Give Newt a chance

All he is saying is that conservatives can be green, and with some good ol' know-how, America can lead the world out of its environmental troubles.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Books, Al Gore, Environment, Newt Gingrich, Global Warming, Katharine Mieszkowski, Books Features, Salon Conversations

Nov. 10, 2007 | Pop quiz: What beloved American politician declined to enter the race for president to champion the environment? That's right: Newt Gingrich! The icon of American conservatism, the former speaker of the house, the co-author of the Contract With America has a new contract out; this one's called "A Contract With the Earth." It's a slim volume that serves as an inspirational green polemic for the sort of conservative who usually associates the word "environmentalist" with all that's abhorrent. Gingrich wants to convince his conservative readers that deep down, they can be green too.

Co-authored with Terry L. Maple, president of the Palm Beach Zoo and a professor of conservation at the Georgia Institute of Technology, this Contract is pro-God's green earth, waxing lyrical about tigers and the volcanic mountain forests that are home to the world's remaining mountain gorillas. Yet in taking on the world's environmental problems, the authors don't rail against coal-fired power plants, belching tailpipes or other blights upon the landscape. They reserves their ire for the classic Gingrichian scourges: regulation, taxation, litigation and big government.

Gingrich and Maple contend that those on the right -- or the "mainstream" as they dub it -- must offer their own strategy for repairing the planet, which goes beyond what those tree-hugging greens have proposed. The strategy the authors outline, in short: forget the stick, embrace the carrot. To fight global warming, they argue that governments should offer tax incentives to spur companies to stop pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and create billion-dollar prizes to inspire inventors to innovate our way to a clean energy future. In this blue-sky vision, great American entrepreneurs, not regulators and Washington bureaucrats, much less Al Gore, will protect the planet for future generations.

For those with long memories, it won't be a shock to hear Gingrich beat the drum for the environment, albeit in his free-market-lovin', tax-deploring way. Before Gingrich was a member of Congress, he taught an environmental studies class at West Georgia College. In his early years in Congress, he was known as a green conservative. By the time he became speaker, his Contract With America drew outrage from the likes of the Sierra Club for striving to undermine environmental, health and safety protections, by attempting to cripple the federal government's power to regulate. Gingrich also inspired the wrath of some conservative think tanks for defending the Endangered Species Act. In a recent interview, Gingrich told Salon that he has always been a dedicated environmentalist.

Do you call yourself an environmentalist?

Yes.

What do you mean by that?

Somebody who believes that the environment is part of our heritage, and we have an absolute obligation to try to maintain it, and develop it, and sustain it. And somebody who has reverence for the extraordinary complexity that God has created in the natural world.

Do you think that we should preserve the environment primarily for economic reasons or moral ones?

First of all, I don't think that you preserve the environment. The environment is constantly changing, constantly evolving. But I think that you want to nurture the environment and protect the environment from undue damage largely for moral reasons. It's part of our quality of life, and part of our relationship to a larger world. We ourselves are diminished when the environment is diminished.

What do you think are the most important environmental issues today?

My highest focus is on biodiversity because if you follow strategies that maximize the health of plants and animals on the planet, you've almost certainly got a very healthy environment in general. Second, there is a significant challenge in carbon-loading of the atmosphere, and third, there is a tremendous challenge with water around the planet, and how to develop it as a renewable resource, and how to protect it.

Who do you think is to blame for these problems?

The human race. We have been very, very successful at using resources to make our lives longer, healthier, wealthier, and with greater choices. One of the side effects has been that we've had a bigger and bigger impact on the environment as we've grown more and more capable, particularly in manufacturing and agriculture. In the last 200 years, our capacity to have an impact has grown dramatically. Remember that people were clearing parts of Africa as early as 50,000 years ago with cutting and burning techniques.

So we've always been impacting our environment?

Well, we're a part of our environment, just as army ants, locusts and other organisms are. We're just a remarkably powerful part of our environment.

You write: "Free enterprise is not the enemy of the environment; it is the engine that will drive promising alternatives to failed practices." Yet isn't free enterprise, unfettered by regulation, at the root of some of those failed practices? And if free enterprise is going to solve those problems, why hasn't it done so already?

First of all, free enterprise creates wealth better than any other system. And wealth has been a key factor in the rise of the conservation movement. It was wealthy Americans who founded the New York Zoological Society to save the bison. It was wealthy Americans who founded the Audubon Society to save birds. I think that poor people tend to eat the organisms around them. It takes pretty wealthy people to decide that they can afford national parks. So there's a certain virtue to creating wealth.

Second, if you were to look at the history of destroying the environment, you'd have to argue that it was in fact state-owned industries in the Soviet empire that were far more destructive on a routine basis than most capitalism. And third, I don't know of anybody who argues for unregulated free enterprise. I'm a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. I like the fact that the government requires that I have clean water to drink no matter what restaurant I walk into anywhere in America.

When you were in Congress, what did you do to protect the earth?

Everything from helping pass the Clean Air Act in 1990 to working to save the Endangered Species Act and the Rhinoceros and Tiger Fund. If you look at the totality of my involvement, I've been consistently concerned about the environment going back to 1971, when I taught in the second Earth Day, and to the mid-'70s, when I was the coordinator of environmental studies at West Georgia College.

Do you think that the Contract With America was good for the environment?

I don't think that the environment was a central focus of the Contract With America. I don't think that it was bad for the environment. I don't know of a single thing in the Contract that was bad for the environment.

Didn't it promise to cut the the Environmental Protection Agency's budget and curb its ability to regulate?

If you look at some of the things we were opposed to at the time, we were probably right. But I don't think that Washington is the center of all knowledge. I very much like the work being done, for example, by the Sand County Foundation in Madison, Wis., which works on how do you get local solutions.

By the way, let me give you an example. There was a period where we had a regulation that managed creosote in telephone poles with an estimated cost of $7 trillion per life saved. Now that verges on utter irrationality and again made perfect sense to the regulators.

Do you think that the environment would be in better shape today if Al Gore had been president?

I think that's unknowable. Remember that it was under Clinton that the Senate voted 95 to 0 not to endorse Kyoto. If you go back and read Gore's last great radical document before his movie, which was his book about the earth, it has statements in it that are fairly hard to take seriously.

Such as?

That the internal combustion engine was the most dangerous development of the 20th century, something which requires you to look past Hitler, Stalin and Mao. In a way, that's kind of breathtaking.

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