THE WORST SORT OF REACTIONARY:

Environmentalism, properly understood, has the power to appeal to something more fundamental than partisan divides, nurturing the primary community loyalty necessary for healthy politics. It can remind us that our relationship as neighbors is more basic than our political identities and that most people, whether liberal or conservative, can agree on the moral principles that form its foundations. Among these are the ideas that nature has a given order that is not of our making, that we live best when we live in harmony with this order, and that things have value above and beyond their economic utility. In a way, these might be said to be eminently conservative principles; they might also be called eminently human ones.

Conservatives should not be shy of environmentalism because of its association with leftist political programs. Rather, they should be attentive to the conservation of our environment as, in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton, a "pre-political" concern. By caring for our mutual home--the land that binds us together and sustains us--we can dedicate ourselves to our neighbors, recognizing our place within an organic order that we did not create yet have a responsibility to conserve. In doing this, liberals and conservatives can take a step together toward a more healthy civic life.

The philosopher-farmer mentioned above, Roger Scruton, lays out the natural connection between conservativism and environmentalism in his excellent book, How to Think Seriously About the Planet. We might often associate environmentalism with a certain cultural clique, a kind of irrational radicalism, and a whole raft of accompanying ideological commitments. Yet concern for the natural world's conservation is not limited to this superficial stereotype; the umbrella of "environmentalism" covers a diverse cultural and political array. Although our idiosyncratic sociocultural situation has severed many conservatives from ecological morality, there are a good number of conservative environmentalists walking among us today, even if they would not themselves claim the title. They are not handing out fliers for Greenpeace or tying themselves to trees, but they are supporting local measures to protect the lakes where they fish and the woods where they hunt. They are members of the local Izaak Walton League, gardeners, recyclers, and chicken-coop keepers. Liberal environmentalists and conservatives might be surprised to find out that they have a great deal in common, if only they communicated with one another.

In its origin, environmentalism might almost have been called a conservative movement, and the defenders of the environment in the early decades of industrialization tended to lean politically conservative. This makes some sense, because at the heart of conservatism is the idea that we have a responsibility to those who went before and those who come after us. We must preserve and augment what we have inherited, putting what is lasting ahead of the fashions of the present hour. The English theologian Richard Hooker described this conservative disposition well when he said that we were alive in our forebears, and they too live within us and our children. We are born into a sort of covenant between generations and across time.

This attitude also recognizes that there is a kind of social entropy present in human societies. Put simply, it is easy to destroy what we have inherited and very difficult to preserve it. 

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