While the nation has made great progress on a number of environmental fronts, the size and cost of the federal environmental regulatory bureaucracy have come under sharp criticism. One alternative policy approach—long available, but underutilized—is based on the straightforward governmental use of line drawing (also known as “geographic delineations”). These policies include the creation of development buffer zones as well as urban growth boundaries and density/open-space controls that may be utilized to protect air, water, biodiversity, and other resources targeted by federal environmental laws. These policies have very low administrative costs relative to current federal environmental statutes, which consume vast amounts of economic, human, and temporal resources. In this way, these policies have what we can call high “relative administrability.” Even so, geographic delineation policies remain largely unutilized. The question is: why? One important reason is the failure of conservative policymakers and commentators to accept that prescriptive line-drawing policies actually support a number of principles valued by conservatives. In fact, geographic delineations offer great promise as policies that many, if not most, environmentalists would support but that would also provide more efficient environmental management from a conservative perspective—at least more efficient than relying predominantly on expansive federal control like we do today.