Among them were Walter Hickel and Rogers Morton, Nixon's interior secretaries, who strongly resisted efforts to overexploit public lands. During the Reagan administration, many environmental groups discovered the power of polarization as an organizing tool. Groups that used such polarization techniques proved far more successful than ones that did not. But such polarization had the major drawback of driving people out of the environmental movement. It also narrowed the range of tools environmentalists could use to protect the environment.
Few people consider themselves enemies of the environment.
But to use polarization as an organizing tool, you have to identify an enemy. Since most of the people identified as enemies were Republicans, environmentalists began thinking of themselves as Democrats. During the 1970s, environmentalists frequently endorsed Republican candidates such as Newt Gingrich for office. But such endorsements thinned during the 1980s. One Republican member of Congress complains that No matter what I do for the environment, environmentalists will claim it wasn't enough and will oppose me in the election.