Why don't Conservatives want to conserve?

I read this over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish:

I have never understood why it is conservative to take an attitude toward the natural world of how best to exploit and use it entirely for short term benefit. (My first ever publication was a paper for Thatcher called "Greening The Tories"). The conservative, it seems to me, will not be averse to using the planet to improve our lot, and will not be hostile to the forces of capitalism and self-interest that have generated such amazing wealth and abundance in the last three hundred years.

But a conservative will surely also want to be sure that he conserves this inheritance, for its own sake and also for his future use. He will want to husband the natural world, not rape it and throw it away. He will see the abandonment of all values to that of immediate gratification as a form of insanity, if not evil.

I found this interesting for several reasons because I had a discussion with a South Korean labmate about what is "conservation" as an idea (i.e., something different than "enviornmentalism" or "preservationism"). Andrew's connection between political conservativism and conservation of natural resources seems non-relatable, at least in the modern era.

The current Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) used to be called the Michigan Department of Conservation (MDC). What was it that they were trying to conserve? Trees, rivers, and natural places? Ummm.... Not so much. More like they were in charge of conserving the ability to continue to hunt (deer and fowl) and fish. In conserving these abilities, one had to maintain natural areas, however, it was in the end done to maintain human use of these places.

The more modern environmental movement - in contrast - sought to remove humans from nature and repair the damage caused by them. In some way, the environmental movement became aligned with the left-wing social movements of the time, and that political relationship has continued (in some manner) to today. Over the years, though, environmental science (especially ecology) has changed from one that excluded human activity to slowly incorporating the impacts that humans have caused and can cause, slowly moving itself from a viewpoint more in-line with environmentalism to one that is (now, from my point-of-view) somewhere between an understanding that there are human uses (more like conservation) and a desire to remove humans from nature (more like environmentalism).

Alongside this shifting in the science, as well as the continued political ties of environmental groups to the political left, has come - in fits and starts - an understanding of some conservation groups to side with environmental groups in calling for more protections on existing areas of low human impact (i.e., "natural places"). National conservation organizations - like Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited - have come to understand that climate change and diminished habitat would have future consequences on hunting and fishing activities that so many of their members liked to pursue. Similarly, these groups didn't have any strong allegiance to the political right, even though hunter groups may have had more political alliances to the right due to association with the NRA (although this is speculative).

Moving against climate change legislation, however, made good political sense at the time for "national security" reasons (national coal is less dangerous than foreign oil), "economic" reasons (subsidized coal is cheaper than non-subsidized wind or solar), "job security" reasons (coal companies hire many people that would "suddenly" become unemployed if coal had to become ramped down), "nationalist" reasons (the UN and the IPCC isn't going to run our country), "anti-tax" reasons (cap-and-trade being called "cap-and-tax"), etc. It tied into anti-governmental-regulation (i.e., "mommy-state") sentiments that were supported by many right-wing groups at the time. Such a stance could be used to link anti-climate-change stances to being against abortion, gun control, taxes, and "big government" generally speaking. However, it moved, as Andrew stated, against some of the core values of what "conservation" stands for.

It moved against the idea of conserving that very thing that is most dear to us: our world. It is from that world that we receive everything from which we can build our lives and society. We derive not only food, water, clean air, and shelter from the world, but we also derive social and personal identity from it as well. These are the fundamental things that are necessary for success in life -- those things from which we can build the self-made man. Working against those things means that one is undercutting future generations' ability to make the most of themselves. These are values that Andrew lists:

These are deeply conservative instincts, humble in the face of nature, conscious of the need to preserve for the future, aware of the limits of exploitation. These conservatives aren't utopian tree-huggers. They do not worship Gaia or see no give and take with the natural world. They believe in the harvest but also in the need for fallow years and for care and husbandry of animals and plants and environments. And they love their home for its specificity and its beauty, and do not want to see its stability and future gambled away on the casino of greed.

I would argue that for the same reasons, conservatives should be in favor of public transportation, and there have been a few articles over at treehugger.com that also support this feeling. One particularly good one (in my opinion) was on November 16, 2009, showing a short film about the new book Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation by William Lind. In another example of how public transportation might actually align with conservative values was written on April 29, 2009, and it quotes extensively from Andrew's posts on the same topic at around the same time.

So... what's up with conservatives and conservative values? Especially when it comes to those things that conservatives should be lining up in support of? Is it that they are opposed to them because of propaganda from sources that they -- for one reason or another -- trust? If so, then when propaganda finally clashes with reality, there could be problems ahead. Chinua Achebe wrote - somewhere in Things Fall Apart - "The truth that is a lie is harder to accept than the lie that is the truth" (or something like that, I can't find it anywhere in internet searches).  However, I think this is where that ironic statement "reality has a well-known liberal bias" rings true: that for whatever reason, the justifications of conservatives against conservation for propaganda "conservative truths" will eventually have to deal with a reality that shows "liberal bias."