on to quip that those who seek a clean earth should be advocating for nuclear power, but he failed to account for Chernobyl and Carbon 14, as if these issues were incidental to the debate. He continued: "We are missing, in our struggle to keep the planet habitable, a sense of proportion . . . There is no spot on the beach that one can pay to despoil. But the rodomontade we heard on Earth Day, much of it, was not devoted to making distinctions. It was devoted, instead, to creating Heaven on Earth, and that trip we've all taken before." (Universal Press Syndicate, 4/6/90)

In a 2002 interview as part of CSPAN's American Writers series, Buckley repeated his theme that while he supported environmental concerns he opposed the extremes to which advocates of the environment often went.

"On the environment, conservatives have to make a complete attachment to environmental integrity, but also complete attachment to the movement not to fetishize it. To reorder your life on the basis of the potential damage to one spotted owl is not the way to live. So those are distinctions I believe conservatives need to be instructed by."

Each time he endorsed a pro-environmental concern he also offered a reservation. Indeed, in one of his last Firing Line interviews – the guest was author Peter Huber — Buckley continued on this theme. His opening question, as typical, set the tone: "I begin by asking Mr. Huber if he will dwell for a minute on his cheerful news that an industrial society is healthier and lives longer" than a rural society. Buckley then essentially surrendered the stage to Huber, who for 30 minutes made the case that technology and industry have proven up to the task of containing environmental and ecological dislocation.

Perhaps Buckley's most eloquent statement on the environmental movement was included in his collection of essays, Happy Days Were Here Again, in an essay entitled "A Conservative Agenda." It is worth quoting at length:

The most binding scientific superstition of the 1970s had to do with the ineluctable toxicity of nuclear power. The success of the anti-nuclear-power movement has been the most momentous Luddite extravagance of the century. We need to rub our scientists' noses in the consequences of prolonging our ostracism of nuclear power. To do this requires not only the dissemination of knowledge, but cooperative legal action, such as would immunize nuclear-power producers against legal harassment by ideologues.

In this same connection, we will need to keep our eyes on the metaphysical – yes, metaphysical – implications of the environmental movement. It is essentially conservative to conserve, whether we speak of energy or timberland, elephants or bald eagles. But the conservationist movement, in the hands of some who appear to dominate it, sometimes sounds as though the creation of man was an act of aggression against animal and mineral kingdoms. We know that the regulation of hunting and fishing and mining and timber cutting is prudent and in most cases necessary. But the creeping imperialism of environmentalism and its hardening axioms are moving us in the direction of prohibition against everything from the wearing of fur coats to the use of the gas-powered automobile, a form of fanaticism that lies athwart the natural relationship between man, animal and nature. Against such reductionism conservatives need to contend, by propping up the natural order of priorities while of course remaining sensible to our obligation to preserve the vital organs of our planet.

One can understand Buckley's perspective. As Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb reported in their 1998 book, Trashing the Economy, some 20,000 lawyers were engaged in the business of environmental politics. In the previous two decades, 300 federal laws had been passed and thousands more were enacted on the state and local level. The number of groups and foundations dedicated solely to environmental issues today numbers in the hundreds, minimally, and collectively they have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to wage fights both silly and serious.

That Buckley observed all of this and found it troubling is not surprising; and he was not alone. Greg Easterbrook was ostracized in some quarters because his impressive book, A Moment on the Earth, made a compelling case that the conditions of the planet were not nearly as dire as the professional lobbyists for more regulation and restrictions claimed. He did not help himself when he observed that our first President Bush actually compiled an impressive environmental record but got scant credit from environmental groups dogmatically committed to an anti-Republican position and financially dependant on an anti-Republican constituency. Bush was undercut as well by members of his own staff, Easterbrook reported, in particular Richard Darman who had little interest in the environmental cause.  

Bjorn Lomborg also earned widespread disdain from the left-leaning pro-environment crowd for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he sought to debunk some of the cherished claims of the environmental movement. On a host of issues, from chemicals to clean water to food to life expectancy, we are, as a global community, doing far better than professional doomsayers will concede, Lomborg argued. He suggested that to exaggerate environmental issues was more than an act of bad political faith: "It makes us scared and it makes us more likely to spend our resources and attention solving phantom problems while ignoring real and pressing (possibly non-environmental) issues. This is why it is important to know the real state of the world." (Lomborg, p. 5).

Still, neither Easterbrook nor Lomborg could ignore that real problems exist. Lomborg's chapter on food, for example, dealt with the problems of our oceans in an almost cavalier way – yes, catches are down and fish populations are being destroyed, but thanks to improvements in agriculture the world does not depend on ocean fish as a major source of nutrition. This analysis might give us comfort with respect to starvation, but not with respect to the future health of a planet deeply dependent on the oceanic eco-systems. Nor did his favorable comparisons with the past address the expectations of billions of people who are struggling to survive but are beyond the reach of private or public enterprises. As they understandably pressure the globe for the basics of survival, we are faced with the challenge of trying to manage expectations in the face of dwindling or more expensive resources.

It is perhaps telling that Easterbrook, for some 700 pages, catalogued the environmental upside, but in his closing pages contemplated human beings abandoning earth for the stars. (Might not giant space mirrors, for example, redirect the sun to the polar caps of Mars, thereby making it habitable in the future?) Such fantasies underscore the underlying fear that we will prove unable to bring population, pollution, and environmental destruction under control.

To suggest that all is not dire does not change the harsh realities facing human beings at this stage of our existence. Not even Easterbrook and Lomborg deny some of the harsh realities – the litany, as Lomborg called it. Our oceans are a dumping ground. Natural fisheries are being depleted. Tens of millions of ocean creatures are destroyed every year by crude and brutal fishing practices. (See Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean if you want to weep over the state of our oceans.) Energy and global warming are real problems. We can debate the causes, but we cannot deny the striking evidence being gathered around the globe. Our meat industry is a national scandal, the destruction of wetlands, corals and reefs a pending ecological disaster. That we have started to reverse some of the destructive forces unleashed by industrial society and geometric population growth is hardly an invitation to be complacent or smug.

A few conservatives are starting to get it, among them Matthew Scully (most recently the author of Sarah Palin's acceptance speech), columnist Rod Dreher and the historian Paul Johnson. They have joined T.S. Eliot in concluding that a wrong attitude toward nature suggests a wrong attitude toward God. Scully wrote a scathing book, Dominion, about the cruelties animals are subjected to in our society. Dreher, in his book, Crunchycons, suggested that unbridled capitalism not only destroys the environment, it jeopardizes a holistic approach toward nature that enriches our lives spiritually and psychologically.           

Both Scully and Dreher, by the way, worked for National Review and both have become allies of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer whose collections of essays on the environment, culture and economics have made him one of our great writers and critics.  One need not embrace all of Berry's views (he can sound decidedly leftist on some issues) to concede that he has done a great service to our nation by documenting our tragic addiction to convenience, consumption, waste and greed.

Now to raise these issues in some quarters is to risk being called a wacko or, worse, anti-American. Yet it is difficult to comprehend how a movement that locates its transcendent truths in the mind of a creator could be dismissive of his creation. Jeffrey Hart, long-time editor of National Review, personal friend of Buckley's and an esteemed writer in his own right, noted this contradiction in his impressive book The Making of the American Conservative Mind.

(James) Buckley observed that a species is much more easily destroyed than replaced. He might have urged stewardship and the collective pleasure involved in even the distant existence of the great wild creatures of plain and forest, the loss of which would be an unimaginable catastrophe: the world a strip mall, plus a zoo or two. William Buckley was sympathetic, but warned against the extremism that would protect every snail darter. Surely that was correct. But free-market dogma ignored what Burke called the 'unbought' grace of life, surely a key dimension of the conservative mind.

Buckley seemed of two minds himself on occasion. In 1997, he wrote a sympathetic response to the Kyoto Protocol, suggesting that it has "dealt with very serious problems. Nature isn't able comfortably to assimilate the greenhouse gases the world is merrily programmed to produce." As was his predilection, Buckley sought to contain those harmful emissions not by imposing a rigid regime upon the nation or the world community but by allowing the pricing mechanisms of free economics to play their part. He returned to the theme he annunciated rather clumsily in the Commoner interview, that nature had given human beings a great bin into which it might flush or toss its waste. "But when the bin overflows, there are instant ecological repercussions – for instance, oil on the water, garbage on the beaches, irritating particulates in the air we breathe. What needs to be done is to discourage people from causing that bin to overflow, and the indispensable approach to doing this rationally and within the framework of liberal procedures is pricing policy."  ("Kyoto or Bust," Universal Press Syndicate, 12/12/97)

One could manage pollution best, Buckley argued, by taxing those who exceed acceptable limits as opposed to imposing harsh and punitive restrictions that, as often as not, invite dire economic consequences. He even seemed to endorse the much maligned idea (by conservatives) of a carbon footprint: "If one country uses up less than its allotted share of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, then it has a surplus – which can be sold to a country threatened with excess consumption." Nevertheless, Buckley had by the end of the piece revisited his appreciation of nuclear power as a source of energy that emits no greenhouse gases. (How to dispose of the nuclear waste was not an issue that preoccupied him – and he noted at the end of his column that conservatives, being optimistic, would no doubt find inventive ways around new environmental challenges.)

Though Buckley was hardly a member in good standing in the environmental movement, he deserves credit for dealing with the issue seriously, if infrequently. Too often conservatives today heap scorn upon environmental "wackos" (rightfully so in some instances) but offer little in the way of thoughtful discussion on how to resolve emerging challenges. That is a shame. The debate too often is shaped, on the one hand, by those who portray any passionate concern for the environment and quality of life as half-baked liberalism, and those, on the other, who manufacture panic and consider the eternal combustion engine worse than the plaque.

There is nothing more American or conservative than revering nature and the beauty of the planet while also celebrating individualism and free enterprise, properly exercised. From Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt to Kirk, our nation has been enriched by a healthy respect for nature and the land, and greatly scarred by those who failed to cherish and protect those gifts. Those who bequeathed this inheritance to our generation placed in our care a sacred trust. Those who brutalize and waste this inheritance are breaking faith with future generations and, as Eliot would have argued, God himself.

Bill Buckley sought to bridge the differences between economics and nature, understanding that there are limits to what we can do. About five years ago, I sent Buckley chapters from a book I was writing on this subject and he kindly wrote back that he had shared the chapters with his brother, Jim, and that it was an important issue worthy of serious and sustained discussion. In that spirit, I have tried to address the issue here, knowing that Bill Buckley and other conservatives have not always shared my sense of urgency but confident that he would consider a serious and balanced discussion an obligation of all responsible citizens, conservatives foremost among them.