The Skeptical Environmentalist: Senator Barry Goldwater And The Environmental Management State

摘要

For much of American history, environmental protection and federal power have been two peas in a pod. This was especially true after World War II, as economic prosperity created a vast middle class that demanded environmental "beauty, health and permanence" (in Samuel Hays's words) as an indispensable part of its consumer lifestyle and expected government to secure them. The result was the birth, in Adam Rome's phrase, of the "environmental management state" in the 1960s and early 1970s as environmental protection took its place alongside national defense and social welfare as a major federal responsibility. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater began his political career in the midst of postwar envir-onmentalism's birth and growth. As a Westerner, a businessman, and a political conservative deeply mistrustful of the federal government, Goldwater seems an unlikely candidate for any environmental sympathies, especially of the federal-regulatory variety, but a close look at his life reveals a man with a complex relationship with the natural world, environmentalism, and the environmental management state. In the end, Goldwater went to his grave without ever fully coming to terms with the tensions between his environmentalist sympathies and his conservatism, but nevertheless his environmental odyssey tells us a lot about the depth and breadth of postwar environmentalism in the United States, as well as the changing conservative movement and the Republican Party.