It seems hard to believe now, but environmentalism was popular and largely uncontroversial during the 1970s—even among Republicans. While Richard Nixon was a rabid cultural warrior and hippie-puncher, fomenting social division on issues like race, crime, drugs, homosexuality, the Vietnam War, and much else, he also championed Earth Day and the Endangered Species Act; the Environmental Protection Agency was a creation of the Nixon administration. Nixon and many of his contemporary Republicans rightly viewed the environment as a mainstream cause that could bring people together to protect our shared home. When Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, he said, “Nothing is more precious or worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.”
James Watt, as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Interior, helped to change all that. (Watt died last month at 85, and his passing was only widely reported last week.) Some of Watt’s specific arguments and beliefs—and most of his policy efforts—failed to catch on, but much of his rhetoric, as well as his legacy of anti-environmentalist culture war, endures. We have Watt to thank for the fact that Republicans today view fossil fuels as an American institution, and for our utter lack of national consensus on climate change and environmental protection.
James Watt had been an Interior undersecretary to Nixon, but seemed to have completely rejected that administration’s environmental commitments by the time Reagan appointed him to head the department in 1981. During his time out of Washington, Watt became a leader of a growing, lavishly funded anti-environmental movement. In 1977, he helped establish the Mountain States Legal Foundation and became its founding president. The conservative organization was supported with money from beer mogul Joseph Coors Sr., and strove to protect property rights and advance the interests of the oil, timber, development, and mineral industries. In 1978, three years before he took office, in a speech to the Conservation Foundation in Dallas, Watt called environmentalists “the greatest threat to the ecology of the West,” and said they were unconcerned about “the quality of life for mankind.”
Watt brought a rabid anti-government and faux-populist ethos to the office of the Interior. In stark contrast to the sensible environmental policies of his Republican predecessors, Watt’s policy enthusiasms included drilling, clear-cutting, despoiling public lands, and shredding environmental regulations. He cut funding for endangered species protection—a direct strike at Nixonian conservation. “We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber,” he said when he took office.