One reason the conservation movement has not been
able to get much traction over the years, especially among
Republicans, is that it was invaded, starting back in the
’60s, by what one could call the “Issue Snatchers.” Most of
these Issue Snatchers were chartreuse green. They had other fish to
fry, agendas that came from the pseudoscience of sociology, with
its egalitarian, class war, top-down socialist-sounding
“solutions.”
These new people (unlike most of the golden
oldies like Rachel Carson, Aldo and Starker Leopold, Durward Allen,
David Brower, Ding Darling, Bernard De Voto and many, many more)
had long lists of grievances against the establishment and
entitlement expectations for client pressure groups. We, the
second-generation greens, were not to have civic peace or
conservation of resources unless, first, there was economic
democracy, justice, ethnic balance and an end to poverty, sexism,
racism, hunger and cultural myopia.
The agendas of the
sociologists are so vast they will sink conservation. From the
green standpoint, it is more important to save the pie itself than
to squabble over the size of the slice of pie each of us is to get.
David Tillotson
Lake Mills,
Wisconsin
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Invasion of the issue snatchers.
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