In July of last year, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing the Make America Beautiful Again Commission, which claimed that his administration would “prioritize responsible conservation, restore our lands and waters, and protect our Nation’s outdoor heritage for the enjoyment of the American people.” The drafting of the order had been influenced by the American Conservation Coalition, an organization founded in 2017 by a conservative college student named Benji Backer who thought that, unless it changed course on environmental issues, the Republican Party was at risk of losing young voters. Nearly a decade on, the group has a large national presence and allies in the White House. Yet, as Gaby Del Valle puts it in her report on the ACC for our April issue, “such prominence doesn’t seem to have led to many tangible benefits for the environment.” Indeed, the Trump Administration has ruthlessly attacked existing environmental regulations and gutted many of the departments responsible for protecting the country’s landscapes and natural resources. As for the Make America Beautiful Again Commission, it’s done little but announce a strategy called MABA 250 that recycles much of the vague language from Trump’s original order. 

So, what gives? Last August, Del Valle traveled to central Tennessee to attend the ACC’s annual summit, hoping to get to the bottom of these contradictions. Did the young conservative environmentalists gathered in Montgomery Bell State Park feel betrayed by the lack of a green agenda under the second Trump Administration? Or were they more concerned with propagating their movement than notching tangible policy wins? I spoke to Del Valle about reporting from conservative events, the ACC’s place within the young New Right, and the complex, often contradictory politics of their environmentalism.

Jess Bergman: Theodore Roosevelt comes up again and again in your piece. We begin with an ACC member reading from his famous “Man in the Arena” speech, which is later invoked by the communications director for another group, Nature Is Nonpartisan. Roosevelt is also all over the writing and official statements of ACC leaders like Danielle Franz and Chris Barnard. One detail that didn’t make it into the final piece is that attendees at the ACC summit were prompted to recite their favorite Roosevelt quotes for a man-on-the-street-style video. Why is he such a potent symbol for the environmentalist right? And what do you think they get wrong about Roosevelt’s legacy?

Gaby Del Valle: I think Roosevelt is a no-brainer mascot for the ACC: he was both a staunch Republican (at least until 1912) and a champion of the environment. For Roosevelt, wild places—especially in the American West—functioned as a proving ground for masculinity. He was wary of the supposedly feminizing influence of cities and advocated a “strenuous life” in the outdoors. He was also preoccupied with birth rates, immigration, and the threat of anarchism. Roosevelt didn’t apologize for America’s past sins, nor did he consider them sins at all; though he worked to save bison from extinction, he also wrote in 1885 that exterminating these herds “was the only way of solving the Indian question.” He believed in the American empire, and he agreed with Frederick Jackson Turner’s assertion that the frontier experience was fundamental in shaping the American character. His efforts to protect the environment were largely born of a desire to keep this pioneer ethos alive.

But Roosevelt is an imperfect avatar for the ACC’s emphasis on market-based solutions. He was not a small-government conservative. In fact, he was more likely to prefer the idea of a nanny state; like other Progressive Era reformers, he thought Americans had to be told what was best for them. Though people like to use his example as a weapon against liberal climate activists, he doesn’t map neatly onto our current left-right divide.

Bergman: There’s a lot of ideological cross-pollination in the history of environmentalism. While it may be easier today to separate the eco-left from the eco-right, this hasn’t always been the case—in the Sixties, for example, eugenic ideas about population control were embraced by groups like the Sierra Club. What makes this movement so vulnerable to being claimed by competing political traditions?

Del Valle: I think it has to do with the movement’s origins. In the United States, conservation began as an elitist project. Roosevelt’s hunting club was one of the first conservationist groups in the country, and its initial purpose was to protect wilderness and wildlife not for its own sake but for the benefit of hunters. These were people who could afford to go on vacations and who saw nature as a respite from the ills of urbanization—and often from the “immigrant hordes” who lived in big cities. Many early conservation efforts found support from wealthy industrialists: railroad interests promoted the creation of Yosemite and Yellowstone, partly because they wanted to profit from tourism, partly because a lot of robber barons really did appreciate the great outdoors. The Sierra Club founder John Muir was friends with both E. H. Harriman, the owner of the Union Pacific and other railroads, and his wife, Mary, who started funding eugenic causes in 1910. Given this history, it’s not entirely surprising that the Sierra Club eventually embraced neo-Malthusian ideas in the Sixties and Seventies. The 1968 publication of The Population Bomb convinced basically everyone across the political spectrum that overpopulation was not only a real problem but the biggest single threat to the environment. 

But there was an alternative tradition. People like Bob Marshall, who co-founded the Wilderness Society in 1935, espoused an eco-socialist vision, though the organization itself was never as radical as he was. Even radical groups like Earth First! dabbled in anti-immigrant politics in the Eighties. The notion of the left having ownership over environmentalism is pretty recent.

Bergman: You’ve spent a significant amount of time as a journalist in both mainstream conservative and more fringe right-wing spaces, from the inaugural Natal Conference to multiple years of the Conservative Political Action Conference. How did the ACC summit compare to some of these other events?

Del Valle: The ACC crowd was much younger than what you’d find at CPAC, which is full of boomers, and far more normie than the Natal Conference, whose organizers and attendees were extremely online and often seemed untethered from the real world. These were regular college kids: they were there for the free trip, but also to network and hopefully get internships or jobs after graduation. I haven’t been to a Turning Point USA conference, but I imagine they’d fit right in at one of those.

Bergman: Last year, New York magazinepublished a widely read story about a new generation of deliberately provocative, social-media-savvy conservatives titled The Cruel Kids’ Table. Though the ACC is not mentioned in the piece, they co-sponsored the party that was depicted on the issue’s cover. How does the group fit into the ecosystem of the New Right?

Del Valle: I know I just said the ACC crowd was somewhat offline and pretty normie, but the ACC leadership is another thing entirely. I wouldn’t call them provocateurs, but they are definitely more of that world. They wouldn’t be out of place at Butterworth’s, a D.C. restaurant whose top investors include a former Breitbart editor that has become a New Right haunt. The imagery they put out on social media is also quite similar to recent graphics released by the Department of Homeland Security: it’s got a sort of bucolic “RETVRN” vibe. I almost see them as a bridge between normie conservatives and more hardline ones. Their focus on the environment brings new people into the fold—kids who are maybe unsure of where they stand politically but care about things like climate change, not that the ACC calls it that—and introduces them to the broader world of right-wing politics.

Bergman: Your reporting for this story ultimately took you to a surprising setting: the Abundance conference in Washington, D.C., which, as you note in the piece, was pretty far removed from the relaxed, outdoorsy vibe of the ACC summit, and—nominally, at least—from its conservative politics. Why did this feel like the right place to end?

Del Valle: I first heard of the ACC through the announcement of the Abundance conference. Because of this association, and because of more conciliatory interviews with the ACC’s founder from the group’s early years, I expected it to be less explicitly partisan. At the very least, I expected the group to temper or at least tailor its message to the Abundance crowd, which was mostly wonkish libs. That’s not what happened at all. The ACC’s president, Chris Barnard, put forth a vision of Abundance that, despite having some short-term goals in common with the liberal version promoted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (building more housing, expanding nuclear energy), had a different end, which was basically to promote traditional family-making. This reminded me of Roosevelt’s conservation project, which was never about protecting nature for its own sake, but about molding it for a particular kind of human use. Roosevelt founded two main environmental commissions, one on conservation and the other on “country life,” to preserve rural lands and promote the growth of rural families. 

Abundance seems to be going in the same direction as environmentalism, in the sense that it can easily be claimed by different—and opposing—political movements. I think emphasis matters here: Do you want to build more housing because you believe everyone deserves a dignified place to live, or because you think Americans need to have more babies? Are you protecting public lands because of their role in the ecosystem, or because you want American families to have somewhere to go on vacation? These aren’t just rhetorical differences; the answers can affect how policy is crafted.