But conservatives can get beyond that kind of cynical calculation and should. The logic for a government role in wilderness conservation is easy to square with a political perspective that strongly favors free market forces in other arenas. Private conservation is important. Markets can't produce what we value because it's not packaged, traded, bought, or sold, because it's spontaneous, open, and free. The central objective of wilderness conservation, after all, is to ensure that in some places, nothing much is done at all.
Nothing is the one thing that big government is capable of doing quite well.
Even conservatives can believe in government's ability to do that. T. R. certainly did. Finally, conservatives can perhaps comfortably affirm that a place like Yellowstone National Park helps define what it is to be an American citizen. I'm quite sure that by any standard ecological metric that naturalists might come up with, Disney could run Yellowstone better than the National Park Service does. I suppose Disney could give us a better flag and a better national anthem, too.