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Conservatives and Conservationists
[Caleb Stegall 03/20 02:11 PM]Any discussion of the environment among conservatives ought to start with this wonderful article on the subject by Jeremy Beer which was first published in the predecessor magazine to The New Pantagruel, Re:Generation Quarterly. First, Beer cites eminent conservative historian John Lukacs’ provocative statement that “You cannot be conservative and be on the side of the concrete pourers and the cement mixers.” (It might be interesting just to have a discussion of this one line.) Beer goes on to recite the historical alliance between conservation and conservatism: You might not know it from the exhibit tables at most conservative gatherings, stacked as they are with explicitly anti-environmental flyers, articles, and books, but America’s conservative movement was once intimately linked with conservation. The influential conservative thinker Russell Kirk wrote warmly about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when it was published in 1962 and frequently held forth on the dangers of pesticides, the protection of endangered species, and the preservation of farmland. In fact, a near-apocalyptic tone suffused the environmental writing of many conservatives during the first decades after World War II. So, how did we get from there to where we are now, with environmentalists firmly established as the favorite whipping boys of conservative intellectuals, pundits, and politicians?
… This issue is particularly important to Christians, whose faith counsels a sacramental vision of nature and opposition to the hubris underlying the modern economy and its institutionalized disregard for the care of God’s creation. “You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility,” writes Wendell Berry.He then traces the origins of today’s antipathy between the two to “fusionism”: The appeal of fusionism lay in its promise that the West could embrace, at one and the same time, both traditional morality and the cult of individual freedom. At a time when the West had only just defeated one totalitarian tyranny (Nazism) and was seemingly locked in a death struggle with another (communism), that promise was especially attractive. But in the face of the totalitarian threat, religious, communitarian, localist, and romantic aspects of conservatism, which could have been sources of a positive environmental approach, were intentionally de-emphasized. Over time, most conservatives came to see the state, not individualistic capitalism, as the primary evil facing the world. The rise of fusionism prevented the development of a conservative environmentalism. Think tanks depend on money to survive, and the funding for such institutions came—and still comes—largely from wealthy individuals, a few relatively small foundations, and a handful of big corporations. Not only does this system discourage intellectual risk-taking among conservatives, it also clearly biases conservative organizations toward the promotion of those things that wealthy individuals and corporations are comfortable with. (Woe to the outspoken conservative critic of individualist, free-market ideology who seeks to raise funds from those who most benefit from that ideology!) After describing how this has driven an environmentalist movement which has more in common philosophically with traditionalist conservatism into the arms of leftist revolutionaries, Beer writes: However, the environmentalist movement itself must deal with its own confusing and contradictory alliances with the left. As John Lukacs has written, Greens are often the self-made prisoners of their leftist and anti-establishment inclinations. They are split-minded: traditionalists and anti-traditionalists at the same time. They want to conserve the land, and they are opposed to the inhuman progress of bureaucracy, automation, technology. In that respect they are conservatives, in the proper, larger-than-political sense of that word. Yet at the same time they favor abortion, feminism, unlimited immigration, nomadism—at the expense of the traditional family, of traditional patriotism, of traditional humanism, of the traditional respect for rights of property.
Who knows? Perhaps Greens would not have been driven to embrace such allegiances if conservatives had not abandoned their conservationist roots. The crowd that forms around Lukacs whenever he speaks to young audiences is an encouraging sign that someday soon, there may be a conservative movement that is dedicated to healing that schism. The lesson here, even for those who may dispute some of the particulars, is that there is an opportunity for those on the right to make inroads on the left. Given the forces at work, however, and given the right’s mixed record in pursuing such opportunities, Beer’s optimism may be misplaced.
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