by Whit Gibbons
Tuscaloosa News
Sunday, October 21, 2007

What do Teddy Roosevelt, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich have in common, besides the fact that they have all held public office? The answer may surprise you. I certainly found it surprising - and highly gratifying.

Gore, who wrote "Earth in the Balance," won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for making the public aware of global climate change through his political actions and his documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth."

Roosevelt worked hard during his presidency and afterward to promote conservation and land ethics. Dubbed "the conservation president," he started the U.S. Forest Service and protected wildlife and natural habitats through the national park system and wildlife refuges. (He also won a Nobel Peace Prize, but not for his conservation efforts.)

Gingrich has not received a Nobel Prize nor has he been elected president or vice president. But like Roosevelt and Gore he is touting the merits of environmental protection and conservation. Yep. Newt Gingrich.

He and Terry L. Maple have written "A Contract with the Earth" (2007, Johns Hopkins University Press). The book could be influential in guiding the public onto a commendable environmental path. Terry Maple is best known to the public for his fund-raising skills as the president and CEO of Zoo Atlanta from 1984 to 2003. However, he is also an accomplished scientist, animal behaviorist, and conservation biologist, as well as the author of two previous books, Orangutan Behavior (1980) and Gorilla Behavior (1982).

I think it's a promising sign that someone like Gingrich, who is clearly defined as a "conservative" politician, would suggest that conservation and the environment are important, vitally important, to all of us in today's world. I am weary of listening to political rhetoric from presidential candidates of both parties in which the word "environment" is seldom if ever heard.

Gingrich and Maple make a good team in declaring the importance of and need for "bipartisan environmentalism." Among the themes that run throughout the book is that "entrepreneurial environmentalism" is the ultimate key to success in global conservation through the "merging of private and public interests . . . to serve the common good." The authors note that for this approach to be effective, we must abandon the perception that free enterprise is in direct conflict with environmentalism. Extremists on both sides will take issue with the idea that greedy capitalists and fanatical environmentalists might ever come to terms with one another, but fortunately there is a lot of middle ground between the extremes.

Gingrich and Maple assert that the United States must become the world leader in environmental protection, including minimizing waste through recycling; reducing dependency on fossil fuels; restoring the environmental health of the world's forests, wetlands, and marine environments; and putting the brakes on loss of biodiversity and endangered wildlife. They support new technologies, but only "clean technologies."

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