In February 2011, Human Events recalled President Ronald Reagan’s top ten achievements, from winning the Cold War, through restoring the economy, revitalizing the Republican Party and the conservative movement, envisioning the Strategic Defense Initiative, to reforming taxes, and taking on the unions. One aspect of his presidency, however, was missing. Reagan biographer Paul Kengor labeled it, the “forgotten Reagan war—not with the Soviets but environmental extremists.”

Reagan’s bold approach to the Soviet Union (“[W]e win and they lose.”), “flabbergasted” Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s first National Security Adviser: “I’d worked for Nixon and Goldwater and many others, and I’d heard a lot about Kissinger’s policy of détente and about the need to ‘manage the Cold War,’ but never did I hear a leading politician put the goal so starkly.” Similarly, Reagan rejected calls by those who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations to continue what “environmental extremists”—Reagan’s term, as was “modern-day Luddites”—dubbed “a bi-partisan consensus on environmental issues.” Reagan knew much more was at stake than whether America developed the energy and mineral resources beneath the third of the country and the billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf owned by the federal government in order to restore the economy and resist Russian aggression.

A fervent conservationist and an environmentalist himself, Reagan believed in being a good steward, but above all, he believed in people, who are, as Reagan put it, “ecology too.” Reagan knew that, from its beginnings, the conservation movement held human beings at its center. Whether the issue was the need to sustain humans by the wise use (conservation) of nature’s bounty, or the necessity to restore humans—emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually—by setting aside (preservation) a portion of God’s great creation, the focus was always on human beings.

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