"Doing More By Doing Less"

As a journalist, Jon Christensen, who is a doctoral candidate in history at Stanford, will be covering The White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation that opens tomorrow, 29 August, in St. Louis, Missouri. At The Uneasy Chair, Jon has two posts up in anticipation of the opening of the conference:"The White House and Conservation" and"‘A Subject of Transcendent Importance'." There's a long history of such conferences, he notes, and they have changed fairly dramatically. What are we to make of the shift of this conference away from the White House to St. Louis, where it will meet under the Gateway Arch? And what are we to make of the changing composition of the conferees? What about the Bush administration's claim that by doing less about the environment, it empowers people at state and local levels to come up with solutions to problems that they more immediately confront? Why is energy conservation no longer on the table, even for discussion? By decentralizing decision making, is the administration simply getting out of the way of private power brokers? Is the administration simply doing less by doing less or is it more complicated than that?