And of course, Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.  Not only that, he chose as its director such conservationist conservatives as William Ruckelshaus and Russell Train.

The latter has, of corse, emerged as a strong Kerry adherent.  Train and Ruckelshaus (who’s still gamely trying to believe that Dubya is a Republican) are both mentioned in this recent column from the Seattle P-I.

Damn, I’m only batting .500 on the word course.

You sure you didn’t mean “gorse,” as in the prickly bush?

I’ve always found that conservatives in the political sense see no dichotomy in tossing conservation in the “keep to the old” sense out the window.  If they were true to the language, they’d never want to strip-mine, log, dam, or do anything else which would harm the pre-existing environment.

That, of course, implies that they understand the language.  Many may, but there are a bunch who are strictly Neanderthal or at best Cro-Magnon.

Somewhere along the way, I think something changed. When I was growing up my parents were close friends with a couple who were also very dear to me. They were socially conservative, politically conservative, and quite devoutly Baptist. Both were also committed conservationists...the man also having spent his life working in the conservation field. Through them I developed an early appreciation of the natural world, life cycles of creatures great and small, and our responsibility as stewards of this planet.

They were conservative in their lifestyle, though not because of lack of means. And generously charitable with both time and tithe.

From them I learned about birds and bugs and plants and even the stars. To them it was all God’s creation to be preserved, treated with the respect due of such a gift, and handed back in better shape than they found it.

Now, that, to me, is an old-style conservative. But somewhere that became a liberal viewpoint.

But I don’t really understand why such a world view has to be either liberal or conservative.

I think that the current so-called conservative attitude of wantonly plundering the earth is quite extremist, greedy, and self-serving. That’s not conservativism.