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I do wonder how being environmentally conscious became a liberal value rather than a conservative one. Environmental causes seem to be more in-line with the per

I do wonder how being environmentally conscious became a liberal value rather than a conservative one. Environmental causes seem to be more in-line with the perceived stereotype of an American conservative than an American liberal. Liberals tend to live in cities, where there is very little nature. Conservatives tend to live in rural areas. They are more often farmers and hunters and fishermen. They're more likely to drink unpurified and non-treated water. Surely keeping nature as pristine as we can make it should mean more? If we poison the groundwater, my well becomes useless. If we poison the lakes, I can't fish. If we cut down the forests, I can't hunt. Even though I live in the city now, I grew up on a farm and I consider myself to be a conservationist, and I can't for the life of me figure out how any rural American could feel otherwise. Destruction of natural environments impacts rural America far more than anyone living in a city.

kyralis 7y ago
There are a couple pieces here, I think. 1) Environmental regulations and property rights are frequently viewed as in conflict by the rural population, examples of government reach onto the property owner's perceived absolute rights upon their own land. 2) The view that the wilderness exists to be made use of- which, really, is a view that's quite in line with what the rural population is generally living out. Farms can look beautiful and green from the outside, but they're generally intensely managed little plots of nature, where every year is a fight against Nature's encroachment. 3) A feeling that life is hard enough in those areas and those lifestyles without further restrictions on what you can and can't do, or more work that has to happen just to keep doing the same thing that you've been doing for generations. These are generally not the people who feel like they are (or actually are!) really getting ahead in life, and anything that makes it feel like they've got to run faster on that treadmill isn't going to go over well. I think a lot of city-dwellers idolize the wilderness, it being something that is not at all part of their daily life, to a much greater extent than the rural dwellers who can walk out into acres of forest with no one around practically whenever they feel like it. I'm city to rural transplant who's very much conservation-minded, but it's important to acknowledge where people are coming from, too. These are certainly not the only reasons, nor are they reasons that every rural citizen is going to agree with, but they're certainly some of the reasons that I've encountered.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Good points. Like I said, I grew up on a farm so I certainly understand that rural life is hard and a lot of anti-regulation sentiment comes from that. But lack of regulation often makes life even harder for rural populations. As an example: when I was a teenager a water bottling plant went in a few miles from our farm. Almost immediately our well stopped producing water. We had to get a drilling service to come out and drive our well deeper. There's no regulation in the area on how much water any one property owner can consume which is great for farmers who are just keeping their crops alive but catastrophic when someone comes in to pump that water out of the ground for the sheer purpose of pumping as much water as they can. Logging was big in the area back then too. Very little regulation about logging on your own property, which is great when you need to clear a bit more farmland or keep the wood stove running. But when the property is bought for the specific purpose of clear-cutting, now area farmers have to worry about the wind blowing topsoil away. That's exactly what happened in the Dust Bowl, and it's happening again now. The only reason we haven't had a farming collapse is our fertilizers are so much better now. But fertilizer is expensive, and it's just one more thing farmers have to buy. And when all those trees are cut down, the deer population moves away. So now hunters have fewer chances to harvest during the hunting season. I know a lot of people back home have given up on hunting. I haven't harvested a deer in over five years, and we used to fill multiple licenses per season. Anti-regulation is supposed to make rural life easier. But in effect it really only makes life easier for out-of-town businesses who want to destroy a rural area and leave it decimated for the population who lives there. These should be conservative talking points. This should resonate with rural populations. "Lack of environmental concern from big business is making your already-difficult life even harder." But that message is considered "liberal" and I just don't understand it.
  - crdrost 7y ago
    I mean I have an answer which helps me understand but it is not a particularly “satisfying” answer… the answer basically boils down to this being a mathematical theorem. So you have an election cycle. Each election is a function Polity → Polity, the people who performed the election look at the election issues and they vote and they look at the results and they are changed by that process. A cycle of these will chain a bunch of these together; the time delay between them is a sort of diffusion process in the middle of them. That diffusion is kind of the only way to escape the basic theorem. So there’s a broad set of theorems about these x → x functions called fixed point theorems; under very general conditions repeating one indefinitely causes it to converge to some value which is equal to its input, x = f(x). So the mathematical theorem says that whatever your election process is, your nation will fall into a state where those elections do not change the polity much, except to eliminate any diffusion. It seems then that the fixed point of the “divide the country into seats and run first-past-the-post elections on each seat” looks like this: 1. There are two spineless political parties. By spineless, I mean that they are not actually associated with real deep-held convictions; over long time-scales you will see seismic shifts, such as a “party of Lincoln, freed the slaves” becoming a “definitely favored by white supremacists” shift or so. 2. Each party maintains approximately 50% of the popular vote, and probably 50% of the control of the government. Note that this happens both with gerrymandering (the House) and without (the Senate). 3. Typical people do not belong to one party or the other. People think they are relatively independent and they disagree with “their” parties in many many ways. What makes that party “theirs” is not their identification with that cause, but their abject terror at the policies of the opposite party. Presumably these three trends continue to polarize the nation until an inevitable civil war. One can also predict that, since the casus belli of the civil war was chosen by spineless political parties, after the situation is resolved one way or the other there will be some sort of movement from the losers to forget that casus belli and recast their motives into new lights as the political climate changes—so in a post-slavery America the US Civil War is understood as not being about “slavery” but about “states’ rights to self-determination,” which is not really about white-washing history (the Republicans after all won the US Civil War and would not mind reminding people of it if that were politically expedient) so much as re-stoking the same demonization of the Other that keeps the system going (“those Democrats are part of a dangerous Northerner lineage that dates back to the Civil War and wants to take away all of your rights in the name of improving your life, whereas we in the South prize individual liberties and would never do such barbaric things”).
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Cities are far more environmentally friendly. Just in terms of energy consumption, people in cities save vast amounts of CO_2 by: - having shorter commutes - driving smaller cars, or even... - ...using public transport - using less real estate (lower heating/cooling costs) - living in large, shared houses with better space-to-surface ratios They also protect the environment in the classical, i. e. by not building houses with manicured but dead lawns in it.
Ancalagon 7y ago
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is a reasonable comment and a good question to ask.
krapp 7y ago
I know it goes back at least to Ronald Reagan, and likely has a lot to do with the Reagan Republicans' association of environmental policy with burdensome government over-regulation that interferes with business and personal liberty. That may also have been part of an attempt to repudiate the legacy of Jimmy Carter and the Democrats by polarizing the base against Carter's environmentalism, gaining a power base with business interests interested in deregulation. I might even speculate there is some residual association with the hippie movement of the 1960s. Also, the mockery that Al Gore got from Republicans for his environmental activism more or less cemented anything associated with environmentalism and "climate change" as a "leftist fraud" in the minds of many Americans.
kolbe 7y ago
Devil's advocate: maybe they have the same conservationist attitude you do, but they've seen how bureaucracies operated by non-locals and legislated by corrupt politicians don't result in better conservation? People in cities can look at legislation that seems to make sense to them, and feel like they're protecting the earth. But people in nature see the actual consequences. I lived in the Sierra Nevadas where we have to do absurd things like destroy unauthorized dams that have existed for 150 years[1]. We have to adhere to solar installation regulations, despite getting hundreds of inches of snow that require 400# per square foot of roof strength tolerance, and are covered by snow six months out of the year. We have to live in constant fear of a massive forest fire blowing through our community thanks to our government's approach to fire containment. I admit that Big Oil has seized on this skepticism to push their own environmentally harmful agenda, but not wanting the government to sink its tentacles into rural life is more than just the hypocrisy that you are implying countryfolk have. There are real consequences to past legistaltion they are reacting to. [1] https://mynevadacounty.com/2444/Lake-Van-Norden-Spillway https://mynevadacounty.com/2444/Lake-Van-Norden-Spillway
kevin_b_er 7y ago
Because to be a US Conservative is now more about greed that a "conservative value". It is more about self-interest than selflessness. To be environmentally conscious means someone cannot exploit that environment to profit. The consequences matter for someone else. The lakes are poisioned because it was cheaper to discharge into them than to keep your poisionous runoff. The US Conservatives are currently attacking the clean water act, the clean air act, and the endangered species act only because they interfere with profit and greed. Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by greed.

kyralis 7y ago

There are a couple pieces here, I think. 1) Environmental regulations and property rights are frequently viewed as in conflict by the rural population, examples of government reach onto the property owner's perceived absolute rights upon their own land. 2) The view that the wilderness exists to be made use of- which, really, is a view that's quite in line with what the rural population is generally living out. Farms can look beautiful and green from the outside, but they're generally intensely managed little plots of nature, where every year is a fight against Nature's encroachment. 3) A feeling that life is hard enough in those areas and those lifestyles without further restrictions on what you can and can't do, or more work that has to happen just to keep doing the same thing that you've been doing for generations. These are generally not the people who feel like they are (or actually are!) really getting ahead in life, and anything that makes it feel like they've got to run faster on that treadmill isn't going to go over well. I think a lot of city-dwellers idolize the wilderness, it being something that is not at all part of their daily life, to a much greater extent than the rural dwellers who can walk out into acres of forest with no one around practically whenever they feel like it. I'm city to rural transplant who's very much conservation-minded, but it's important to acknowledge where people are coming from, too. These are certainly not the only reasons, nor are they reasons that every rural citizen is going to agree with, but they're certainly some of the reasons that I've encountered.

freehunter 7y ago
Good points. Like I said, I grew up on a farm so I certainly understand that rural life is hard and a lot of anti-regulation sentiment comes from that. But lack of regulation often makes life even harder for rural populations. As an example: when I was a teenager a water bottling plant went in a few miles from our farm. Almost immediately our well stopped producing water. We had to get a drilling service to come out and drive our well deeper. There's no regulation in the area on how much water any one property owner can consume which is great for farmers who are just keeping their crops alive but catastrophic when someone comes in to pump that water out of the ground for the sheer purpose of pumping as much water as they can. Logging was big in the area back then too. Very little regulation about logging on your own property, which is great when you need to clear a bit more farmland or keep the wood stove running. But when the property is bought for the specific purpose of clear-cutting, now area farmers have to worry about the wind blowing topsoil away. That's exactly what happened in the Dust Bowl, and it's happening again now. The only reason we haven't had a farming collapse is our fertilizers are so much better now. But fertilizer is expensive, and it's just one more thing farmers have to buy. And when all those trees are cut down, the deer population moves away. So now hunters have fewer chances to harvest during the hunting season. I know a lot of people back home have given up on hunting. I haven't harvested a deer in over five years, and we used to fill multiple licenses per season. Anti-regulation is supposed to make rural life easier. But in effect it really only makes life easier for out-of-town businesses who want to destroy a rural area and leave it decimated for the population who lives there. These should be conservative talking points. This should resonate with rural populations. "Lack of environmental concern from big business is making your already-difficult life even harder." But that message is considered "liberal" and I just don't understand it.
- crdrost 7y ago
  I mean I have an answer which helps me understand but it is not a particularly “satisfying” answer… the answer basically boils down to this being a mathematical theorem. So you have an election cycle. Each election is a function Polity → Polity, the people who performed the election look at the election issues and they vote and they look at the results and they are changed by that process. A cycle of these will chain a bunch of these together; the time delay between them is a sort of diffusion process in the middle of them. That diffusion is kind of the only way to escape the basic theorem. So there’s a broad set of theorems about these x → x functions called fixed point theorems; under very general conditions repeating one indefinitely causes it to converge to some value which is equal to its input, x = f(x). So the mathematical theorem says that whatever your election process is, your nation will fall into a state where those elections do not change the polity much, except to eliminate any diffusion. It seems then that the fixed point of the “divide the country into seats and run first-past-the-post elections on each seat” looks like this: 1. There are two spineless political parties. By spineless, I mean that they are not actually associated with real deep-held convictions; over long time-scales you will see seismic shifts, such as a “party of Lincoln, freed the slaves” becoming a “definitely favored by white supremacists” shift or so. 2. Each party maintains approximately 50% of the popular vote, and probably 50% of the control of the government. Note that this happens both with gerrymandering (the House) and without (the Senate). 3. Typical people do not belong to one party or the other. People think they are relatively independent and they disagree with “their” parties in many many ways. What makes that party “theirs” is not their identification with that cause, but their abject terror at the policies of the opposite party. Presumably these three trends continue to polarize the nation until an inevitable civil war. One can also predict that, since the casus belli of the civil war was chosen by spineless political parties, after the situation is resolved one way or the other there will be some sort of movement from the losers to forget that casus belli and recast their motives into new lights as the political climate changes—so in a post-slavery America the US Civil War is understood as not being about “slavery” but about “states’ rights to self-determination,” which is not really about white-washing history (the Republicans after all won the US Civil War and would not mind reminding people of it if that were politically expedient) so much as re-stoking the same demonization of the Other that keeps the system going (“those Democrats are part of a dangerous Northerner lineage that dates back to the Civil War and wants to take away all of your rights in the name of improving your life, whereas we in the South prize individual liberties and would never do such barbaric things”).

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

Cities are far more environmentally friendly. Just in terms of energy consumption, people in cities save vast amounts of CO_2 by: - having shorter commutes - driving smaller cars, or even... - ...using public transport - using less real estate (lower heating/cooling costs) - living in large, shared houses with better space-to-surface ratios They also protect the environment in the classical, i. e. by not building houses with manicured but dead lawns in it.

Ancalagon 7y ago

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is a reasonable comment and a good question to ask.

krapp 7y ago

I know it goes back at least to Ronald Reagan, and likely has a lot to do with the Reagan Republicans' association of environmental policy with burdensome government over-regulation that interferes with business and personal liberty. That may also have been part of an attempt to repudiate the legacy of Jimmy Carter and the Democrats by polarizing the base against Carter's environmentalism, gaining a power base with business interests interested in deregulation. I might even speculate there is some residual association with the hippie movement of the 1960s. Also, the mockery that Al Gore got from Republicans for his environmental activism more or less cemented anything associated with environmentalism and "climate change" as a "leftist fraud" in the minds of many Americans.

kolbe 7y ago

Devil's advocate: maybe they have the same conservationist attitude you do, but they've seen how bureaucracies operated by non-locals and legislated by corrupt politicians don't result in better conservation? People in cities can look at legislation that seems to make sense to them, and feel like they're protecting the earth. But people in nature see the actual consequences. I lived in the Sierra Nevadas where we have to do absurd things like destroy unauthorized dams that have existed for 150 years[1]. We have to adhere to solar installation regulations, despite getting hundreds of inches of snow that require 400# per square foot of roof strength tolerance, and are covered by snow six months out of the year. We have to live in constant fear of a massive forest fire blowing through our community thanks to our government's approach to fire containment. I admit that Big Oil has seized on this skepticism to push their own environmentally harmful agenda, but not wanting the government to sink its tentacles into rural life is more than just the hypocrisy that you are implying countryfolk have. There are real consequences to past legistaltion they are reacting to. [1] https://mynevadacounty.com/2444/Lake-Van-Norden-Spillway https://mynevadacounty.com/2444/Lake-Van-Norden-Spillway

kevin_b_er 7y ago

Because to be a US Conservative is now more about greed that a "conservative value". It is more about self-interest than selflessness. To be environmentally conscious means someone cannot exploit that environment to profit. The consequences matter for someone else. The lakes are poisioned because it was cheaper to discharge into them than to keep your poisionous runoff. The US Conservatives are currently attacking the clean water act, the clean air act, and the endangered species act only because they interfere with profit and greed. Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by greed.