Page 20 - Flathead Beacon // 10.21.15

COVER
CONSERVATIONIST
The Rise of the Conservative
CONSERVATIONIST
In recent years, a new brand of GOP lawmaker has emerged. These “Teddy Roosevelt Republicans” must walk a fine line between their conservation values back home and the partisan politicking in Washington.
BIY TRISTAN SCOTT
t’s late August in Montana and the North Fork of the Flathead River is running low and slow, snaking through a chalky corri- dor of wildfire smoke, its steep
banks inscribed with the tracks of deer and grizzly bears, wallpapered with a mix of blackened snags and young lodgepole pine, and scored with clus- ters of radiant fireweed.
The smoke blotting the sky overhead hangs in contrast against the transpar- ency of the water below, magnifying the burnished bottom-stones and the shimmering flashes of bull trout, rain- bows and cutties.
Somewhere downstream from the Glacier Rim river access, about 10 miles north of Columbia Falls, a ClackaCraft drift boat cuts through the glassy sur- face, which longtime fly-fishing guide and oarsman Irv Heitz navigates from his perch in the middle of the boat, row- ing and setting his clients up on fish. At the bow, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, dressed in zip-off Columbia cargo pants and a T-shirt, leans against the boat’s leg bracket, casting a dry fly at the tail of a riffle that’s usually filthy with trout.
But the river is low and tepid at the end of a dry, hot, smoky summer, and the fishing has been slow all day.
Then the Republican senator slings another cast past some downed limbs near a deep pool’s tailout and a rain- bow trout explodes on his mayfly pat- tern. Moments later he holds the gleam- ing, rose-hued trout in his hands and releases it back into the crystalline
waters of the North Fork.
Heitz calls it a 20-incher, employ-
ing the liberal measurement standards of a seasoned guide, but he’s not far off. There’s no arguing with the reality that the fish, if a little on the skinny side, is a gorgeous specimen, and no debating that Daines is handily out-fishing the reporter seated on a swivel chair at the boat’s stern.
“That’s the biggest fish I’ve seen on this stretch this summer,” Heitz says, exchanging a high-five with Daines. “And as a guide, I’m sort of the keeper of the river.”
Gorgeous as the fish may be, it’s the river and its keepers that Daines is here to celebrate today, and the congratula- tory high-five is as much a solemniza- tion of the permanent environmental protections he helped furnish on the North Fork as it is a gushy salute to the tight lines and hungry trout.
CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN, Daines’ support of the North Fork Watershed Protection Act,
which banned new energy development on 430,000 acres of wild and scenic river corridor, bucks a trend of partisan politicking that has eroded a deep tradi- tion of conservation in the GOP, which has a distinguished history of steward- ship going back to the founding of the Republican Party.
Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s first Republican president, signed legislation in 1864 to protect California’s Yosem- ite Valley, laying the groundwork for
what would become Yosemite National Park. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republi- can hailed as the patron saint of conser- vation, later created scores of national parks, game preserves, national forests, national monuments, bird sanctuaries, and reclamation projects during his tenure from 1901 to 1909.
Dwight D. Eisenhower established the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Richard Nixon signed many of the most significant pieces of environmen- tal legislation to date, establishing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Council on Environ- mental Quality.
And under Ronald Reagan, whose administration was generally skepti- cal of environmental rules, the United States pushed forth the Montreal Pro- tocol, which required the phasing out of chemicals that deplete the ozone layer.
But that legacy has been undermined
by gamed-out partisan politics, accord- ing to Rob Sisson, president of the group ConservAmerica, and the default Republican response has been to balk at anything that smacks of environmental legislation, dismissing the measures as job-killing federal overreach and the provenance of Democrats and liberals.
For the past 20 years, ConservAmer- ica, previously Republicans for Envi- ronmental Protection, has worked to raise the profile of conservation in the conservative party, and while the efforts have often been plodding, Sis- son says he’s seeing progress, finding purchase even in the halls of a divided Congress.
“I think the ideal of conservation and environmental protection has always been alive and well among the rank-and-file Republicans across the country, the kind of voters you find in Anytown, Montana. But nationally we have had this echo chamber of cable
U.S. Sen. Steve Daines casts a line in the North Fork Flathead River.
GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
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OCTOBER 21, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM