EDITORIAL: Mystery case: Conservatives v. Conservation

One of the enduring mysteries of American politics is the tendency of so many politicians of conservative bent to oppose conservation.

Conservative and conservation derive from the same root word—conserve—and to conserve treasures of nature is a perfect fit with the conservative ethos of protecting and preserving traditional values.

And yet, in the past few weeks conservative Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature have acted to kill the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program and in Congress voted for crippling cuts in national park funding and attempted to include a provision to sell millions of acres of public lands in the legislation deceptively named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In Madison, the Joint Finance Committee voted to eliminate funding for the Stewardship Program from the state budget, seeming to fulfill the wishes of some members of the committee’s Republican majority to get rid of this remarkably successful conservation program named after Republican and Democratic governors once and for all.

In the past, the JFC was content to merely disable aspects of the program by vetoing funding for individual conservation projects, as when it quashed a grant for Ozaukee County’s Clay Bluff Cedar Gorge Nature Preserve on the objection of a single anonymous member. 

A subsequent state Supreme Court decision put an end to that craven practice. Deprived of that means of hindering conservation efforts, the committee simply removed the Stewardship funding provision from the budget as though the program did not exist.

Hopes for the survival of Knowles-Nelson now rest with separate proposed legislation to provide funding. It’s unclear what the prospects for passage are, though some members of the Republican majority have voiced support for it. Perhaps they have learned of how the program instituted in Wisconsin law in 1989 has protected natural areas, wildlife habitat and fisheries for the recreational enjoyment of the state’s great outdoors and to keep it safe from development by matching state grants with local fundraising. 

In Washington, the Senate passed the so-called BBB bill with a provision that rescinds previously approved national park funding, leaving the National Park Service with a total loss of $1 billion of its $3.5 billion budget. This forced reduction in operating money for the country’s national parks, done without so much as a token gesture to consider its consequences, will take a toll on treasured places owned and loved by the American public.

The funding cut will force the closure of a number of parks, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, and it undercuts the mission of the park system’s rangers, scientists and maintenance workers to protect the parks’ magnificent natural features. Beyond that, it’s an affront to the parks’ owners, the American people, who accounted for most of the 322 million visits to the national parks in 2024 and supported it with $55 million paid in park fees.

Another noxious anti-conservation measure in the BBB bill, a mandate to sell millions of acres of public lands, was removed before the final Senate vote, but only because the chamber’s parliamentarian determined it violated Senate rules.

Pushed by Senate Energy Chairman Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, with notable support from Wisconsin’s ultra-conservative Sen. Ron Johnson, the measure called for the sale of public lands in 11 western states. 

Lee and like thinkers in Congress have long advocated for turning public lands over to the private sector for development, but he came up with a new—and patently ridiculous—rationale for the BBB legislation. Filling those open natural places with subdivisions is necessary to cure America’s housing crisis, he posited.

Such nonsense surely does not fly with the American public. Polling consistently shows large majorities of Americans value their country’s natural areas, whether in designated parks or wilderness, and support public ownership and government protections.

A national poll by YouGov found that 85% of Democrat voters and 61% of Republicans opposed selling public lands.

In Wisconsin, a recent poll commissioned by The Nature Society found that 93% of Wisconsin voters support funding for land and water conservation through the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund. For years, various opinion polls have confirmed that more than 90% of Wisconsinites support funding for the Stewardship program.

The signs of public support for conservation, from citizens of all political persuasions are so robust and numerous that they should be impossible to ignore, yet the anti-conservation conservatives somehow manage it.

Would they ignore them if they came from a sainted hero of American conservatism? Ronald Reagan isn’t here to counsel them, but his words remain.

In a speech at the dedication of the new home of the National Geographic Society in 1984, Reagan spoke of American’s natural landscapes, declaring: “This is our patrimony. This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.”

The words of a true conservative.