Putting Conserve Back Into Conservative

This week we celebrate Earth Day, where we recognize the need to protect our environment as good stewards of the Earth. “Environment” should not be a dirty word to conservatives. Republican President Teddy Roosevelt became the father of conservation by creating the National Park Service and setting aside 230 million acres of public lands for the nation to protect and enjoy. The Republican party was the first to champion conservation to benefit our communities, and we continue to do so today. It is a fallacy to assert, as too many environmental activists do, that we must choose either the health of our environment or the success of our economy. It is counterproductive to bankrupt ourselves through Green New Deal programs when our nation continually develops innovative technologies to produce energy and products cleaner and more efficiently than any other nation. The bottom line is: we can have both a clean environment and a booming economy.

I am working to advance shared conservative goals, from backing legislation that bolsters America as a leader in global energy and mineral production, to calling out the Biden Administration for its hypocrisy and detrimental policies, to featuring Arkansas’ leaders offering creative and commonsense solutions that will make our economy and our environment flourish. 

My Republican colleagues and I have introduced a myriad of legislation this year that would steward our resources well and conserve the planet without destroying our economy, including the Trillion Trees Act.  This bill solidifies the United States as a global leader of the One Trillion Trees Initiative to conserve, restore, and grow 1 trillion trees worldwide.  

Republicans also introduced the RENEW WIIN Act to reauthorizes water storage, desalination, recycling, and conservation programs to help provide more water for people and species in times of historic drought and the Resilient Federal Forests Act to provide comprehensive solutions to address the rapidly declining health of American forests and prevent catastrophic wildfires by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasing the pace and scale of critical forest restoration projects. 

We also have introduced the BUILDER Act to modernize the outdated National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to make infrastructure project reviews more efficient, reduce project costs, spur economic recovery, and rebuild America all without sacrificing environmental protection, and the No Timber from Tyrants Act to prohibit imports of forest products from Russia and Belarus while ramping up responsible harvesting of American timber to create new jobs, produce more sustainable wood products, and make U.S. federal lands more resilient to catastrophic wildfires.

Our work has only just begun. Through science-based legislation, Republicans are re-claiming our rich heritage of conservation. Together, we will leave our world better than we found it.