Guest AuthorRecently I was cycling with a friend from grade school, and let’s politely say our political views have been at odds since seventh grade. But she says that she’d be a Republican on most issues, except for the environment.
I remarked how there are no greater conservationists than those folks who grow up camping, fishing, hunting (yes, with guns), paddling, running, hiking or cycling through nature. A great many of them, especially the responsible gun owners who hunt, tend to be Republican. Yet somehow we are castigated as the enemy of the environment.
I took up paddle boarding last fall. Initially, I did more falling than paddling. But one day in my home county of Okaloosa, I went to my usual launch point and saw that the county had warnings posted about high fecal coliform due to poor storm-water conditions.
That was the moment I became a “stand up the entire time” paddle boarder.
The Obama administration has used “climate change” to divide the country by bashing those it claims deny climate change. Conservatives deny nothing. The science is clear. The climate is changing — just like it did during the Mini-Ice Age from 1350 to 1850.
The argument comes over the use of government power to force changes that may or may not have anything to with the problem. Time and again we see that government “solutions” are worse than the problem.
In grade school, my liberal friend and I learned the basic lesson that the sun is responsible for heating and cooling the Earth. Now, the scientists at Space.com are reporting the sun may be entering a “sleeping phase” and climate change…will happen again.
The party that brought the EPA to America is now painted as the anti-environment party, and I’m sick of it. Florida’s Republican Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam recently wrote in the Tampa Bay Times a persuasive article about how new technologies can help improve the state’s water quality.
The Republican legislative leadership has issued calls to increase water-issue funding.
Yet critics mock the leadership and its policies. When I, a well-known conservative in my county, bring up the need for better storm-water management, the reaction from the so-called left is visceral. It seems to defy liberal logic that one can be for limited government yet support sound water policies.
The issue conservatives have with “climate change” is not science, but that people in both Washington and Tallahassee dictate what local governments and private landowners can do.
The idea that we need the federal or state government to tell me how to manage a pond on private property that is used to pump water to 10 acres of crops is ludicrous. If I don’t manage it properly, the farm suffers and I have no income. That is what we call a free-market incentive to get it right, every time, every year, year after year.
It’s time to tone down the rhetoric about who “owns” the environment. It’s not Earth Justice, the Republicans, or the Democrats – it’s us. All of us.
We already spend a tremendous amount of taxpayer money on the environment. I applaud the Legislature for taking on this difficult subject, and that they work hard to spend the money wisely. After all, it’s not just my friend and I who enjoy the water – it’s a major economic driver of our state.
Henry Kelley is a businessman and founder of the Fort Walton Beach Tea Party. He lives in Okaloosa County.
