On point one, James Howard Kunstler has written about how destructive our throwaway strip-mall architecture helps condition all of us to regard the built environment as disposable. We’ll use it up and then move on. Here’s the relevant passage from Crunchy Cons:

Kunstler is a ferocious critic of the man-made environment in contemporary America, which he believes “has ceased to be a credible human habitat.” He contended [in “The Geography of Nowhere”] that since about 1945, We’ve been building neighborhoods not to suit authentic human needs for beauty and community, but to move product as cheaply and quickly as possible. For reasons of expedience and efficiency, Kunstler argued, Americans cut themselves off from architectural tradition, a tradition rooted in the same ancient wisdom about pattern language and its effects on the human psyche that Jonathan Hale cites. We began to build houses and neighborhoods and cities that have no connection to the past or the future, and that ultimately are not worth caring about. Our built landscape, Kunstler has written, “ends up diminishing us spiritually, impoverishing us socially, and degrading the aggregate set of cultural patterns that we call civilization.”

“This is the price that we pay for ignoring our own psychology and millenniums of tradition that proceeded from it in the form of practical wisdom,” he wrote. “I daresay many Americans don’t care what their own houses or their neighbors’ houses look like. We check this off to good old American pragmatism, or patriotic individualism, but the consequences are rather serious: a world outside the confining walls of the home that nobody cares about, a country made up of places that are not worth caring about, and a nation that is not worth defending.”

That’s harsher than I would have put it, but his point is essentially sound. It is supremely ironic that the chief defenders of a status quo that violates tradition so radically are … conservatives.