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Patrick Allitt is the author of A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism. He has written six books on religious history, education, and politics, including The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History. Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University.

October 15, 2018|

U.S. Environmentalism Is a Success Story

by Patrick Allitt|

In response to: Reforming U.S. Environmental Policy

(image: Panther Media GmbH / Alamy.com)

In the decades since the movement began in 1970, we have discovered that we don’t have to choose between environmental protection and economic growth.

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The Environment for Liberty

by William Dennis

Only the wealth accrued over the last few centuries, built upon well-defined property rights, has enabled humans to even worry about the environment.

National Environmental Policy Act and Chevron Deference Aren’t the Problem

by Jonathan H. Adler

NEPA is a quite limited statute; and judicial deference to federal agencies can be good if the agencies are pursuing deregulatory measures.

Environmental Policy: Benjamin Zycher Responds to His Critics

by Benjamin Zycher

Whose reforms would work best—mine or my respondents’—cannot be decided on the basis of first principles.

August 6, 2018|Charles Mann, Norman Borlaug, The Wizard and the Prophet, William Vogt

America’s Debate between Scientific Innovation and Caution

by Patrick Allitt|

Charles Mann traces the history of two competing frames of mind: The “wizards” of scientific innovation and the "prophets" who warn of hubris.

March 16, 2015|Conservatism, Environmentalism, EPA, Free Market Environmentalism, Green Philosophy, Roger Scruton

The Conservationism You Can Believe In

by Patrick Allitt|

To be a conservative is to value the places and traditions we have inherited from the past, to hold them in trust: this includes the environment.

August 25, 2014|Environmentalism, global warming, Julian Simon, Paul Ehrlich, Rachel Carson

The Pathetic Record of Environmentalist Pessimism

by Patrick Allitt|

This conversation with Patrick Allitt on his latest book, A Climate of Crisis, provides a historical judgment on the environmentalist movement in postwar America. We see its causes, self-understanding, and the motives and beliefs driving its adherents. Allitt, unlike most in this area, does not come to propose or critique policies, but to note the benefits and consequences that have resulted from the particular brand of environmentalism that emerged in America. Curiously, Allitt notes, environmentalism received its initial energy from the immense capacity for wealth creation that America generated in the postwar environment. This freed us to notice the damage…

September 23, 2012|Daniel Bell, Lionel Trilling, Neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz, Taking the Fight to the Enemy

Understanding the Neocons

by Patrick Allitt|

Adam Fuller’s Taking the Fight to the Enemy: Neoconservatism and the Age of Ideology is a book so weak that it ought never to have seen the light of day. This book is poorly argued, carelessly written, and badly edited. The author and the press are equally culpable and should share responsibility. It is not easy to grasp the author’s argument. Fuller asks whether neoconservatism is a unified ideology with clearly defined boundaries, or merely a cluster of loosely related ideas shared by a crowd of influential writers over the last half century. His answer seems to be that it is…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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In response to: Reforming U.S. Environmental Policy

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