Newt Gingrich, long known to have a soft spot for animals, has produced a short book in collaboration with well-known zoo director Terry Maple. A Contract with the Earth—named after the Republican Party's 1994 Contract with America, which Gingrich helped fashion—is their blueprint for how Americans should tackle the major environmental challenges that confront us.
It is news that the strategist behind the Republican takeover in the 104th Congress takes the environment seriously, and the book contains nuggets that surprise, such as the suggestion that there be a US government endowment for conservation. Not surprisingly, however, the book's policy prescriptions usually, but not always, tend to favor incentives, environmental markets, and entrepreneurial activity (“carrots”) rather than command and control (“sticks”); experience tells us, I believe, that the strongest prescription is one that includes both elements.
Although Gingrich and Maple are to be commended for taking on the environmental predicament, the book tends to underestimate the challenge and the task of remedying the situation. Dismissive references to “doomsday scenarios,” “doomsday visions,” “doomsday environmentalism,” and “doomsday theorists” are not necessary to their thesis but are nonetheless scattered throughout the book. Indeed, the authors seem not to appreciate that the real value of projections such as Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (Ballantine Books, 1970) is that they inspire activity that keeps those projections from becoming fulfilled predictions. It is discouraging that they still question the human role in climate change—even the Bush administration now concedes that human activities “very likely” cause global warming—but, fortunately, they do favor reducing carbon loading in the atmosphere, and they call for greater government funding for energy research. And the call for civil dialogue and bipartisan approaches could not be more on the mark. One can only applaud the notion that the “environment may become the world's most inclusive political issue.”
I think the book's message would have been stronger had more attention been paid to US environmental history. The environmental achievements of the Clinton years—especially those of the Department of the Interior, but also NOAA and the Environmental Protection Agency—dwarf those of the current administration. Also, it would have been instructive and useful to sketch in the bipartisanship Gingrich and Maple correctly value. Witness the extraordinary legacy of environmental law and institutions from the Nixon and Ford administrations; this legacy and the accomplishments of Theodore Roosevelt's administration amply demonstrate that the environment and conservation are indeed part of a thoughtful conservative's agenda—as A Contract with the Earth emphasizes.
I suppose it is not surprising that a former politician—if there is such an animal—would write a book that resembles a stump speech in places, as it calls on the American people to muster good old American know-how and can-do. Of course, the environment certainly needs all that we can muster. Phrases such as “creating solutions for our emerging democratic neighbors,” however, can be interpreted as condescending, which is unfortunate because some of the most pressing environmental problems—climate change and restoration of oceans' and fisheries' productivity, for example—require international collaboration of the highest order.
It is also clear that the book was issued in haste to appear in time for the current election campaign, with the inevitable result that substantial errors failed to be rectified. Carbon dioxide emissions from deforestation are not three times those from fossil fuels; rather, they are about 20 percent of the total (i.e., roughly one-fourth of fossil fuel emissions). Gif ford Pinchot was head of the Forest Service, not the National Parks Service. If one focuses on the overall thesis of the book, however, these are not fatal flaws.
It would be easy to dismiss A Contract with the Earth on the basis of the deficiencies cited above, but that would be amistake. Amore serious flaw that cannot be overlooked, however, is the allegation of overstatement by science and media—the reality is that most environmental science has been objective, even if self-correcting, as science inevitably is. Still, it is fair to ask whether the world has been well served by an international scientific body—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that has tended to underestimate problems. Yet even in this instance, I can only agree with Gingrich and Maple: there is a need for objective science and greater scientific literacy.
In the end, this is an important little book because its senior author is a prominent conservative who not only considers the environment a serious matter but also was willing to write about it with his longtime collaborator Terry Maple. It comes at a time when collaboration on these matters could not be more important.
