CHAPTER 9

Conserving What We Have

Growing up in the country, I didn’t have to go on a field trip or watch some documentary on TV to know that the natural world around me was special. Nobody had to explain that to me. I learned it on my own.

I received my education on the natural world from the creek beds and tree branches, the open fields, and cloistered valleys. Some of my earliest memories involve my cousins and me running free in the woods where my family lived—as elementary schoolers! We used to wake up in the mornings, eat breakfast, and pack bags full of water, compasses, Band-Aids, snacks, and pocketknives and set out deep into the woods on the hunt for the elusive Bigfoot. Sometimes we’d get lucky and come across a doe. Once we came across a copperhead and expertly navigated around it, as we could identify poisonous snakes and berries, and we knew not to eat mushrooms without asking Grandpa about them first. Sometimes we chalked tree trunks as we walked through the woods to note something of interest in the area, like a hidden cave or animal den. The creeks and clearings in the rolling hills of southern Missouri served as our classroom and playground. We’d dash through the woods and out into a sun-soaked meadow, playing freeze tag, dodgeball, or our made-up game called simply “war,” where we cousins would divide and wage combat with one another all over Grandma and Grandpa’s front yard—all games surely dismissed by today’s progressive parents as too violent or reminiscent of actual combat. We’d go until our little legs simply ran out of juice and we collapsed, happy and exhausted, into the grass. Our only regret was killing Grandma’s weeping willow, an old, enormous tree that once occupied most of her front yard. That poor tree endured numerous children climbing up its trunk and swinging on its branches as we pretended we were Tarzan.

Our family used to take us to Black River, where we would congregate on the riverbank. The adults would listen to music, drink beer, and make up for lost time together; we kids would build elaborate holding systems in the sides of the riverbank for all of the tadpoles and crawdads we caught. We’d examine the tadpoles at various stages of their development; some had leg buds, some had full-on legs, some had neither. We grouped them accordingly. After a long day at the river we’d pile into the back of my uncle’s pickup truck (no seatbelts!) on the way back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Towels draped over our shoulders, drinking Capri Suns, the wind drying our hair as we traveled through the lush green farmland and the sun’s rays waned over the hills; sometimes we’d lie in the back of the pickup’s bed and see who could find the most imaginative shapes in the clouds. We’d fill our lungs with good, clean air—air somehow never tastes better than it does when you’re young and alive and living in God’s country. That, that was joy. Somehow I knew it then, that moments like these would grow scarcer as I grew older. The sky would fade to orange and purple, and as the first shadows cast themselves across our faces, we’d get the message that the world was sending and get up to head home, where Grandma always had a hot meal and bath waiting. The memories of my childhood are tinted with a golden eighties hue, like the dying sun at the end of a long day at the river.

One of the simplest and most brilliant books ever written is Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! I bought this book for the first time to read to my toddlers, and the last lines got to me. It’s opener there in Flyover Nation, in the wide-open air.

Throughout this book I’ve been arguing that most of the beliefs held by the people who run this country have no basis in reality. Geography created their ignorance. No issue taps into this divide so clearly as our feelings about the environment. There are people who would sneer at these sorts of recollections. They might dismiss them as “quaint” and “provincial” as they huddle in their corner of Starbucks or sit crammed on a crowded subway car. I pity them. I pity that they never knew such unencumbered freedom in their youth. I pity that they’ve never known such happy simplicity. I can’t imagine my childhood any differently. Let them dismiss away. Deep down, they’re probably just jealous. (And if they’ve bought this book, the joke’s on them anyway.) But anyone who comes from the land of real America knows exactly what I’m talking about. This will resonate with them. The sheer, unbridled joy of unsupervised time outside is one of the hallmarks of a childhood in Flyover Nation. It was one of the aspects of my own childhood that I loved the best, and one that I work very hard to pass along to my own children. Whenever the weather is nice and I don’t have to be in the studio, we find a way to get outside—even if it’s just for a walk, an hour on the zip line in the backyard, a couple hours at the range, or a half hour at the park. Of course, these days usually the laptop or smartphone ends up tagging along, keeping us at least somewhat connected to, not to mention distracted by, the world of work. This technology that was not nearly as accessible to me growing up as a free-roaming kid (our cell phones were the size of bricks—bricks—and they flipped) is now just part of the territory for millions of working parents. What matters is that I’m able to get out of the house or the office or the studio and spend some time with my kids out in the fresh air.

Kids learn from what they see, and what I saw growing up was adults who spent time outside. My grandfather was a farmer who dealt with cattle; in fact, many members of my family farmed. They knew to respect, and how to care for, the land. It’s something ingrained in our family, though I’m not sure to what I’d attribute it. My family has always had an association with the land; my grandfather explained that if you respect the land, the land respects you. Don’t overgraze. Let the land rest every few years. Care for your animals. Don’t hunt to the point where it harms herd health. Abusing the land and its wildlife carries with it an even bigger consequence beyond bad stewardship: It may mean no meat for your family’s freezer next winter, no vegetables on your table the coming summer, no fall harvest. For people who prefer to omit the middle man and harvest their meat and vegetables from nature, it means your family might go hungry.

My great-grandfather was a farmer, and his father before him. Before them part of my family was settled in a different part of the United States; some of my ancestors were removed by Jackson’s soldiers during the Trail of Tears. During one family reunion a great-aunt once pointed out death records of ancestors whose untimely end was noted as being on the trail by those overseeing their brutal forcible relocation. (I always joke about how the “esteemed” senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, has ancestors who rounded up mine. That is the closest she comes to actual American Indian ethnicity, say genealogists.) My grandfather was a poor farmer whose nickname was a racial slur, not maliciously meant, that stuck with him throughout his life (and even in the town’s phone book and on his headstone) due to his beautiful golden brown skin. I was always proud of our ancestry, though it was more immediate to my grandparents than it was to me. We are so blessed in these United States to live in the middle of such a diverse ecosystem. We are blessed with lakes and streams and rivers—not to mention oceans—along with plains and grasslands, forests filled with hundreds of kinds of trees, and mountains that scrape the sky. Nearly every kind of climate you can think of can be found within our borders, along with myriad creatures that walk, crawl, fly, and swim within them.

Native Americans understood how critical it was to live in harmony with the natural world. That’s a mentality I share today and strive to share with my children. Actually, it’s shared by many in Flyover Nation, where we generally live closer to the land than do our counterparts in the concrete plains or glass-and-steel canyons of our coastal urban centers. We understand that as the top-functioning species on earth, we humans do need to work to be good stewards of our natural habitat.

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You might read that and think it makes me an environmentalist. You would be wrong. It makes me a conservationist, and there’s an important distinction. Conservationists believe in living in harmony with the land that sustains us. We practice the basic philosophy of “waste not, want not” to conserve our natural resources. Environmentalists, on the other hand, are a quasireligious sect of nut-eating hemp wearers and will turn swaths of California farms into desert wastelands over a stupid minnow. They believe not that humanity should live in balance with nature but that humans are a plague dedicated single-mindedly to destroying the paradise of planet Earth by any means necessary. They do not include humans in their equation about nature.

There are a few ways to tell the difference between conservationists and environmentalists—their preferred habitats, for one. Environmentalists are usually found on the coasts in dense cities that were built on shipping American goods abroad (and now specialize in shipping American jobs abroad). Some can be found scattered elsewhere around the country, holed up in colleges and universities, high up in ivory towers where they can send down an acid rain of moralizing judgments and proclamations about how awful humans are for this planet. You can also spot them in airports on their way to and from Very Important International Conferences about the dangers of fossil fuels . . . traveling on airplanes that burn fossil fuels. Wherever there is no one growing anything or making anything, there will be plenty of environmentalists.

Conservationists, on the other hand, can be found in the Flyover Nation. We appreciate the land not because some washed-up presidential wannabe told us we should. We don’t believe with cultlike devotion the alarmist mantras that the world is dying and it’s all our fault and we’re all terrible people if we don’t drive hybrid cars. We don’t go in for those kinds of hysterics in general. We don’t need to be seen tearing our hair out over gases in the atmosphere or this or that endangered species to claim our place in some celebrity outrage culture.

We do, however, love our fields and streams—our hiking, our swimming, our hunting, and our fishing. We grew up on the land and want to preserve it for our children and our children’s children, but we want to do so in our own way, as individuals and groups and communities. We don’t need Washington sending out top-down edicts telling us how to do it or forcing us to do it with unnecessary regulations. We’ve seen Washington’s abysmal track record when it comes to actually keeping land and water safe and the totally rancid culture of the top agency tasked with this mission. In fact, the only thing the federal bureaucrats “responsible” for the environment seem to be good at—especially in the Obama administration—is destroying American jobs left and right.

That’s because this isn’t really about the environment for them, or for the leftist president they serve, or for the leftist academics and “green business” executives and activists who form the president’s base of support. For them the main concern is not even the land itself but the advancement of their ideology.

In Washington “the environment” is purely a political issue. It’s used by people to make money or push a socialist agenda under the pretense of caring for our trees, lakes, and cute furry animals. Being “green” is big business—as umpteen companies supported by the Obama administration demonstrated with our tax dollars before going belly up. The new snake oil is “carbon credits.”

It’s a matter of faith for them, and those of us in Flyover Nation—the conservationists, who genuinely appreciate the land for its own sake and not for political or monetary gain—are viewed as apostates by members of the First Church of Environmentalism.

But when they put their faith in government institutions like the EPA, it shows how far gone they truly are.

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The shopping mall lives on in Flyover Nation. I understand that on the coasts the majority of shopping must be done in tiny, overpriced boutiques where everything is hand-fashioned and crafted with sustainable materials (not to mention gluten/GMO/dairy/soul-free) and put into the ever-present hemp bag. Or everything is bought online, which doesn’t even require leaving the house. But where I’m from we still go to Walmart, Kroger, and, yes, the mall. Admittedly, I prefer to buy online simply because I hate being presented with so many choices upon walking into the store. I buy black T-shirts and black jeans in bulk and have four pairs of black boots. Even my sneakers are black. I don’t hate the mall; I rather like the concept of it. In some areas, however, the malls are barely hanging on. They lose a lot of their stores, and the ones that replace them seem to get seedier and seedier as you move through the complex, to the point where you don’t really want to take the kids there anymore, much less let them go by themselves. Malls are closing down altogether all across America, in yet another sign of the “Obama recovery.”

A shopping mall with shuttered, dingy storefronts could also stand as a representation for Obama’s Washington. As you move through the streets of America’s capital, you pass federal agency after federal agency, each its own engine of regulation and factory of bureaucratic red tape that makes things tougher on normal Americans. Just like the storefronts at a neglected shopping mall, each agency is seemingly worse than the last. And then, around the corner, you see it: the worst store in a bad mall. In Washington the worst agency in that bureaucracy-crazy town is the laughably named Environmental Protection Agency.

A product of the environmental movement and the general hippiedom of the 1960s, the EPA was created by the decidedly unhippie President Richard Nixon in 1970 in order to “effectively ensure the protection, development and enhancement of the total environment itself,”140 as Nixon said in his message to Congress about the agency’s creation. That’s not a bad goal in and of itself—in fact, it even kind of sounds more conservationist than environmentalist; the mistake was a federal rather than state-level creation. To accomplish the stated goal, Nixon envisioned “pulling together into one agency a variety of research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities now scattered through several departments and agencies.”141 Increasing government to “streamline” it and make it more efficient never works. Predictably, like all big government agencies, once the EPA was up and running, it fell into the standard Washington pattern of gobbling up as much power as it possibly could and not being afraid to wield it. Federal agencies seem to view their regulatory and “enforcement” authority with an attitude along the lines of “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” and the EPA is no exception. Now, as it approaches its fiftieth anniversary, the EPA has built up a legacy of mismanagement, overreach, bullying, and just plain cluelessness—all of which have carried dire consequences, often for Flyover folks. (Said Dr. Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health: “The ban on DDT may have killed 20 million children.”142)

According to Dr. Mark Hendrickson of Grove City College, who has studied the EPA’s history of “misfeasance and malfeasance, misdeed, and mischief” for decades, even the agency’s early years were fraught with suspicious activity. In 1972, for instance, just two years into the EPA’s life, its first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, decided to ban DDT, a pesticide known mostly for cutting down on mosquitoes in American communities. The problem, however, was that Ruckelshaus made his decision in the face of “several hundred technical documents and testimony of 150 scientists,” which, according to Dr. Hendrickson, led the judge who examined the DDT case for the EPA to conclude that it was likely not harmful to humans.143 Ruckelshaus decided to ignore the scientific recommendations and banned DDT anyway—for political reasons, of course—and in doing so established a strong precedent of overreach by the EPA to score ideological points.

Just a few years later Congress was forced to deal with another example of the EPA’s willingness to mislead in order to achieve ideological ends. In 1978 the agency proposed new standards for air quality that would have imposed significant costs on businesses. Of course, the EPA was not especially eager to have the true cost of its regulations exposed. According to Dr. Hendrickson, the EPA tried to keep the cost estimates of its proposed red-tape bonanza quiet—and it would have gotten away with it too, if not for two Republican senators from Pennsylvania, John Heinz and Richard Schweiker. They stymied the EPA’s efforts in order to protect jobs in their home state. Had the new regulations been allowed to proceed, they would have, in Dr. Hendrickson’s opinion, “effectively shut down the U.S. steel industry.”144 Early on, the EPA displayed a callous disregard for the impact of its actions on actual American workers—you know, the ones who don’t work in comfy Washington government offices—which has not lessened with time.

The next decades saw plenty of similar scandals. Outside scientists tasked with a review of the EPA in 1991 found much to be desired, accusing the agency of making its science work for its own purposes. The administrator at the time, William Reilly, even admitted that “scientific data have not always been featured prominently in environmental efforts and have sometimes been ignored even when available.”145 That’s not something you want to hear from someone whose job it is to use taxpayer dollars to come up with good scientific data. A few years later, in 1993, the problem had still not gone away, prompting Michigan representative John Dingell—a Democrat—to compare the EPA’s approach to science with disreputable accounting. The agency “cooks the books with great vigor,” Dingell said.146 Carol Browner, the EPA administrator under Bill Clinton, ran the agency like a tinhorn dictator—keeping analytic practices secret, breaking federal lobbying laws, and even demanding that the City of San Diego stop treating its own sewage in order to protect “sewage-based ecology.”147 And yet the agency keeps chugging along.

Fast-forward to today, when Barack Obama’s EPA has shown no signs of improvement—and really, no signs that it deserves to stay in existence. The agency continues to be riddled with what Congress’s top investigator characterized in 2015 as “glaring management failures,” including “numerous examples of fraud, unprofessional behavior, cronyism and outright theft.”148 In one bizarre case in 2013, an EPA official stole some $900,000 while claiming that he was “working undercover for the CIA” to cover himself at the office. Another employee was found to have preyed on at least seventeen women with “conduct and exchanges considered to be unwelcome,” which, according to the Associated Press, included “unwelcome touching, hugging, kissing and photographing of women.”149 The AP noted that one of the women involved was just twenty-one, an intern at the Smithsonian. To round things out, a recent report by the agency’s inspector general also cited multiple instances of employees discovered watching pornography at work.150 Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Obama’s EPA troubles began early. The first EPA head under the Obama administration, Lisa Jackson, resigned during a storm of scandal in December 2012. Both congressional investigators and the EPA’s own inspector general had launched investigations into her use of a private, unofficial e-mail account to conduct official government business (sound familiar?). Jackson was apparently using the e-mail alias “Richard Windsor” to communicate with her staff.151 Hardly a model of open government, especially on the watch of a president who declared just a few months later that he was leading “the most transparent administration in history.”152

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We’ll all have to make sacrifices to save the earth, say the coastals, by which they mean you all have to make sacrifices.

Barack Obama likes to call his administration the most transparent, in spite of the actions of his first EPA administrator and his secretary of state, to name just two. What’s very transparent is that his administration has certainly been one of the most ideologically motivated in history. As a product of the radical Left, Barack Obama made no secret of his own leanings—strictly environmentalist, not conservationist. Remember, this was the man who cited his own nomination for president as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”153

He also laid out how we were going to get there, and a big part of that was bankrupting the coal industry. In 2008, in an interview with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, then-Senator Obama described his intention to aggressively pursue regulation of carbon emissions.

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” he explained. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”154 Since he couldn’t just unilaterally shut down the evil coal companies, the plan was to effectively starve them out of existence with regulation and fees—and starve the middle class, who rely on affordable and plentiful energy, in the process.

It looks like that plan is working—just ask the tens of thousands of American workers who on Obama’s watch lost their jobs that were once supported by the coal industry. This disturbing trend surfaced early on. In December 2009, less than a year after Obama took office, CONSOL Energy announced that it would have to lay off some five hundred workers in West Virginia. CONSOL was in the midst of a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and other environmentalist groups. At the time, Obama’s EPA was slow-walking nearly eighty mining permits around the country. CONSOL’s CEO, Nicholas Deluliis, blamed the job cuts in part on “a constant stream of activism in rehashing and reinterpreting permit applications that have already been approved or . . . inequitable oversight of our operations.”155 Things only got worse from there. In June 2014 the Washington Times reported that “coal mines are closing down so rapidly in the wake of a raft of federal environmental regulations targeting coal that mining employment is now in a ‘free fall.’” The Times cited a report by the research firm SNL Energy that was based on the government’s own data. SNL found that jobs in the mining industry had dropped 8.3 percent between March 2013 and March 2014.156

The next year brought more grim news. In February 2015 a comprehensive report by the American Action Forum revealed that between 2008 and 2013, essentially the first half of the Obama administration, power plants cut nearly 40,000 jobs and coal mines shed more than 3,700 workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—government data—coal jobs dropped by an additional 4,800 between January 2014 and January 2015.157 The American Action Forum blamed the job losses on overzealous federal regulation, with the EPA leading the charge. It noted that coal mines and power plants had been slapped with additional federal red tape that had cost the industries more than $10 billion since 2011.158

Let’s take a step back from the numbers and look at the people behind them. Let’s look at where these jobs in the mining industry are found—or at least were found before the Obama administration got rid of them. The SNL report from 2014 notes central Appalachia fared the worst, losing 15 percent of its mining jobs in the previous year.159 The American Action Forum report was even more specific. For instance, it found that the four states with the most jobs lost at power plants were Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.160

In other words, these jobs are disappearing from Flyover Nation. Obama’s EPA and its “war on coal” has left our communities decimated. According to the Wall Street Journal, unemployment rates in coal-rich areas of the nation are abysmal—8 percent in eastern Kentucky and more than 10 percent in southern West Virginia.161 And that doesn’t even count the laid-off or retired coal workers who could stand to lose what benefits they still get if regulations eventually force their companies to go bankrupt.

These workers in mines and power plants are fathers, brothers, mothers, and sisters. They have families to support in an economic climate that is already making it tough for working families to catch a break. Entire communities depend on coal mines and power plants to provide the jobs that sustain them, and those are the places that are being hurt by the Obama EPA.

But Barack Obama doesn’t care. He’s made it plain that the hardships of Flyover communities don’t merit his time or attention. After all, these were the kinds of backwaters where, as he put it, “bitter” people “cling to guns or religion.” It’s awfully easy to direct your EPA to starve an entire industry to death as part of an ideological environmentalist crusade when you don’t know or care about any of the people who are going to lose their jobs as a result. If the coal plants that were hemorrhaging jobs under the Obama administration were located in San Francisco or Brooklyn, the EPA would probably be taking a different approach.