You could say liberalism is about squaring the circle, if it weren’t for the fact that even liberals don’t really expect to accomplish this feat: They aim at creating the impression they can effect the impossible, and lying afterward about their success in having done it. In between comes an impressive array or sequence of legislative and bureaucratic initiatives—fudging and futile, as complicated as they are incomprehensible, boring beyond the limits of public attention—whose purpose is to convince the voters, the press, even the perpetrating politicians themselves, that Something Is Being Done and A Solution Is in Sight. Months, occasionally a few years, go by before a) everyone has forgotten the crisis, or b) the politicians and their media apologists declare the victory of liberal ingenuity over the laws of mankind, and of nature itself Nature, of course, knows better, while even mankind can be fooled only in the short run (depending on your understanding of the word “short”).

The process is necessarily surrounded by buzzwords, as a range carcass is surrounded by flies. In the old cowtown of Denver, now a city of a couple of million people, the majority of whom seem to be economic refugees from Old Mexico and cultural ones from the Golden State (annually assuming a deeper bronze hue), the loudest buzz being made by the biggest, most aggressive flies from the Republican governor down to the shabbiest environmentalist, the rattiest Democratic ward-heeler, is “smart growth.” “Smart growth,” like the “smart bomb,” represents an attempt at squaring the circle, at having it all; destruction without risk (to the aggressor), action without consequence, choice without sacrifice. Over the past two decades Colorado has doubled its population, most of the growth occurring north and south of the Denver area along the Front Range. The scenery is (or rather was) lovely, the climate ideal (before the L.A. smog was piggybacked in like the chemical version of an alien biological species in the car trunks of arriving Angelenos), the prairie an indefinitely expansive Eden awaiting completion by the travail of developers (until, spreading eastward, Denver butts up against Kansas City the way Los Angeles is projected to bump into Phoenix, Arizona). Americans all want the same thing at the same time (a dependable sign of mass hysteria), and to live in Colorado is a craze lasting already at least 30 years. And everything at once as well: California freeways in addition to Colorado mountains, big-city convenience along with small-town access. West Coast lifestyles in a heart of the American heartland—most importantly. Pacific Rim salaries on an old buffalo pasture and Indian hunting-ground. “Smart growth” is an attempt at having it ever)’ which way through land set-asides, easements, restrictions on developers, and so on, without putting the brake on population increase and economic growth: by combining, that is, virtue with greed, a program which reflects almost the whole of the national political, social, and economic agenda at the start of the third millennium.

The Denver Post, a liberal newspaper calling itself “The Voice of the Rocky Mountain Empire,” works hard to live up to its billing, boosting city and state with the pep and zip of the Zenith Advocate-Times. The Post‘s Sunday edition is really a giant promotional kit aimed at selling off Colorado to the highest bidder. The editors are alarmed by what you might call “stupid growth,” but when it comes to corporations relocating in Denver, too much is never enough. They’re concerned about loss of wilderness in areas surrounding Colorado’s ski resorts, but during the winter months give Vail, Aspen, Copper Mountain, and Telluride what amounts to free publicity in the interest of pumping up these destructive behemoths to even greater size. The Immigration and Naturalization Service announces its intention of cracking down on illegal immigrants in Colorado, and they protest that the ski industry requires these honest, hard-working people who take jobs Americans won’t do, and that the INS ought to be working to ensure their civil and economic rights instead. The Vail city council passes a resolution calling upon Congress to enact legislation to stabilize population growth in the United States, and the Post‘s editorial policy is “no comment.”

Colorado’s largely Republican congressional delegation and its state legislature have been supportive of bills in Congress aimed at establishing new national monuments, most of them in the West, and at upgrading the present Sand Dunes National Monument near Alamosa to the status of a national park. When President Clinton in 1996 created the Escalante-Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah by executive order and in January 2000 invoked the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate a million acres in Arizona the “Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument,” Republican lawmakers were outraged. Colorado Republicans, though, have a special consideration these days: their state’s suburbs which, in addition to being largely Republican, are populated by outdoor recreationists driving $40,000 four-wheel-drive vehicles. If this development should in time be repeated in other of the Western states, an eventual realignment in environmental politics could occur as environmentalism rediscovers its WASPish, upper-middle-class roots in the conservation ethic of Republican progressivism early in the 1900’s—which God forbid.

Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, makes the case in his recently published book, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, A Conservative Manifesto, for a “conservative” brand of environmentalism. “[T]o conserve wilderness legacies and to expand them is not to abandon conservative principle,” he argues, “it is to affirm it.” Well and good. Reading further, however, one discovers that Huber’s conservatism is of the cornucopian—i.e., having-it-all—variety, a secular version of Christianity-without-the-Cross. Indeed, it is largely a restatement of the smelly intellectual corpus of the late Julian Simon, which Huber has ill-advisedly sought to resurrect. Human beings are not the problem, Huber insists, they’re the solution; wealth is the most effective birth-control device: national populations decline with increased prosperity. “There is no inherent scarcity of food, fuel, metal, mineral or space to bury our trash”: only of wilderness and the wildlife that inhabits wilderness, which “conservatives” should seek to preserve through the conservation of wetlands and forests. As the nation matures, Huber suggests, it wishes to conserve “more law, more history, more freedom and more public land, too. And so we should, political conservatives especially. This is the most conservative conviction we can embrace.” Linda Chavez, at the start of a newspaper column devoted to Huber and his book, noted that she feels nervous when Bill Clinton does something she approves of (in the present case, granting protected status to the Grand Canyon tract). Similarly, I’m suspicious of any conservationist plan endorsed by Linda Chavez, founder and spiritual leader of the United Immigrationist Church.

A few days past New Year’s, the Census Bureau heralded the third millennium with the announcement that it is projecting the population of the United States at 571 million people by the year 2100. This grim news was for the most part ignored by the media, except for encouraging reflections that, even with 571 million inhabitants, the United States would have a lower population density than Germany has today (as if that country were a third waterless desert and another third truck garden and bread basket to much of the world). For the next couple of weeks I scanned the press for comment from the Sierra Club but found nothing—as might be expected from a protectionist organization whose official response to massive population increase produced by immigration is to demand that native Americans produce fewer offspring as a balance for the fertility of nonnative citizens and illegal immigrants.

The refusal by the Sierra Club to recognize the greatest existing threat to the cause it was founded to promote indicates the extent of the Terror sustained by the organs of official opinion in this country and the power underlying the conspiracy of silence on immigration, as on other “sensitive” issues. Sierra Club officials, of all people, ought to be alert to the likely eventual fate awaiting large birds with pompom bodies, outsized padded feet, stick legs, and serpentine necks who react to proximate danger by sticking their heads in the sand. Historically, the conservationist movement and the environmentalist one that succeeded it have been, like democratic institutions arising from traditional British liberties, culturally specific phenomena. Do Mexico, Nicaragua, Kenya, Ghana, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Vietnam, Haiti, Jamaica, Russia—to name only a few of the countries sending immigrants in substantial numbers to the United States—have their own equivalent of the Sierra Club? Have they passed any vast body of environmental law onto their statute books? (Do they have anything properly describable as statute books, as British law understands them, or enjoy even the rule of law itself?) Immigrationists seem to believe America has its own unique atmosphere, a gaseous bubble enclosing the North American continent, which, processed through the lungs of aliens, produces the red blood cells specific to 100-Percent Americans. Of course, anyone who knows anything about human nature, history, and politics, or even reads the newspapers intelligently, knows the Bubble Effect to be mere superstition, like the alchemical transformation of dross into gold and other medievalist beliefs rational progressivists deride. It’s about as reasonable to expect that the America of 2100 in which white European-Americans constitute 52 percent of the population (20 percent less than today) will have a commitment to wilderness preservation as to imagine it will be devoted to maintaining present affirmative-action law (especially in defense of the coming white minority). Huber himself admits that wilderness (which I prefer to think of simply as open, humanly undeveloped space) is in scarce supply. Is it likely that a hundred years from now, with the population of the United States more than doubled, that supply will not have dwindled considerably? The answer, for those who believe in the possibility of having it all, is Yes.

Which, in America, is everybody who is anybody. The only message to arise from the current political season is that on EVERY SIGNIFICANT PUBLIC ISSUE, whether domestic or international, the candidates of the two major parties (and even some of the minor ones) are in fundamental agreement. And the basis of this consensus, or unanimity, is having it all: autonomy and regulation, diversity and identity, multiculturalism and Americanism, imperialism and a volunteer army, military adventurism and no casualties, immigration and wilderness, growth and open space, private property and government lockups, freedom of expression and sensitivity training, affirmative action and a color-blind society, lower taxes and Social Security, overvaluation and zero inflation, tobacco subsidies and tobacco penalties, French and no tears, morality and unrestraint, sadistic entertainment and benign children, corrupt politicians and election reform, the Constitution and the Supreme Court, abortion and the blessings of God. Gee—ain’t America grand?

Recently, Alan Greenspan offered a no-so-veiled hint to the congressional and executive branches of the federal government when he observed in a speech to the Economic Club of New York City that the tight labor market virtually guarantees eventual inflationary pressures—unless the country makes the decision to import labor. . . . Linda Chavez, the Manhattan Institute, and other familiar parties must have been gratified, but what does the Sierra Club really think of the idea? The answer is, like most of the rest of brain-dead America, it doesn’t really THINK at all.