Green Philosophy E-Book

Roger Scruton

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The environment has long been the undisputed territory of the political Left, which has seen the principal threats to the earth as issuing from international capitalism, consumerism and the over-exploitation of natural resources. In Green Philosophy, Scruton argues that conservatism is far better suited to tackle environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism. He shows that rather than entrusting the environment to unwieldy NGOs and international committees, we must assume personal responsibility and foster local sovereignty. People must be empowered to take charge of their environment, to care for it as a home, and to affirm themselves through the kind of local associations that have been the traditional goal of conservative politics. Our common future is by no means assured, but as Roger Scruton clearly demonstrates in this important book, there is a path that we can take which could ensure the future safety of our planet and our species.

Leseprobe

GREEN PHILOSOPHY

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2012 byAtlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britainin 2013 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Roger Scruton, 2012

The moral right of Roger Scruton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of boththe copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The extract taken from ‘Burnt Norton’, Collected Poems© The Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library.

978 1 84887 202 8ePub ISBN: 978 1 78239 503 4

Printed in Great Britain

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Contents

Preface

ONE

Local Warming

TWO

Global Alarming

THREE

The Search for Salvation

FOUR

Radical Precaution

FIVE

Market Solutions and Homeostasis

SIX

The Moral Economy

SEVEN

Heimat and Habitat

EIGHT

Beauty, Piety and Desecration

NINE

Getting Nowhere

TEN

Begetting Somewhere

ELEVEN

Modest Proposals

Appendix 1: Global Justice

Appendix 2: How Should We Live?

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Preface

The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to, save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since no one can be as gloomy as that without a reason. We believe the sceptics, since they offer hope, and remind us that the scaremongers have made an emotional investment in their gloom. And we watch as governments, NGOs and pressure groups both augment our anxieties and offer to assuage them.

Without the resources of government it is hard to address such problems as climate change, oil spills, plastic pollution and the loss of biodiversity. But history tells us that large-scale projects in the hands of bureaucrats soon cease to be accountable, and that regulations imposed by the state have side effects that often worsen what they aim to cure. Moreover, the same people who promise vast schemes for clean energy and reduced pollution, also promise vast schemes to expand airports, build roads and subsidize the motor industry. The fact is that, when problems pass to governments, they pass out of our hands. Our own understanding was shaped by local needs, not global uncertainties: it is the product of day-to-day emergencies, and its wisdom is the wisdom of survival.

But there is a lesson in this for the environmentalists. No large-scale project will succeed if it is not rooted in our small-scale practical reasoning. For it is we in the end who have to act, who have to accept and co-operate with the decisions made in our name, and who have to make whatever sacrifices will be required for the sake of future generations. It seems to me that current environmental movements, many of which demand far-reaching and even unimaginable government projects, as well as fundamental changes in our way of life, have failed to learn this lesson. Their schemes, like their cries of alarm, frighten the ordinary citizen without recruiting him, and he stands in the midst of a thousand warnings hoping to get through to the end of his life without going insane from the noise.

In this book I develop another way of looking at environmental problems, one that is, I hope, in keeping with human nature and also with the conservative philosophy that springs from the routines of everyday life. I do not offer detailed solutions to particular problems. Instead I propose a perspective on those problems that will make them seem like our problems, which we can start to solve, using our given moral equipment. That, it seems to me, is the enduring message of conservatism. And if it is greeted with hostility by those who cannot encounter a problem without advocating radical solutions with themselves in charge, then that is only further proof of its validity.

My intention in this book is to present the environmental question as a whole and in all its ramifications. Hence I have drawn on philosophy, psychology and economics, as well as on the writings of ecologists and historians. I argue that environmental problems must be addressed by all of us in our everyday circumstances, and should not be confiscated by the state. Their solution is possible only if people are motivated to confront them, and the task of government is to create the conditions in which the right kind of motive can emerge and solidify. I describe this motive (or rather, family of motives) as oikophilia, the love and feeling for home, and I set out the conditions in which oikophilia arises and the task of the state in making room for it. I defend local initiatives against global schemes, civil association against political activism, and small-scale institutions of friendship against large-scale and purpose-driven campaigns. Hence my argument runs counter to much of the environmental literature today, and may be greeted with scepticism by readers who nevertheless share my central concerns. For this reason I have explored the first principles of practical reasoning, and the ways in which rational beings can reach co-operative solutions to problems that cannot be addressed either by the individual or by the centralized state. I am critical equally of top-down regulations and goal-directed movements, and see the environmental problem as arising from the loss of equilibrium that ensues when people cease to understand their surroundings as a home. This loss has many causes; but not the least among them is the wrong use of legislation, and the fragmentation of society that comes about when the bureaucrats take charge of it.

Work on this book has been made possible by my position as resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where I have been fortunate to find the collegiate atmosphere and open-minded opposition of which I was in need. I have benefited from conversations with many colleagues there, and in particular from discussions with Kenneth P. Green, Lee Lane, Stephen Hayward and Christopher C. DeMuth. I also wish to thank Kimberly Hudson and Keriann Hopkins for invaluable editorial assistance, and Tony Curzon Price, Angelika Krebs, Ian Christie, Alicja Gęścińska, Mark Sagoff and David Wiggins, who patiently read through earlier drafts and rightly reproached me for my many errors, not all of which have been corrected.

Scrutopia, July 2010.

ONE

Local Warming

The environmental movement has recently been identified, both by its supporters and by many of its opponents, as in some way ‘on the left’: a protest on behalf of the poor and the powerless against big business, consumerism and the structures of social power. But that image is highly misleading. In Britain the environmental movement has its roots in the Enlightenment cult of natural beauty and in the nineteenth-century reaction to the Industrial Revolution, in which Tories and radicals played an equal part; and the early opposition to industrial farming joined guild socialists like H. J. Massingham, Tories like Lady Eve Balfour, secular gurus like Rudolf Steiner, and eccentric radicals like Rolf Gardiner, who borrowed ideas from left and right and who has even been identified (by Patrick Wright) as a kind of fascist.1American environmentalism incorporates the nature worship of John Muir, the radical individualism of Thoreau, the transcendentalism of Emerson, the ‘ecocentrism’ of Aldo Leopold and the social conservatism of the Southern Agrarians – a group of writers typified by the nostalgic poet Allen Tate, and represented in our day by Wendell Berry.2 French environmentalism is the child of pays réel conservatives like Gustave Thibon and Jean Giono, while the German Greens have inherited some of the romanticism of the early twentieth-century Wandervogel movement, as well as the vision of home and settlement so beautifully expressed by the German Romantic poets and taken up in our time both by the ex-Nazi Martin Heidegger and, in more lucid and liberal vein, by his Jewish student Hans Jonas.3

Moreover, environmentalists today are aware of the ecological damage done by revolutionary socialism – as in the forced collectivization, frenzied industrialization and gargantuan plans to shift populations, rivers and whole landscapes that we have witnessed in the Soviet Union and China.4 Left-leaning thinkers will not regard those abuses as the inevitable result of their ideas. Nevertheless, they will recognize that more work is needed, if the normal conscience is to be persuaded that socialism is the answer, rather than one part of the problem. At the same time, they seldom recognize any affinity with ‘the right’, and often seem to regard ‘conservatism’ as a dirty word, with no semantic connection to the ‘conservation’ that they favour.

The explanation, I believe, is that environmentalists have been habituated to see conservatism as the ideology of free enterprise, and free enterprise as an assault on the earth’s resources, with no motive beyond short-term gain. Furthermore, there is a settled tendency on the left to confuse rational self-interest, which powers the market, with greed, which is a form of irrational excess. Thus the Green Party manifesto of 1989 identifies the ‘false gods of markets, greed, consumption and growth’, and says ‘a Green Government would replace the false gods with cooperation, self-sufficiency, sharing and thrift’.5 This manifesto echoes a widespread feeling that to rely exclusively on markets to solve our problems is to drift inevitably in an anti-social direction. And this accusation goes hand in hand with the view that there are other, more altruistic motives that can be called upon, and which would be called upon by a left-wing government. I agree that there are those other motives. But I doubt that they would be called upon by a left-wing government.

Those who have called themselves conservatives in the political context are in part responsible for this misperception. For they have tended to see modern politics in terms of a simple dichotomy between individual freedom on the one hand, and state control on the other. Individual freedom means economic freedom, and this, in turn, means the freedom to exploit natural resources for financial gain. The timber merchant who cuts down a rainforest, the mining corporation that decapitates a mountain, the motor manufacturer that churns out an unending stream of cars, the cola producer that sends out a million plastic bottles each day – all are (or at any rate seem to be) obeying the laws of the market, and all, unless checked, are destroying some part of our shared inheritance. Because, in a market economy, the biggest actors do the most damage, environmentalists turn their hostility on big businesses, and on the free economies that produce them. Abolish the market economy, however, and the normal result is enterprises that are just as large and just as destructive but which, because they are in the hands of the state, are usually answerable to no sovereign power that can limit their predations. It is a plausible conservative response, therefore, not to advocate economic freedom at all costs, but to recognize the costs of economic freedom, and to take all steps to reduce them.

We need free enterprise, but we also need the rule of law that contains it, and law must keep pace with the threats. When enterprise is the prerogative of the state, the entity that controls the law is identical with the entity that has the most powerful motive to evade it – a sufficient explanation, it seems to me, of the ecological catastrophe of socialist economies. Studies have shown that free economies, with private property rights and an enforceable rule of law, not only consume far less energy per comparable product than economies where private property is insecure or absent, but also are able to adapt far more rapidly to the demand for clean energy, and for the reduction of emissions.6 And while markets cannot solve all our environmental problems, and are indeed the cause of some of them, the alternatives are almost always worse.

There is another and better reason for thinking that conservatism and environmentalism are natural bedfellows. Conservatism, as I understand it, means the maintenance of the social ecology. It is true that individual freedom is a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the only goal of politics. Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but law-governed economy. According to this view, the purpose of politics is not to rearrange society in the interests of some over-arching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium. The goal is to pass on to future generations, and meanwhile to maintain and enhance, the order of which we are the temporary trustees.7

This means that conservatism, in the eyes of its critics, will seem doomed to failure, being no more than an attempt to escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Disorder is always increasing, and every system, every organism, every spontaneous order will, in the long term, be randomized. However, even if true, that does not make conservatism futile as a political practice, any more than medicine is futile, simply because ‘in the long run we are all dead’, as Keynes famously put it. Rather, we should recognize the wisdom of Lord Salisbury’s terse summary of his philosophy, and accept that ‘delay is life’. Conservatism is the politics of delay, the purpose of which is to maintain in being, for as long as possible, the life and health of a social organism.

Moreover, as thermodynamics also teaches us, entropy can be countered indefinitely at the local level by injecting energy and exporting randomness. Conservatism emphasizes historical loyalties, local identities and the kind of long-term commitment that arises among people by virtue of their localized and limited affections. While socialism and liberalism are inherently global in their aims, conservatism is inherently local: a defence of some pocket of social capital against the forces of anarchic change. And it is precisely this local emphasis that uniquely suits conservatism to the task of addressing environmental problems.

Another way of putting the point is that, for the conservative, politics concerns the maintenance and repair of homeostatic systems – systems that correct themselves in response to destabilizing change. Markets are homeostatic systems; so too are traditions, customs and the common law; so too are families, and the ‘civil associations’ that make up the stuff of a free society.8 Conservatives are interested in markets, and prefer market forces to government action wherever the two are rivals. But this is not because of some quasi-religious belief in the market as the ideal form of social order or the sole solution to social and political problems; still less is it because of some cult of homo economicus and the ‘rational self-interest’ that supposedly governs him. It is rather because conservatives look to markets as self-correcting social systems, which can confront and overcome shocks from outside, and in normal cases adjust to the needs and motives of their members.

There are other such systems, however. There are the long-term associations over time that form the traditions and institutions of a self-governing society. There is representative government in the hands of officers who must pay the price of their mistakes. And there are the legal instruments that return the costs of mistakes to the people who make them. In later chapters I will explore some of these systems, and the states of mind that sustain them. It is only by respecting and exploiting those states of mind that we can develop a successful environmental policy. For they introduce into human affairs the crucial element of stewardship. They provide some of the negative feedback without which markets can become the anti-social and exploitative machines that their opponents suppose them always to be.

It follows that conservatism admits of many varieties. Conservatives in America emphasize economic freedoms, and associate this emphasis with a rugged individualism and a belief in the virtues of risk-taking and enterprise. Conservatives in Europe have favoured tradition, custom and civil society, emphasizing the need to contain enterprise within a durable social order. This difference of emphasis can lead to conflicting policies. Thus there is a tendency in American conservatism to prefer ‘market solutions’, whether or not they pose a threat to traditional forms of community and social equilibrium. Americans collectively possess an abundance of land and natural resources, and this has enabled them to put problems of scarcity and overpopulation out of mind, believing that there will always be space and resources for some new experiment. Europe is an assemblage of constricted states, settled throughout recorded history and with precious habitats, both human and animal, cared for and fought for over centuries. European conservatives are acutely aware of the constraints that surround them, and of the dangers of ‘breaking out’. This does not mean that they reject market solutions. It means that they will pay more attention than their American counterparts to the things that make markets possible: to law, tradition and the moral life. Likewise Europeans, heirs to precious cities embellished over centuries, do not have the same attitude to the human habitat as Americans. I return to these differences in Chapter 8, since they point to matters from which American conservatives have something important to learn.9

The conservative understanding of political action that I propose is formulated in terms of trusteeship rather than enterprise, of conversation rather than command, of friendship rather than the pursuit of some common cause.10 Those ideas lend themselves readily to the environmental project, and it always surprises me that so few environmentalists seem to see this. It is as obvious to a conservative that our reckless pursuit of individual gratification jeopardizes the social order as that it jeopardizes the planet. It is obvious too that the wisest policies are those that strive to protect and keep in place the customs and institutions that place a brake on our appetites, renew the sources of social contentment and forbid us to pass on the costs of what we do to those who did not incur them.

The major difficulty, from the environmental point of view, is that social equilibrium and ecological equilibrium are not the same idea, and not necessarily in harmony. Two examples illustrate the problem. Democracies appear to achieve equilibrium only in a condition of economic growth. Periods of stagnation, rapid inflation or impoverishment are also periods of radical discontent, in which resentment and deprivation lead to instability. Hence the first concern of democratic governments is to encourage economic growth, regardless of its environmental costs. It is true that serious poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation and that a certain level of prosperity is necessary if people are to free the energy and resources required to protect their environment.11 Studies have suggested that the curve postulated by Simon Kuznets, which shows income inequality at first rising and then falling as societies develop, is exhibited also by key environmental factors. Above an average annual per capita income of $4,000 to $5,000, it has been suggested, environmental degradation steadily declines.12 Nevertheless, whether expressed as a prediction or as a recommendation, the statement that there are ‘limits to growth’ has an air of intuitive plausibility. Optimists will set these limits further in the future than pessimists, and the ongoing argument between them will delay any consensus.13 But it is evident that, beyond a certain point, what is needed may be not more growth but less – and less is precisely what no democratic government can afford to promise. We see this in the attitude of recent British governments to airports, business parks and roads, the environmental impact of which is put out of mind, once these things have been packaged in the language of ‘growth’. We see it in the American response to the Kyoto Protocol. It is not only big business that puts the pressure on the American Senate not to ratify such agreements. It is also the desire of the Senators to be re-elected.14 This is not to say that the Protocol was the right solution to the problems that it addressed. But it is to acknowledge a serious difficulty facing all attempts to find binding treaties that will constrain consumption around the globe. Why should a politician put his signature to a treaty when the effect of doing so is that he will be out of office, and therefore unable to press for its enforcement?

Nor is democracy the only problematic case. Other forms of social equilibrium may equally pose a threat to the environment, not because they depend on economic growth, but because they depend on population growth, or on the consumption of some dwindling resource such as a rainforest. Consider the traditional Islamic societies observed in North Africa and parts of the Middle East. These achieve equilibrium only when families enjoy spheres of private sovereignty, under the tutelage of a patriarch whose social standing is constantly enhanced by evidence of his reproductive powers. Each family must be forever adding to its retinue of sons if it is to retain its position. The result, in modern conditions, is a population explosion that is rapidly destroying the environment of Muslim Arabia and North Africa, spilling over into a Europe whose institutions and traditions are in friction with the Muslim way of life, and now putting in question half a century of uneasy dictatorship.15

There is a tendency among environmentalists to single out the big players in the market as the principal culprits: to pin environmental crime on those – like oil companies, motor manufacturers, logging corporations, agribusinesses, supermarkets – that make their profits by exporting their costs to others (including others who are not yet born). But this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of course it is true that the big players externalize their costs whenever they can. But so do we. Whenever we travel by air, visit the supermarket, or consume fossil fuels, we are exporting our costs to others, and to future generations. A free economy is driven by individual demand. And in a free economy individuals, just as much as big businesses, strive to pass on their costs to others, while keeping the benefits. The solution is not the socialist one, of abolishing the free economy, since this merely places massive economic power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats, who are equally in the business of exporting their costs, while enjoying secure rents on the social product.16 The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And we can correct ourselves in this way only if we have motives to do so – motives strong enough to restrain our appetites.

This tells us nothing, however, about what we must do to make our dealings friendlier to the environment. To defend slow food, slow transport and low energy consumption in a society addicted to fast food, tourism, luxury and waste is to risk the anger of those who need to be converted. Not only are there no votes to be won by seeking to close airports, to narrow roads or to impose a local food economy by fiat, but there is the serious risk of making matters worse, by representing environmental protection as the cause of nostalgic cranks. All environmental activists are familiar with this reaction. Yet I am surprised they do not see that it is a version of the very same reaction directed towards social conservatives, when they defend the beleaguered moral order that was – until a few decades ago – passed from generation to generation as a matter of course. Environmentalists and conservatives are both in search of the motives that will defend a shared but threatened legacy from predation by its current trustees.

Rational self-interest is not, I think, the motive that we are seeking, although, as I will argue, it has an important part to play. Rational self-interest is subject to the well-known free rider and prisoner’s dilemma syndromes, and can avert ‘the tragedy of the commons’17 only in special circumstances. Social contract theorists, from Hobbes to Rawls, have attempted to overcome the problems of social choice, but always they come up against some version of the original difficulty: why is it more reasonable to bide by the contract than to pretend to bide by it?18

The need is for non-egotistical motives that can be elicited in ordinary members of society, and relied upon to serve the long-term ecological goal. Burke proposed ‘the hereditary principle’, as protecting important institutions from pillage or decay, and believed that people have a natural tendency to accept the limits that this principle places on their conduct. Hegel argued for the priority of non-contractual obligations, of the kind that sustain the family, and believed that similar obligations could be recuperated and exercised at the political level. In similar vein, de Maistre gave a central place to piety, as a motive that puts divinely ordained traditions and constitutions above the temptations of self-interest.19

Those suggestions20 are unlikely to carry full conviction today, though each tries to frame a picture of human motivation that does not make rational self-interest the sole ground for political decision-making. But we should take a lesson from Burke, Hegel and de Maistre. We should recognize that environmental protection is a lost cause if we cannot find the incentives that would lead people in general, and not merely their self-appointed representatives, to advance it. Here is where environmentalists and conservatives can and should make common cause. That common cause is territory – the object of a love that has found its strongest political expression through the nation state.

Many environmentalists will acknowledge that local loyalties and local concerns must be given a proper place in our decision-making, if we are to counter the adverse effects of the global economy. Hence the oft-repeated slogan: ‘Think globally, act locally.’ However, environmentalists will tend to baulk at the suggestion that local loyalty should be seen in national terms, rather than as the small-scale expression of a humane universalism. Yet there is a very good reason for emphasizing nationality. For nations are communities with a political shape. They are predisposed to assert their sovereignty, by translating the common sentiment of belonging into collective decisions and self-imposed laws. Nationality is a form of territorial attachment, but it is also a proto-legislative arrangement. Moreover, nations are collective agents in the sphere of global decision-making. Through membership in a nation the individual has a voice in global affairs.

It is through developing this idea, of a territorial sentiment that contains the seeds of sovereignty within itself, that conservatives make their distinctive contribution to ecological thinking. Were conservatism to adopt a slogan, it should be ‘feel locally, think nationally’. This does not mean that conservatives are nationalists, in the manner of the nineteenth-century romantics who adopted that creed.21 They are aware of the historical and transitory nature of the nation state, of the need to contain and soften its belligerence, and of the threat that it poses to local loyalties and civil associations. But they recognize that, in the current environmental crisis, there is no agent to take the needed measures, and no focus of loyalty to secure consent to them, other than this one.

A useful contrast is provided by George Monbiot, who has trenchantly argued the case for some kind of global politics, through which ordinary people can fend off the disasters that are being concocted within the global economy, and give voice to their desire for a safe, equitable and sustainable economic order.22 I suspect that this would be the preferred way forward for those who have retained a vestige of the old socialist agenda, and who still wish to combine environmental rectitude with social justice. However, this approach is premised on two highly questionable assumptions: first, that sustainability and social justice can be combined; and second, that ordinary people, given the choice, would opt for sustainability rather than the gratification of their present desires. In some circumstances they would, of course. But it is precisely those circumstances that the global economy erodes. By disrupting old patterns of settlement and managed environments globalization undermines the values and expectations on which a stable way of life depends. This is as true of global politics as it is true of the global economy.23

The conservative approach is more reasonable, even if less ambitious. Rather than attempt to rectify environmental and social problems at the global level, conservatives seek a reassertion of local sovereignty over known and managed environments. This involves affirming the right of nations to self-government, and to the adoption of policies that will chime with local loyalties and customs. It also involves opposing the all-pervasive tendency of modern government towards centralization, and actively returning to local communities some of the powers confiscated by central bureaucracies – including those confiscated by transnational institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations and the European Union. The attachment to territory and the desire to protect that territory from erosion and waste remain powerful motives that are presupposed in all demands for sacrifice that issue from the mouths of politicians.24 For such motives grow from a strong root, which is love for one’s home. As I argue in Chapter 7, this motive is not single or simple, and its many-layered structure reflects the psychic archaeology of human settlement. But it is possible to describe the motive and its many components, to amplify it, and to put it to work in the new and dangerous conditions of our emerging world.

In Chapter 10 I consider the examples of England and North America in order to show the way in which patriotic sentiments have protected highly vulnerable environments through fostering the motive of stewardship, and how that motive has both operated independently of the state and often been undermined by the state. Sentiments of territorial attachment, I argue, have helped to maintain an inherited equilibrium that is both social and ecological; and their repudiation in recent decades is one major cause of the growing entropy. At this local, national, level, coherent environmental policies and coherent conservative policies coincide.

Indeed, it is only at this local level that it is realistic to hope for improvement. For there is no evidence that global political institutions have done anything to limit the global entropy – on the contrary, by encouraging communication around the world, and by eroding national sovereignty and legislative barriers, they have fed into that global entropy and weakened the only true sources of resistance to it. I know many environmentalists who agree with me that the WTO and the World Bank are potential threats to the environment, not merely by breaking down self-sufficient and self-reproducing peasant economies, but also by eroding national sovereignty wherever this places an obstacle before the goal of free trade.25 Many also seem to agree with me that traditional communities deserve protection from sudden and externally engineered change, not merely for the sake of their sustainable economies, but also because of the values and loyalties that constitute the sum of their social capital.

The odd thing is that so few environmentalists follow the logic of this argument to its conclusion, and recognize that we too deserve protection from global entropy, that we too must retain what we can of the loyalties that attach us to our territory, and make of that territory a home. Yet, in so far as we have seen any successful attempts to reverse the tide of ecological destruction, these have issued from national or local schemes to protect territory recognized as ‘ours’ – defined, in other words, through some inherited entitlement. I am thinking of the following: the initiative of American nature lovers, acting upon the United States Congress, to create national parks, the action by Iceland to protect the breeding ground of the Atlantic cod, the legislation that freed Ireland from polythene bags, the clean energy initiatives in Sweden and Norway, the Swiss planning laws that have enabled local communities to retain control over their environments and to manage those environments as a shared possession, the British ‘Green Belt’ policies that brought an end to urban sprawl, the initiatives of lobster-catchers in Maine and cod-fishers in Norway to establish self-regulating fisheries with local people in charge. These are small-scale achievements, but they are real, and could, if replicated more widely, change the face of the earth for the better.26 Moreover, they are successful because they appeal to a natural motive – the shared love of a shared place.

That, it seems to me, is the goal towards which serious environmentalism and serious conservatism both point – namely, home, the place where we are and that we share, the place that defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil. Many of those who have seen this connection between conservatism and environmentalism have also – like Patrick Wright – been suspicious of it.27 And local environmentalism between the wars – especially in Germany – was undeniably part of the collectivist turn, even if only circumstantially connected to the nationalist frenzy.28 However, it is time to take a more open-minded and imaginative vision of what conservatism and environmentalism have to offer each other. For nobody seems to have identified a motive more likely to serve the environmentalist cause than this one, of the shared love for our home. It is a motive in ordinary people. It can provide a foundation both for a conservative approach to institutions and a conservationist approach to the land. It is a motive that might permit us to reconcile the demand for democratic participation with the respect for future generations and the duty of trusteeship. It is, in my view, the only serious resource that we have, in our fight to maintain local order in the face of globally stimulated decay. And it is worth adding that, in so far as thermodynamics has a story to tell, it is this one.

I describe this motive (or family of motives) as oikophilia, the love of the oikos, or household. The Greek word appears, in Latinate form, in ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’; but I use it to describe the deep stratum of the human psyche that the Germans know as Heimatgefühl. Self-styled conservatives have been much criticized – often rightly – for their belief that all political decisions are really economic decisions, and that market solutions are the only solutions there are. Yet the conservative emphasis on economics begins to make sense if we put the oikos back in oikonomia. Respect for the oikos is the real reason why conservatives dissociate themselves from currently fashionable forms of environmental activism. Radical environmentalists tend to be suspicious of national feeling. They repudiate old hierarchies and strive to remove the dead from their agenda, being largely unmoved by Burke’s thought that, in doing so, they also remove the unborn. They tend to define their goals in global and international terms, and support NGOs and pressure groups that will fight the multinational predators on their own territory and with weapons that make no use of national sovereignty.

German suspicion of Heimatgefühl goes further. Many German intellectuals will agree with Bernhard Schlink that a dangerous seed of utopianism lies planted in recent invocations of the Heimat. The home has been conceived as a ‘no place’, built from unsatisfiable emotional needs and therefore always a threat to the mere realities that disappoint the one who longs for it.29 The fifty-five hours of Edgar Reitz’s cinematic trilogy Heimat do not entirely dispel that impression, but they illustrate the argument that will be central to this book. I will explore the sentiment of oikophilia in its available modern forms, and I will define the real environmental task as one of sustaining that sentiment, and protecting it from all that wars against it – from oikophobia (the repudiation of the home), from technophilia (the urge to obliterate the home with functional appliances), from consumerism (the triumph of instrumental reasoning that turns somewhere into anywhere), and from the desire to spoil and desecrate that is one of the permanent diseases of human nature.

Since its origins in the writings of Hume, Smith and Burke intellectual conservatism has emphasized the importance of small associations, autonomous institutions and the various trusts and colleges that lie beyond the reach of the state. The emphasis was shared by de Maistre and Hegel on the Continent and made pivotal to his analysis of American democracy by Tocqueville. What those thinkers had in mind was civil association: gatherings of people that exist for the sake of membership – sometimes, but by no means always, with a common purpose – conducting their affairs without interference from the state, and usually without the desire for political prominence. Such associations form the stuff of civil society, and conservatives emphasize them precisely because they are the guarantee that society will renew itself without being led and controlled by the state.30 Although, legally speaking, these ‘little platoons’, as Burke called them, are NGOs, they are conceived in entirely different terms from the big NGOs that have, until recently, dominated environmental campaigns. The NGO shows in its name that it is not a government organization; but the very emergence of this name indicates the extent to which NGOs have been in the habit of competing with government for a share of the action. Many of them also have political aspirations, wishing to recruit their members to purposes that can be achieved only through far-reaching legislative change.

The difference here can be simply put by saying that, while civil associations exist for the sake of their members, the big NGOs often exist purely for the sake of their goals. Such NGOs may offer nothing to their members besides demands for money. The distinction can be illustrated by reviewing some examples. Typical among activist NGOs is the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), an NGO founded in 1969 that campaigns around the world on behalf of animals. IFAW recruits members through shocking adverts. These describe the plight of bears condemned by their Chinese captors to suffer agonizing extractions of their spleen, the mass slaughter of seals on Canadian ice floes, or anything else that will cause the average animal lover to give money to the person who promises to stop such things. The principal co-founder of IFAW, Brian Davies, received $2.5 million from the Fund on his retirement, in return for the right to use his name – a right that many people would be happy not to exercise. The Fund itself continues to finance political campaigns across the world, one of which, the campaign to ban hunting with hounds in England, was recently successful. (IFAW’s political wing, the Political Animal Lobby, gave £1 million to the Labour Party in exchange for a promise to instigate the ban. It is worth noting that this kind of corruption of the political process elicits no cries of outrage when donor and recipient are both ‘on the left’. IFAW’s worldwide income and expenditure is around $100 million annually.)

IFAW is one extreme instance of an NGO devoted to causes the value of which it cannot debate, since it has no forum for discussion, and the results of which might be damaging to its own putative goals – as a ban on the seal cull in Canada may very well be damaging to animal welfare in that country, as well as destructive of a human habitat vital to the Inuit people of the coast.31 IFAW is accountable to no one other than its leadership, exists purely in the realm of politics, and cannot debate the long-term effects of its short-term purposes. It requires nothing of its supporters other than their money, and acts as an uncompromising, single-issue pressure group in all the places where it enters the fray. It is organized internationally, and takes account of no issue other than the one that defines its stated purpose. Hence it attacks the very foundations of democratic politics, the purpose of which is to reconcile conflicts, to achieve workable compromises, and to take collective responsibility for a settled community and its many interests. The same can be said of the big multinational environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Earth First!, which, precisely because they escape national jurisdictions and the burdens of realistic politics, can easily become threats to the homeostatic systems that they ought to be protecting.

A useful illustration is provided by the case of Greenpeace versus Shell, over the matter of the Brent Spar oil platform, which Shell had proposed to dispose of by sinking it in the sea. Greenpeace countered with a massively orchestrated hate campaign against Shell, involving boycotts, advertising, leaflets and pressure on shareholders, in order to prevent the sinking of the platform. The reason given was that the platform contained many thousand tonnes of oil and would be an environmental hazard for years to come: a reason that turned out to be false. No suggestion was made that Greenpeace and Shell should sit down together and discuss the problem. This was a fight to the death, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.

Greenpeace won, and the platform was lifted and conveyed to a Norwegian fjord, an unsightly wreck that was eventually dismantled at a cost of £43 million (as opposed to the £3 million required to sink it). Because of the energy required to dismantle the rig, and the polluting side effects of doing so, this was the worst way, from the environmental point of view, of dealing with the problem. (Indeed, some environmentalists now recommend that old oil platforms be sunk in the oceans, since they provide beneficial habitats for fish.) Having cost Shell millions of dollars, and unjustly damaged its reputation, Greenpeace, on proof that the platform after all contained no oil, offered an airy apology and went on to its next campaign.32

This is not to say that the big NGOs are always wrong in their campaigns or that multinational companies always behave responsibly. On the contrary, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have drawn attention to real abuses, and used their high profile to good effect in educating the public. As companies get bigger, developing the capacity to move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, evading their liabilities in each, so does their accountability dwindle. Shareholders rarely ask questions, and certainly not about the environmental consequences of actions that are bringing them a return on their investment. It is one of the weaknesses in the conservative position, as this has expressed itself in America, that its reasonable enthusiasm for free enterprise is seldom tempered by any recognition that free enterprise among citizens of a single nation state is very different from free enterprise conducted by a multinational company, in places to which the company and its shareholders have no civic tie. It is this carelessness towards ‘other places’ that underlies environmental catastrophes like BP’s oil-rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the ‘slash and burn’ cropping by multinational agribusinesses in the Amazon rainforest.

Nevertheless, the activist NGOs have an accountability deficit that is the natural consequence of their way of working. The contrast with civil associations is illustrated by the Women’s Institute, which was founded in 1915 to provide support to British women in the countryside, during the difficult years of the Frist World War. This now has 205,000 members in Britain, organized in local branches throughout the country, and which has been imitated across the English-speaking world. The WI has no purpose other than to encourage its members to gather around socially beneficial projects, and to form mutually supportive local clubs. It responds to suggestions from below, is accountable for its funds to those who provide them, and steers clear of politics. It shapes the moral character and the social aspirations of its members by providing an enduring institution that unites them across space and time. It feeds spontaneously into their patriotic feelings, and offers them friendship and support in times of trouble. It is, in short, an instrument of peace, and, being ‘depoliticized’, it lends itself to the conservative instinct, offering solace to those who wish to keep their heads down and get on with their lives.

Yet I have no doubt that the WI has done an immense amount of good, not only for its members, but also for their shared habitat. It has played an active part in promoting the local food movement, not through campaigns, but through the opportunities that it provides to farmers and their families. Its members are first to get together to support environmental initiatives in their neighbourhood, and its whole emphasis, despite its nationwide organization, is on local activities and things ‘close to home’. Likewise I have no doubt that IFAW has done as much harm as good, not only to the rural communities of England, but also to the Inuit of Canada and the coastal hunters of Namibia, who have been targeted by its campaigns. And it is quite possible that wild animals are, on the whole, worse off as a result of its actions, and that the animals that might most have benefited – the imprisoned bears of Asia – are beyond the reach of its campaigns. As for Greenpeace, the jury, to my mind, is out.

Not every big NGO is open to that kind of criticism. Many of the best-known NGOs steer clear of politics, or lift some of the burdens that government must otherwise bear – the Red Cross, for example, and the educational and medical charities that have played such an important part in building functional civil societies in Europe and America. But it is significant that I use the word ‘charity’ to describe these institutions, and it is significant too that, ever since the preamble to the Charitable Uses Act of 1605, English law has acknowledged their social significance and granted exemption from taxes that might otherwise have impeded their work. Indeed, we rarely use the ‘NGO’ label in describing this kind of institution, for the very reason that we do not see them as competing with government or as pressing for political results. They are active, but not activist.

Of course, there are many distinctions to be drawn here among the various ways in which the need to associate and the need to act jointly for the common good can be expressed, fulfilled and exploited. Behind the tentative contrast that I have been drawing between the activist NGO and the civil association there lies another and more interesting distinction between two competing conceptions of politics. There are people who see politics as mobilizing society towards a goal. And there are others who see politics as a procedure for resolving conflicts and reconciling interests, but one that has no overarching goal of its own. The first group includes all revolutionaries, many democratic socialists, for whom political action should guide society towards an equal and fraternal order, and maybe some of those whom John Gray calls ‘neo-liberals’, whose ruling concern is to rearrange communities and institutions on free market principles, regardless of their innate tendency in some other direction.33 The second group includes most conservatives and also those called ‘classical liberals’ in the typology of political science. In this book I shall be defending the second kind of politics. Wise government, I maintain, should not have a goal beyond that of reconciling, as best it can, the goals of its citizens. Only in emergencies can societies be conscripted to a shared purpose and emergencies spell the end of civil politics. People on the left tend to define their political stance in terms of an agenda – a list of changes that will create a ‘new society’ in place of the old. Many environmentalists in recent times have shared that approach, pressing for a dominant agenda that will reshape society in keeping with the norms of environmental rectitude. After all, if you see yourself as representing the uncountable numbers of future people you may feel a justified impatience towards arrangements designed for the convenience of those living now.

Such environmental movements, therefore, tend to be NGO-shaped; while conservative political initiatives tend to be civil-shaped – not so much movements as forms of association, like the WI. This distinction is not absolute, and there are many associations that are part purposive, part purposeless, in the manner of sports clubs, churches and reading groups. But the distinction bears upon the environmental issue in important ways. The most influential agenda-driven NGOs are powerful, largely unaccountable, and unable to discuss the validity of their goals, since they are defined in terms of them; civil associations are, on the whole, unconcerned with political power, accountable to their members, and able to adjust in response to criticism. They are not means to some end, but ends in themselves, as people are. Typically NGOs move forward on a slope, and need to maintain an impetus if they are not to crumble. Civil associations are homeostatic systems, which usually recover from their own mistakes and return towards equilibrium when they are disturbed. Environmental problems arise largely because human purposes, pursued in a linear way, destroy homeostatic systems. Hence it is the route marked out by the civil association, rather than that followed by the activist NGO, that ought to be followed. The purpose of this book is to describe that route, and to encourage the reader to set foot on it.

Conservatives tend to see the campaigning NGOs like Greenpeace and Earth First! not merely as institutions without internal equilibrium, but also as threats to the equilibrium of others, on account of their desire to pin on the big actors blame that should in fact be distributed across us all. And by casting the conflict in the form of a zero-sum game between themselves and the enemy, they obscure what it is really about, which is the accountability of both. It seems to me that the dominance of international decision-making by unaccountable bureaucracies, unaccountable NGOs and multinational corporations accountable only to their shareholders (who may have no attachment to the environment that the corporations threaten) has made it more than ever necessary for us to follow the conservative path. We need to retreat from the global back to the local, so as to address the problems that we can collectively identify as ours, with means that we can control, from motives that we all feel. That means being clear as to who we are, and why we are in it together and committed to our common survival. I respect George Monbiot’s attempt to identify this first-person plural in planetary terms, just as I respect the Enlightenment conception of the human being, as a rational agent motivated by universal principles. As a conservative, however, I bow to the evidence of history, which tells me that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections, the best of which is the territorial loyalty that leads them to live at peace with strangers, to honour their dead and to make provision for those who will one day replace them in their earthly tenancy.

TWO

Global Alarming

That is all very well, you might say. But our problems are no longer of the kind that can be solved at the local level, or by relying on the old-fashioned attachments that appeal to conservatives. Climate change has lifted the issue of the environment entirely clear of normal politics, and presented us with the vision of a catastrophe that will negate all our old ways of securing our common welfare. An environmental policy devoted to recycling bottles, cleaning rivers and defending red squirrels from grey has a certain charm, and may in this or that particular take inspiration from a vision of Old England, Dixieland or . Meanwhile, however, Old England, Dixieland and are destined to disappear beneath the rising oceans, or to burn to a cinder under violent suns. The worst-case scenarios that are now offered and revised day by day are so truly alarming that they seem to throw all our plans and policies into disarray, and while the fear and apprehension are shared by people of all political persuasions, no single philosophy or ideology seems to offer the solution for which everybody craves. What should be our response to this? Before proceeding with the body of my argument it is vital to address that question. For if we have no answer to it, then all discussion of the environment and its place in political thinking will be meaningless.