The Erosion of Conservation as a Conservative Value

A 2012 budget blueprint was released earlier this month by the House's Republican Study Committee, whose members inhabit the nose-bleed section of the political spectrum's rightfield bleachers. The blueprint calls for steep cuts in agriculture spending, including elimination of the egregious Direct Payments program that pays farmland owners regardless of what they grow or whether they grow anything at all. That's a good idea and long overdue.

Not so good is the blueprint's call for ending new enrollments in the Conservation Reserve Program, in which farmers are paid to plant cover crops on farmland in order to prevent topsoil erosion and protect rivers from sedimentation. Unlike the Direct Payments program, Conservation Reserve offers value to the taxpayers.

The study committee's comment about Conservation Reserve is revealing about how far lawmakers calling themselves conservative have strayed from the stewardship ethic of traditional conservatism. Its report says Conservation Reserve is "economically destructive and takes away farmland that could be used for such things as corn and biomass production."

Well, for one thing, Conservation Reserve doesn't "take away" farmland. Participation is voluntary. Second, anyone who believes that conserving topsoil is "economically destructive" is indulging in the most clueless, tunnel-visioned accounting imaginable. Topsoil is necessary for growing food. There is no engineered replacement for topsoil available from any vendor at any price. Third, the statement reflects the intellectually barren idea, far too prevalent among Republicans in Congress, that unless a natural resource can be immediately monetized, it has no value.

Russell Kirk, the historian and novelist who wrote the seminal work The Conservative Mind, had choice words for the falsehood that conservatism means a knee-jerk embrace of grasping commercialism that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The "debauching of agriculture to a gross money-getting concern," Kirk wrote, is one of the "aspects of a vast and voracious concentration upon profits that are so many illustrations of our sinning confusion of values."

Kirk warned against the degeneration of conservatism into "mere laudation of 'private enterprise,' economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests." The Republican Study Committee's mind set about conservation embodies and celebrates the degeneration against which Kirk warned.