Can Conservatives Go Green?

Clare Ath always loved the outdoors. The summer after her freshman year of college, she got a job as a backpacking guide in Colorado, planning and leading camping trips in the Rocky Mountains. Ath noticed that the people she encountered in that environment tended to be secular and politically progressive. The experience made her wonder if there was a place for people like herself, a conservative Catholic who was passionate about the outdoors. Now, a decade later, this mother of four is cofounder of the new nonprofit Vita Et Terra, which is part of a growing conservative environmental movement that sees more humans as a solution, not a problem. 

That message is resonating with young conservatives who don’t connect with left-wing environmental messaging but still care about the planet. Danielle Franz, a self-identified conservative and CEO of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), which has over 100,000 members across the country, says her organization has succeeded by branding itself as “a new kind of environmental movement” aimed at mobilizing college students and young professionals on environmental issues. Franz sees environmental stewardship as logical for conservatives to pursue. 

“I think it’s important for conservatives to be active in conservation because it is such a natural extension of our worldview,” Franz told me in an interview. “It’s this sort of underlying stewardship ethic that conservatives have that says we have a responsibility to the things that are entrusted to our care.”

Franz writes frequently about the blessings of motherhood and outdoor living in America. Her social media is peppered with photos of her young son running around outdoors, sporting jumpsuits with American flags and tiny Birkenstock clogs. And although she was raised in a progressive family, Franz says her commitment to independent thought—and her dad’s encouragement of the same—eventually led her to the political right.

This background makes her a particularly effective advocate for an approach to ecological stewardship that reflects conservative values. In September, Franz published an op-ed titled “Why I Don’t Worry About My Kid’s Carbon Footprint,” pushing back against the small but vocal group of people who are choosing not to have children because of their fears about ecological catastrophe (or even—in at least one extreme case—terminating pregnancies out of climate anxiety). 

The mainstream environmentalist crowd has appeared to embrace much of this anti-human, anti-family ideology. A recent article published in the journal Sustainable Development observed that “the past century of massive increases in human population and resource use has seen many undesirable environmental effects.” The solution to this problem? “Slowing and gradually reversing population growth” to achieve a global population of 4 billion by the year 2200. (The authors euphemistically suggest that this could be accomplished by “fulfilling women’s and couples’ unmet needs for reproductive health services and by improving girls’ education opportunities.”) 

The idea that birth control and abortion are the best ways to combat climate change isn’t confined to the fringe of the environmentalist movement. The late feminist activist Gloria Steinem said in a 2017 interview that “systematically forcing women to have children they don’t want or can’t care for” is “the fundamental cause of climate change.” 

Whether it is a response to climate change or not, it is true that Americans are having fewer children. A recent report from the Institute for Family Studies showed that the total fertility rate in the U.S. has dropped below 1.6 children per adult woman—much lower than the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain our current population.

Such a focus on whittling down the population is at odds with the conservative vision of human flourishing. Compare left-wing environmental messaging with what comes from groups like ACC and Vita Et Terra, and the difference is stark. You’re much more likely to encounter a word like “stewardship” coming from the latter.

The notion of stewardship also came up in a conversation I had with E. Calvin Beisner, another conservative conservationist. As he told me: 

We can’t really preserve nature. We only preserve whatever state we find it in… Stewardship, I think, is the best term, because what it means is that we’re acting as God’s representatives to enhance the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors.”

Beisner founded the Cornwall Alliance in 2005 as a network of Christian scholars engaged in research, education, and advocacy on the topics of environmental stewardship and economic development. Today, the group’s outreach primarily takes place at homeschool and worldview conferences across the country, where Beisner and his team seek to educate students and their families on the biblical ethics of creation care.

Beisner explained that there are two primary approaches to environmental policy: conservation and preservation. The former, which focuses on protecting areas and conserving them for human use and enjoyment, was gradually displaced by the latter, which seeks to completely separate parts of nature from human interaction. Beisner considers this approach flawed. Conservative environmentalists are much more likely to align with Beisner and consider tradeoffs and nuanced solutions than their left-wing counterparts. 

This is similar to how Franz described ACC’s approach, which basically involves two interconnected lines of effort: promoting environmental stewardship and championing energy development. “We tend to think of policy in different buckets. We have our conservation bucket, and we have our energy bucket, and there’s a lot of things that flow from those buckets,” she said. As an example, promoting technology to produce clean nuclear energy comes from the energy bucket, while active forest management belongs in the conservation bucket.

The influence of these sorts of groups appears to be growing on the right, with ACC in particular finding a niche for itself within Republican circles. In 2021, the organization joined forces with Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), at the time a U.S. representative, to found the Conservative Climate Caucus, which aimed to educate GOP lawmakers on conservative approaches to environmental policy. Earlier this year, Energy Secretary Chris Wright took part in ACC’s Energy Freedom Tour—intended to tout “reliable, affordable, and clean American energy” to college students—alongside Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. And according to Franz, the group has also helped with other executive and legislative efforts: “We’ve been very involved with the President’s Make America Beautiful Again executive order, the Great American Outdoors Act, all those types of things.”

Although much of ACC’s advocacy is tied to politics, Franz hopes to eventually see the climate issue become less polarized. She also hopes to see conservatives put forward a message of optimism that contrasts with the “doom and gloom” of the mainstream climate change narrative. “Yes, there are environmental problems,” she concedes, “but we know how to solve them or we can figure out how to solve them.” And if the right can “lead with the solutions,” Franz believes, it may find that the environmental issue “is actually an opportunity to grow the conservative movement.”

Over at Vita Et Terra, Ath has launched an extensive messaging campaign to combat the idea that having babies and protecting the environment are at odds. The message she hopes to convey is that human life is not a problem to be solved, but a gift to be protected. Environmental policies that treat the human population as a threat to nature are out. Environmental policies that make the earth a cleaner, safer, better place for people to live are in. “We inherit the Earth first from God and then from our ancestors,” Ath wrote in one op-ed. “It is our obligation, then, to hold the Earth in trust for our children.”

Ath believes that conservatives should be eager to talk about environmental policy and the impact it can have on future generations. Because, as she told me, “There’s no one who should care more about the earth than pro-life people and parents and families.”