Interview on New Books network

newbooksnetwork.com/james-m-turner-and-andrew-c-isenberg-the-republican-reversal-conservatives-and-the-environment-from-nixon-to-trump-harvard-up-2018/On November 20, the New Books network released a podcast of an interview Brian Hamilton, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducted with James M. Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg.  The abstract for the podcast is here:

It wasn’t always this way. From the Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership on natural resource conservation to Richard Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ronald Reagan’s singing of the Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, Republicans have a proud tradition of environmental stewardship. Why have they seemingly abandoned it? That question animates The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018), a collaborative effort by acclaimed environmental historians James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg—who have produced an accompanying websitefor educators. They draw from the latest scholarship on the rise of postwar conservatism to explore how corporate interest groups, libertarian think tanks, evangelicalism, and the GOP power center’s shift southward and westward encouraged frustration with the broadly popular legislative achievements of the 1970s and resistance to mounting a similarly robust federal response to subsequent environmental problems. The authors explore the party’s shifting positions on the management of federal lands, the protection of air and water quality, and the mitigation of climate change. They observe how discourse prizing local control, prioritizing economic concerns, and questioning scientific expertise and international cooperation grew louder and louder and helped produce a political landscape where environmental issues are defined less by technical data and more by voters’ values. But party leaders’ anti-environmentalist rhetoric has often found them out of step with their constituents, and Republican administrations from Reagan to Trump have had to scale back their assaults on the environmental state.

Click on this link to visit their website and download the podcast.

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