Roger Scruton: Conservatism and the Environment

By Roger Scruton

There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home. Conservatives resonate to Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead; they believe in civil association between neighbours rather than intervention by the state; and they accept that the most important thing the living can do is to settle down, to make a home for themselves, and to pass that home to their children. Oikophilia, the love of home, lends itself ­ to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the Conservative Party has not seized hold of that cause as its own.

The problem arises because the agenda has been set by the globalisers. Global problems, we are told, require global solutions, and global solutions are trans-national solutions, involving the loss of sovereignty and the surrender to treaties that tie our hands. There may be reason to fear what is happening. But much more important for the activists is the political use to which that fear can be put – which is to destroy national sovereignty and to exert a top-down control by the self-appointed experts over the ordinary activities of mankind.

Moreover, by concentrating on climate change the activists have managed to distract attention from the many other environmental problems that could be, and often have been, solved by people acting in the conservative spirit. Environmental problems arise when homeostatic systems break down – in other words, when the feedback loop that establishes equilibrium is, for whatever reason, destroyed. The homeostatic system that has been most studied is the free market, which returns to equilibrium in changing conditions, provided the participants bear the costs of their actions. Left-wing thinkers refuse to accept this, and constantly invent bogeymen – ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘corporate greed’, ‘market failure’ – in order to justify the intervention of the state, and therefore control by socialists. But intervention by the state is the major cause of disequilibrium, and the environmental consequences can be seen all across the former communist world – in the Soviet case in the form of total devastation. The market ceases to deliver solutions to environmental problems when participants can externalise their costs – in other words, when they can escape the internal rules of the system. It is this that gives rise to ‘the tragedy of the commons’.

The solution is not automatically to call on the state to intervene but first to look for the social mechanisms that cause people to bear the costs of what they do. That is what the common law of tort has done in our country, acting often in conjunction with the law of trusts. It is what oikophilia naturally prompts us to do, as Elinor Ostrom has shown, when we are permitted to regard ‘common pool resources’ as shared by a defined and localised community. It is what the conservative instinct for trusteeship spontaneously urges upon us.

If we look at the history of the environmental movement in Britain we see those conservative principles working successfully, not through the state, but through the civil initiatives that challenge the state, beginning with the protests on behalf of the forests in the 17th century, initiated by John Evelyn's Silva, and leading to the creation of the National Trust at the end of the 19th century.
Vital to this conservative environmental movement has been the love of beauty. Through art, literature and local activism the British people have given voice to the idea of beauty as a shared resource, an irreplaceable fund of ‘social capital’. Beauty, they have recognised, acts as a barrier to the top-down brutalities of the exploiters and the social engineers.

But the environmental demagogues are determined to brush such obstacles aside. Littering the landscape with pylons and wind-farms appeals to them not because it has any scientific authority – for the science, such as it was, has been exploded – but because it refocuses the problem as a global one. To destroy the home that we have built over centuries is to afflict conservatives in the heart of their way of life. It is to deprive people of the primary source of oikophilia, and to make conservatism – the only political outlook that has ever done anything for the environment – irrelevant.

Moreover, it is through the pursuit of beauty that we could solve our most pressing environmental problem, which is the need for new homes. People resist large-scale development, because they know that it will produce an eyesore. Conservative-minded architects like Leon Krier at Poundbury and John Simpson at Swindon have shown that this need not be so, that we can learn from our traditional architecture how to build in ways that enhance the neighbourhood, and in ways that produce affordable housing too. People protest at the faceless estates that destroy the view from their window. But no-one protests at Poundbury except the modernist architects who sense the threat that it poses to their monopoly game.

The sad thing is that the Conservative Party has said so little to clarify what is at stake. Why do those old-fashioned words like trust, settlement, beauty and home so seldom pass the lips of those who are now, nominally at least, in charge? And why is the agenda still set by those for whom climate change, renewable energy and global warming define the problem, and for whom the favoured solution involves the total destruction of the things we love?

Comments

[Realcroquetplay]

All verg true, but we cant ignore potential global effects such as climate change, or perhaps better described as climate instability either. Surely we need to price in the exernality (CO2 emissions) and/or encourage lower emitting tchnologies?

[belbylafarge]

Market failure is not an invention of the left. It covers situations such as natural monopolies and environmental pollution which happens when polluters do not have to bear the cost of the effects of their actions on others.

I suggest the author avoids talking about economics as he is clearly ignorant of it.

[Elaine Turner]

I thought oikophilia was a fear of those outside the M25 by those that govern us!

If we closed down the UK tomorrow and emitted nothing, whatever may, or may not, be going on with the climate would continue. Our contributions to carbon emissions are as nothing compared to China and India. All we succeed in doing in hampering our production of carbons in a 'green way' is to cause our people to go cold and our industry to close because of excessive costs. We can contribute little to altering the climate. I wish those in Westminster would realise that!

[colliemum]

"Trans-generational loyalty" - a beautiful concept which does not just embrace the living, the dead and the as yet unborn, but emphatically the living, from grandchildren to grandparents.

This has been very successfully destroyed by the globalised Left, so that we now have an atomised society in most Western nations, where child raising is seen more and more to be the task of the state, thanks to the creeping destruction of the family. This atomisation has also led to the now common intergenerational 'war' between the generations, with more than a hint of class warfare. The old are being painted as greedy 'have-alls' who should be done away with so the young can get what they deem to be their due, now, without needing to put a lifetime's work into it.
Above all, this atomisation is characterised by a disrespect for life, from abortion to euthanasia on demand - because babies, infants and toddlers as well as the infirm and elderly are unproductive, and are cost factors because they need looking after.
The global, green Left doesn't care that their solutions for saving the planet are destroying just that which should and must be protected - from family life to landscapes to regions and animals. Perhaps it is already too late to reverse this global destruction.

[Drant001]

Hmmm strange unless you consider Fascists to be on the Left, I've noticed that the modern right seem to these days, Scruton seems to have forgotten who created what you might call the environmental movement in this country, as for euthanasia I can't imagine Pitt-Rivers ever considered himself to be on the'Left' Poundbury its OK, but it 'aint Utopia.

The Soil Association was formally registered on May 3, 1946,[2] and in the next decade grew from a few hundred to over four thousand members. The founding members comprised notable figures from various fields, including doctors, dentists, farmers, journalists, engineers and horticulturalists.[3]

According to their website:

"The Soil Association was founded in 1946 by a group of farmers, scientists and nutritionists who observed a direct connection between farming practice and plant, animal, human and environmental health."
"The catalyst was the publication of "The Living Soil" by Lady Eve Balfour, the sister of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, in 1943. The book presented the case for an alternative, sustainable approach to agriculture that has since become known as organic farming."

The Soil Association was founded in part due to concerns over intensive agriculture and in particular the use of herbicides. A comparison between the two forms of farming in 1939 was called the Haughley Experiment. The headquarters of the Soil Association used to be at the nearby Haughley Green in Suffolk.

One of the founders of the Soil Association was Jorian Jenks, a former member of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), closely associated with Oswald Mosley. Jenks was for years the editorial secretary of the Association's journal "Mother Earth". During the late 40s the Association involved far-right and even antisemitic elements, remnants of the defunct BUF, and was driven by far-right political ideas as much as ecological concerns. Following Jenks’ death in 1963, the Association tilted towards the left of the political spectrum, especially under the new president of the Association, Barry Commoner.[4]

The Soil Association was one of five like-minded associations that founded the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) in 1972 in Versailles, France, to act as the umbrella organisation to advocate for the global uptake of organic farming.

Along with Bob Saunders Jenks pretty much kicked off the environmental movement in this country, I do hope now that 'fracking' is looked upon as the solution to our energy problems especially the Right the likes of Scruton and Co. will not be protesting when it arrives in their rural idyll.

[Lt. Tom Paris.]

Roger Scruton dismisses neoliberalism as an invention of the Left which they use as a "bogeyman". The truth is the opposite. Neoliberalism is an anti-conservative fiscal movement that deregulated banks, reduced tax, caused inflation and created massive, unrepayable debt across the democracies. No fiscal conservative policy would have done this.

It is neoliberalism that has caused off-shoring of our manufacturing and done more to globalise the world and devour national sovereignty than anything else. The author needs to adopt a new critical position against neoliberalism if he is to be a genuine conservative.

[KandUnine]

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Some very interesting reading , one of the comments touched upon the idea that we should be looking towards china and india to Kerb their emissions as they are the big ones and need to to be addressed

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