St. Matthew Island. Photo: Dave KleinWelcome to another edition of Uncle Ryan's story time…

Editor's note: Red, Green and Blue is Green Options' weekly take on politics and the environment from both sides of the aisle. Ryan Thibodaux represents the progressive position. Jimmy Hogan's conservative take on this issue is available here.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful uninhabited Alaskan paradise called St. Matthew Island. In 1944, the United States Coast Guard arrived and stationed 19 men on the island to aid ships and aircraft with navigation. To ensure a backup food supply for the men, the Coast Guard released 29 reindeer on the island.

When World War II ended, the Coast Guard decided to abandon the island base, leaving the reindeer with no predators and with a seemingly unlimited food supply of thick carpets of yummy lichen. For the reindeer, it was undoubtedly heaven on earth.

In fact, by the time Dave Klein of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service became the next human to step foot on the island in 1957, more than 1,300 reindeer were thriving there. They were healthy, fat, and their numbers were still growing.

Klein returned to St. Matthew again in 1963 and counted more than 6,000 reindeer this time, but all was not well in the island paradise. Klein found that food availability for the reindeer had decreased dramatically, and the toll the reindeer were taking on the health of the rest of the island's ecosystem was astounding. The reindeer themselves were smaller than they had been 6 years earlier, and Klein observed that the relative populations of males and of young reindeer were decreasing.

Klein returned once more in 1966. He was astonished to find just 42 living reindeer. The dramatic population decline was due in part to a harsh winter in 1963-64, but rapid over-consumption of resources combined with explosive population growth was also heavily to blame. By 1980, the reindeer were completely extinct on the island.

Between 1944 and 1963, the reindeer "GDP" was seemingly in great shape. They were growing, healthy, happy, well-fed, and doing their Darwinian duty of making as many of themselves as possible. They were the undisputed rulers of the island. Unfortunately, natural selection had not blessed the animals with the ability to think critically, reason inductively, or observe scientifically. If they had those abilities, they would have undoubtedly noticed that they were destroying the limited resources available to them on their small island, and were driving themselves toward an inescapable rendezvous with oblivion.

We humans, too, are living on a small island in the middle of the universe. We rule the planet with an iron fist and have lived for millenia under the assumption that the commons are limitless. Even in 2001, the Vice President of the United States could be heard saying, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

Conservation is a personal virtue. It is also a national virtue, a political virtue, and a human virtue. There's no need to stop there, either. Conservation is a fantastic basis not just for sound energy policy, but water policy, food and farm policy, waste management policy, trade policy, and, well, just about any other policy, too! Call me optimistic, but I'd like to think that humans are smarter than the reindeer of St. Matthew Island. I'm thankful that we (apparently) possess the mental abilities that could have led the reindeer to salvation.

We know that our system of industrial capitalism is adept at valuing human, financial, and manufactured capital, but arrogantly ignores the fourth essential form of capital: natural capital. We know that doing so is entirely unsustainable and in direct defiance of the laws of nature.

We recognize the limitations of GDP and other economic indicators when it comes to true economic health (not to mention quality of life, happiness, and social justice). We know that the depletion of air, water, soil, energy sources, and natural ecosystems are expenses that don't show up on balance sheets or quarterly government economic reports, but that those actions are enormously costly nonetheless.

The bookworms among us even know that Teddy Roosevelt (Republican, conservative) had it figured out a century ago:

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase it's usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very properity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

We do know all of this, don't we?