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Trump 47 Delivers Coup de Grace to Conservation

I have been scratching my head for 15 months. Where is Trump 47 leadership on conservation? They are hitting the ball out of the park on energy resurgence and infrastructure, and rebooting both fossil fuels and nuclear, and mining in A++ fashion. Secretary Wright at Energy is a superstar. And I should mention that I am an unabashed Trump supporter, having voted for his candidacy 6 times and written contributions three times.

In February 2026 I spoke with a close Trump advisor who explained to me that "the inner circle does not think conservation plays to the base." One of my board members, a former senior Congressional leader with 40 years' experience, wrote: "Conservation is so far down these guys' list and everything related to the internet is about AI." What follows is an inside-the-tent recommendation for a pivot to restore traditional Republican policies for conservation.

Conservation is root and branch the legacy of TR Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot and one of the foundational policies of successive Republican administrations' success for a century and more. It was resurrected by the Nixon and Ford administrations, giving us the legislative infrastructure for Clean Air, Clean Water, Endangered Species conservation, and the new agencies and programs that have propelled our recovery to a healthy environment in the 21st century. And then we were ambushed by environmental advocates and their obsession with climate change. Therein lies a great difference in philosophy and practical application of conservation policies, because the environmental focus was all about shaking the money tree at stupendous scam levels. Environmentalism is NOT conservation, and over the last 3 to 4 decades, particularly during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations, environmental advocates have destroyed much of the TR, Pinchot, and Nixon legacies for conservation.

The Trump 47 administration could be transformational in restoring Conservation, with capital C, to the apogee it enjoyed under TR and Pinchot, and briefly under Nixon, by embracing policies that catered to entrepreneurship and stewardship as an alternative to crumbling bureaucracies infiltrated by woke environmentalists bent on misguided policies of regulation and acquiring public lands that their pet agencies are incapable of managing properly. Instead, we are on the verge of a mess. Conservation policies have degraded for more than 3 decades. We no longer manage forests. Environmental organizations are the root cause of forest fires through their litigation and prevention of forest management. We no longer recover species; both endangered species and migratory birds are in historic decline, again because of environmental litigation and three decades of regulatory policies and climate obsessions.

So let's wind back the clock and peel the curtain of history and go backstage to see the philosophical and policy underpinnings of conservation beginning with TR Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. In the interest of transparency, I am a distant relative of Pinchot. His mother was Mary Eno, my great grandfather's sister. Gifford's younger brother was Amos Eno Pinchot and my father knew both Gifford and his brother Amos well, and visited them during the 1930s and 1940s. Gifford Pinchot was the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and he contributed to and ghosted many of Roosevelt's speeches on conservation policy, so let us start with him. Writing in his book, The Fight For Conservation, Pinchot states:

"The central thing for which Conservation stands is to make this country the best possible place to live in, both for us and for our descendants. It stands against waste of the natural resources which cannot be renewed; it stands for the perpetuation of the resources which can be renewed, such as the food producing soils and the forests; and most of all it stands for an equal opportunity for every American citizen to get his fair share of benefit from those resources, both now and hereafter" (p.79).

Pinchot reaffirmed his Principles of Conservation in his THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION:

"The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development" - Trump leaders take note!

"In the second place conservation stands for the prevention of waste." Sierra Club take note of the millions of acres of wasted forest you have caused!

"The third principle is this: the natural resources must be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many, and not merely for the profit of a few...Conservation means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time" (ibid, p. 42,44,46,48).

With regard to the insane forest policies since the Clinton administration, whose NW Forest Plan put 80,000 people out of work on behalf of the spotted owl and decimated NW rural communities across CA, OR, WA, ID, and MT, in Fight for Conservation, Pinchot wrote:

"In a word, when forests fail, life of the average citizen will inevitably feel the pinch on every side. And the forests have already begun to fail as a direct result of the suicidal policy of forest destruction (Thank you Sierra Club, NRDC, CBD!!) which the people of the United States have allowed themselves to pursue" (ibid, p.17).

Pinchot was twice elected Governor of Pennsylvania and he was an astute politician, writing:

"It seems to me that of all the movements which have been inaugurated to give power to the conservation idea, the foresight idea, there is none more helpful than that the women of the United States are taking hold of the problem" (ibid, p.104).

I conclude with his statement that:

"Conservation is the most democratic movement this country has known for a generation. It holds that the people have not only the right, but the duty to control the use of natural resources, which are the sources of (our) prosperity" (ibid, p. 82).

In his Presidential Message, 1972, Nixon quoted Roosevelt and Pinchot:

"At the dawn of the Twentieth Century, almost as a voice in the wilderness he loved, President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed an environmental ethic for America. He said: 'I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use the generations that come after us.'"

Pinchot appended:

"To protect ourselves and our children against wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by actual destruction of such resources or by MAKING THEM IMPOSSIBLE OF DEVELOPMENT HEREAFTER!"

At his 1908 Governors Conservation Conference, TR Roosevelt said:

"We want to see a man own his farm rather than rent it, because we want to see it as an object for him to transfer in better order to his children."

Today one of our greatest threats to natural resource perpetuation is intergenerational transfer. The average age of farmers and ranchers is well past 60 years, and the average age of forest owners is past 70 years, and our current federal agencies are oblivious to this prospect and threat.

A subtle difference between the Roosevelt and Pinchot vision of conservation, which differentiates their clarity of spirit from the policies of recent Democratic administrations of Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, was elucidated by Pinchot:

"One of the great reasons why President Roosevelt's administration was of such enormous value to the plain American was that he understood what St. Paul meant when he said: 'The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.' To follow blindly the letter of the law, or the form of an institution (i.e., Democratic regulatory policies), without intelligent regard both for its spirit and for public welfare, is very nearly as dangerous as to disregard the law altogether. What we need is the use of the law for the public good, and the construction of it for the public welfare" (ibid, p.25).

Note the emphasis on use of natural resources. Roosevelt/Pinchot would be applauding Trump's energy resurgence and the rollback of forest roadless policies and the reapplication of forest management and mining resurgence. Note also the word preservation is not spoken, nor is wilderness. Environmentalists and their Democratic leadership remoras changed the lexicon for conservation to preservation and regulation starting with the Carter administration in 1976. Mark Dowie, author of LOSING GROUND (MIT Press, 1995), in an NRDC dialogue in 1995 noted:

"Every now and then I find words in our discourse that I recommend be suspended for maybe 5 years or so. 'Paradigm' is one. I face the same problem with 'Sustainability.' They get used over and over again, in ways that make them more ambiguous and less easy to understand. I'd like to close by suggesting that we suspend the word 'Environmentalism' from our discourse for a while."

Please make it a long, long while!

During the Nixon administration, the assembled leadership team were all devotees of the Roosevelt/Pinchot philosophies and traditions: Russell Train and Bill Ruckelshaus at the newly created EPA; at Interior: Secretary Rogers Morton, Deputy John Whittaker, Nat Reed, Royston Hughes, and Jack Horton were all progressive Republicans the likes of which we have not seen since.

I have always found it interesting that Aldo Leopold, the patron saint of most environmental organizations and elite academia, is always quoted for his Sand County Almanac and as an early advocate of wilderness areas, but the centrality of his philosophy and the message emphasized in his writings underscores the importance of private ownership and stewardship by private landowners, not expanding the public sector. In his 1934 paper CONSERVATION ECONOMICS he wrote:

"Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private land owner who conserves the public interest."

In his RIVER OF THE MOTHER OF GOD he wrote:

"The geography of conservation is such that most of the best land will always be held privately for agricultural production. The bulk of responsibility for conservation thus necessarily devolves upon the private custodian, especially the farmer" (p.22).

A few years ago Drew Slattery put his finger on this pulse, writing in the Farm Journal (11 Oct. 2021):

"Before they put their boots on in the morning, farmers and ranchers are humans first. If we want to empower our nation's agricultural system to be more regenerative, sustainable, equitable, and inclusive, then we are talking about empowering them to do so."

So let's draw some conclusions: first, conservation was incubated by a Republican administration under TR Roosevelt, who made it a national policy and who emphasized the use and conservation of natural resources, a policy prescription for utilitarian conservation. Roosevelt was an avid hunter; Pinchot birthed forestry, both commercial and as a foundation for the conservation of lands and waters in the West and for rural development through the forest products industry. Conservation was viewed hand in glove as utilitarian, and humans were integral components of the equation, not preservation, not wilderness

"untrammeled at hand of man."

The Nixon administration picked up this gauntlet to address modern conservation issues such as pollution, contaminants, and endangered species. Those laws and structures are still foundational to our body politic. Trump 47 is bringing the spirit back to natural resource use through energy security emphasis, but so far it has been neglecting the conservation side of the equation for our farms and forests and for stemming recent massive migratory bird declines, and our inability to recover endangered species.

Back to the statement that the Trump inner circle does not think conservation plays to the base. The key constituency for conservation today are farmers, ranchers, forest owners, and hunters and fishermen. The key actors on the stage for Trumpian conservation are people, humans in the MAGA constituency. In his biography of John Muir, The American Conservation Movement, author Stephen Fox wrote:

"Conservation began as a hobby and became a profession...The early history of the movement returns again and again to this simple change of such complex implications...embarrassed by its sentimental origins, conservation aimed to be a science" (p. 107).

But it was not science. The jump from human focus, people on the land, to science brought policy degeneration. Both biology and ecology are recent additions to academic sciences appearing and formalized in the last 100 years as accredited curricula. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the evolution of conservation morphing into environmentalism first on the back of pollution issues, then gaining steam and propulsion with the climatista thrust, the human element of conservation got lost in the detritus. Climate proponents, from Al Gore and his legions who embraced hockey sticks and garbage-in-garbage-out computer models, were later demonstrated by Pielke and others to be a perverted embarrassment which has concocted science to underpin their agenda. Environmentalists and the media have made a mockery of science, peer review, and public disclosure and transparency. The eclipse of the human element and utilitarian conservation of Roosevelt/Pinchot and successors disappeared behind the veil of climate change advocacy for 4 decades. Open the veil, pull back the curtain and you see that today ranchers are better grassland managers than any federal agency; and private forest companies and private forest owners are better managers than the U.S. Forest Service or Interior's BLM, and they are not subject to environmental litigants and their abuse of our judicial system. These folks are a core constituency of Trump's base. Most state wildlife agencies are part of the Trump base. The small businesses (forestry consultants, veterinarians, real estate appraisers) are all components of the Trump base. Today environmentalism is driven by metropolitan and suburban constituencies. Rural America is MAGA country. Rural America supports our energy resurgence as two of the three annual inputs for farm success come from oil and gas: fuel and fertilizer. As I write today, I wonder where and when USDA and Interior will turn the knob to focus on conservation. I close with a final question: where is Don Jr.? He understands this equation. Please speak to your Dad.