"The Specter of Environmentalism": Wilderness, Environmental Politics, and the Evolution of the New Right

Abstract

In 1982 conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives released internal re port titled Specter of Environmentalism. Coming on the heels of Ronald Reagan's landslide election in 1980, the appointment of James Watt to the Department of the In terior, and, above all, growing frustration with environmentalism, the Republican Study Committee's report reflected a new conservative opposition to the modern environmental movement. It described environmentalists as extremists who posed a growing threat to the orderly development of the nation's resources. It warned that environmentalism was not just about the environment anymore; it was about an entire outlook of broad politi cal and social affairs. And it cast environmentalism in the keywords of a culture war: it was the rallying point for liberals, revolutionaries, and the counterculture. The report concluded that challenging environmental reform offered a political opportunity for the Republican party. Just a decade after Richard M. Nixon had signed into law the legisla tive foundations of the modern environmental regulatory state, the Republican party saw political advantage in opposing efforts to increase protection of the environment, specifi cally, expanding and cumbersome array of federal environmental regulations. It was a strategy that played particularly well in the American West, where citizens, local and state government officials, and their political allies in Congress had grown increasingly angry at what they described as the environmentalists' War on the West.1 The modern American environmental movement has been a broad and varied affair?