Republicans once understood the need to protect the environment but now, they cheer ‘drill, baby, drill’

Few people remember Richard Nixon’s presidency fondly. He was a fierce partisan who kept an “enemies list” and conspired to cover up the circumstances of the Watergate break-in during his 1972 campaign for re-election. Had Nixon not resigned in the summer of 1974, he certainly would have been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate on a bipartisan vote.

However, Nixon’s policies on domestic issues would classify him as a moderate Republican by today’s standards. This is especially true with regard to environmental policy. The years from 1969-74 were a time of environmental awakening, with the very first Earth Day observances and the bipartisan passage of landmark environmental legislation including the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the establishment of Superfund, designed to clean up dangerously polluted sites across the country. 

One crucial piece of environmental legislation that Richard Nixon signed was the Endangered Species Act, which became law 50 years ago in 1973. Under this visionary law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was itself established in 1970, has the power to take remedial action to protect a species, once it is designated as threatened or endangered.

Our national bird, the bald eagle, nearly went extinct in the United States, primarily due to the use of DDT. Significantly, bald eagles remained fairly plentiful in Canada, where there was less DDT contamination. The bald eagle has been a prominent endangered species success story, as its population has recovered, and it was delisted in 2007.

Similarly, the peregrine falcon was one of the initial species that earned protection under the act, also largely due to the threat of DDT, which had been exposed as a key environmental hazard by Rachel Carson in her landmark book “Silent Spring.”

The peregrine made a spectacular comeback and was delisted in 1999. 

Other endangered species continue to struggle. Here on the Great Plains, a small minnow known as the Topeka shiner was listed in 1998. Hopes for its restoration depend on restoration of streams that have been degraded by industrial agriculture.

The monarch butterfly has experienced a drastic decline in population, more than 75% since the year 2000, largely due to the loss of critical habitat. Homeowners can give monarchs (seen above in a public domain photo posted on wikimedia commons) a boost by planting milkweed. Many pollinators are currently endangered, perhaps even the once ubiquitous bumblebee.

In contrast to the Nixon years, environmental and conservation issues today tend to be starkly partisan. Democrats, from President Biden on down, assert the need to wean our society off fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy in an effort to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Republicans reflexively claim that human-caused climate change is a “hoax” and champion the expansion of fossil fuels, with crowds at Trump rallies chanting “drill, baby, drill” in defiance of the prevailing science.

The right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has sharply limited the EPA’s ability to protect our water resources, holding that wetlands cannot be federally protected unless they have a continuous surface connection to a body of water like a river or lake.

Our opportunity to protect the natural environment for our children and grandchildren is diminishing. The Endangered Species Act is an extremely useful tool to that end, since a precipitous decline in the populations of bald eagles, Topeka shiners and monarch butterflies can serve as a “canary in the coal mine” that alerts us to larger threats to the environment.

Much of our food supply depends on the survival of pollinators. Protection of domestic water supplies, from tar sands pipelines or from mining projects, is vital to our survival. While we celebrate the tangible accomplishments of landmark environmental legislation over the last 50 years, a renewal of bipartisan cooperation to protect our natural environment would certainly be welcome. 

Jay Davis is a retired Rapid City attorney