Here is something that sounds impossible today: for the better part of a century, protecting the environment was not a partisan issue. The first national park was signed into law by a Republican. So was the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The conservation movement was built by both parties, often in direct competition with each other over who could do more.
That consensus is gone now, and understanding how it formed, and how it shattered, is one of the most useful things you can do if you care about public lands. This is the story of when protecting the environment was bipartisan, why it stopped being so, and what the history suggests about getting it back.
It Started With A Republican
The American conservation tradition begins with a Republican signature. In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the act establishing Yellowstone, the first national park in the United States and likely the first in the world. The principle behind it, that the federal government should hold extraordinary land in trust for everyone, was genuinely new, and it came from a Republican administration.
A generation later, the most famous conservationist ever to hold the office was also a Republican. Theodore Roosevelt placed roughly 230 million acres under federal protection, established five national parks and 18 national monuments, and created the national forest and wildlife refuge systems. For Roosevelt’s party at the turn of the century, conserving the American landscape was a point of pride.
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The High-Water Mark: Nixon And Ford
The bipartisan era reached its peak in the early 1970s, and remarkably, much of the credit goes to Richard Nixon. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act, and saw the Clean Water Act pass over his veto. As we explain in our honest look at Nixon’s environmental record, he was no true believer. He signed those laws because the public demand was overwhelming and crossed party lines, and that is exactly the point.
His successor, fellow Republican Gerald Ford, carried it forward, signing the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. Within a single decade, a Republican White House had helped build nearly the entire legal framework that still governs American air, water, and wildlife.
The Reagan Reversal
The consensus broke in the 1980s, and the turning point was the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan reframed environmental regulation as a burden on business and a symbol of government overreach. He installed appointees openly hostile to the agencies they ran, most notoriously Interior Secretary James Watt and EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch, and he tried to slash the budgets and authority of the very programs Nixon and Ford had built.
The deeper shift was political. Attacking environmental regulation became a reliable applause line, a way to signal allegiance to industry and to a philosophy of small government. Once that proved electorally useful, it hardened into orthodoxy. The bipartisan era did not fade gradually. It was deliberately ended, and a new playbook took its place.
The Decades Of Missed Chances
The presidents who followed had openings to change course, and mostly did not take them. George H.W. Bush campaigned as an environmentalist and did sign the landmark 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that created the acid-rain cap-and-trade program, a real achievement. But on the emerging science of climate change, the window for early, bipartisan action closed without much being done.
By the time the warning signs were unmistakable, the issue had calcified along party lines. George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol and spent his presidency resisting binding limits on carbon. The chart of atmospheric carbon dioxide kept climbing through every one of these administrations, indifferent to the politics.
The Lesson Of Nixon
So how does the consensus come back? The history points to an answer, and it runs straight through the most unlikely figure on this list.
Richard Nixon privately had little use for environmentalists. He signed the EPA into existence anyway. He did it because in 1970 the demand was so loud, and so bipartisan, that opposing it was politically impossible. Twenty million Americans turned out for the first Earth Day. The pressure left him no realistic choice.
That is the lesson, and it is genuinely hopeful. Politicians of both parties respond to overwhelming, durable public demand. The bipartisan era was not the product of unusually virtuous leaders. It was the product of a public that made conservation a non-negotiable expectation, so that even a skeptical Republican president had to deliver. The protections did not come from the top down. They came from the bottom up.
It Takes All Of Us
The land does not belong to one party. National parks, clean air, and protected wilderness are used and loved by Americans of every political stripe, and polling has consistently shown broad, cross-partisan support for public lands even as the politicians have polarized. The gap between what voters want and what the parties offer is the opening.
If you want to know which presidents actually delivered, regardless of party, read our ranking of the 10 greatest conservation presidents, and our case for why Jimmy Carter stands at the top. The throughline of all of it is the same: protecting this country’s wild places has never been the property of the left or the right. It has been an American project. It can be again, but only if enough people demand it.
About The People Behind More Than Just Parks
You should probably know that this does not come out of thin air. We love America’s public lands, and my sons Will and Jim have spent their entire adult lives bringing these places to life through their films.
Will and Jim have worked with the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, the USDA, and the U.S. Forest Service for years, creating films about important places and issues. Their work has been featured in publications around the world, and a few people outside our immediate family even call them experts on the national parks.
In 2018, having spent a lifetime teaching history, I joined More Than Just Parks to help tell the stories behind these remarkable places.
