The Boston Globe ran an article yesterday on the attempt by some activists to reach out to evangelicals on environmental issues. A new documentary “The Great Warming” is aimed at least in part directly at mainstream conservative Christians and features appearances by Richard Cizik, an official at the National Association of Evangelicals.

It’s fairly easy to see why a Christian should oppose the despoilation of God’s creation. What’s less frequently mentioned is that environmental protection ought naturally to be a conservative position too. After all, you’d think conservatives would be all about conserving things. At one time this was widely acknowledged. Russell Kirk, the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, was very much a lover of nature and opponent of paving over green places in the name of the free market. One of Kirk’s paragons of conservatism was staunch conservationist Teddy Roosevelt.

Another seminal early conservative thinker, Richard Weaver, once said that the difference between the radical and the conservative was that the former saw reality as infinitely plastic and amenable to the human will, whereas the latter respected the order of reality as a given and something that the human will should conform itself to. In these terms, respecting the integrity of the natural world would be the conservative position, while seeing it as so much raw material for human projects would be the radical view.

One might also point out (and I have) that the spirit that animates conservative positions on, say, abortion, euthanasia, and the exploitation of human embryos for research should naturally yield a hesitance to exploit the natural world through unrestrained economic development, genetic engineering, and unbridled technological “progress.” In other words, a worldview that takes the intrinsic value of life as a fundamental axiom might end up being both “pro-life” and “green.” Green icon E.F. Schumacher, for instance, was also a devout Catholic and articulated just such an affinity. However, in today’s political taxonomy these two groups are largely on opposite sides of the political spectrum (though phenomena like “Crunchy Cons” may indicate that change is afoot).

So, I think the intellectual connections between conservatism and “creation care” are already there, but we all know that ideas are not the only thing that drives politics (to say the least). TR-style conservationism doesn’t have much of a foothold in the current GOP. However, if a significant block of traditionally conservative voters such as evangelicals make environmental issues a high priority, we may see some change at the political level. What the Globe article and others I’ve read on the same topic don’t make clear is to what extent environmental issues have penetrated down to the grass-roots of evangelicalism, or if this is a phenomenon largely confined to the intelligensia.