Toward a Conservative Environmentalism

By Nate Hochman

Thursday, September 03, 2020

 

Last July, when House and Senate Republicans came together to unveil the new Roosevelt Conservation Caucus — a bicameral environmentalist initiative named for the Republican president and early conservationist Teddy Roosevelt — it struck many onlookers as odd. Conservatism and conservation aren’t usually thought of as congruent; in fact, for the better part of a half century, many Americans have seen the two as antithetical.

 

But the formation of the Roosevelt Caucus signaled the beginning of a new era in conservative politics, characterized by a heightened concern for environmental issues such as climate change. The prominent bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the House of Representatives now counts 23 Republicans among its members, and polls show that Republican voters — particularly younger ones — are increasingly likely to see climate change as a serious problem. In a relatively small but symbolically significant act earlier this year, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy presented a series of Republican environmentalist bills dedicated to “clean-energy innovation” and carbon-capture technology. And although McCarthy’s proposals drew some criticism from conservative activist groups, including the Club for Growth, they nonetheless reflect the growing number of Republicans interested in addressing a wide range of environmental issues.

 

The next generation of conservatives is undeniably more environmentally minded than its predecessors. But an important question remains unanswered: What would a conservative environmentalism actually look like?

 

For the Left, the path to environmental sustainability is often just one aspect of a larger transformative endeavor. The progressive commitment to “climate justice” sees the reduction of carbon emissions as indistinguishable from a series of seemingly unrelated political projects: ending capitalism, smashing the patriarchy, dismantling white supremacy, and doing battle with a variety of other structures of oppression.

 

Consequently, the conservative approach to environmentalism can’t be mere acquiescence to the Left’s program. It must be built on a considerably different philosophical foundation: Rather than being based on an irritable antipathy toward our political tradition, it should be motivated by a grateful desire to preserve and build on it. The conservative does not usually seek to be an “agent of change,” to use a fashionable progressive neologism; statecraft, in his view, is stewardship.

 

To their credit, many progressive environmentalists are candid about their society-transforming ambitions. The Green New Deal, for example — the sprawling climate plan supported by influential activist groups such as the Sunrise Movement and the People’s Climate Movement — was not originally “a climate thing at all,” according to one of its chief architects, Saikat Chakrabarti. Instead, Chakrabarti admitted to the Washington Post last year, “we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

 

Or, as the manifesto of the prominent climate-activist group Extinction Rebellion bluntly states: “We have a duty to disobey this system which destroys life on earth and is deeply unjust.”

 

Where the Left’s environmentalism seeks to destroy and transform, then, the Right’s environmentalism seeks to cultivate and preserve. Unfortunately, “the Right has been absent from this conversation for a while,” says Quill Robinson, the government-affairs director of the American Conservation Coalition, a new student-run conservative-environmentalist group. “But [in] these principles — this idea of love of place and holding on to our heritage as its temporary trustees — there’s such a clear overlap between conservationist values and what it means to be a conservative.”

 

Young conservatives such as Robinson tend to see markets as a tool rather than an enemy. While it is worth acknowledging that market capitalism is at least partially to blame for environmental degradation, the much more disastrous environmental effects of socialist economies such as those of the Soviet Union and Venezuela — where bureaucratic inefficiencies and lack of accountability did grave damage to ecological health — are damning evidence that a decentralized approach is preferable to a command-and-control one. And environmentalism itself is, in many ways, made possible only by the vast wealth produced by free markets: Concern for the natural world is often a luxury of the materially prosperous, a fact borne out by the direct correlation between economic growth and reduction in pollution levels.

 

In keeping with market-based principles, a conservative approach to conservation seeks to push power downwards to local communities whenever possible, understanding that rule by federal diktat is a clumsy and unwieldy tool that rarely accomplishes what it sets out to do and often foments political backlashes from the indignant bearers of its consequences. There are a host of legislative initiatives that translate this philosophy into policy. One that has featured prominently is regulatory reform, which would help roll back cumbersome bureaucratic rules and streamline the development of clean-energy projects. Another, as in McCarthy’s clean-energy legislation, is a series of proposals aimed at bolstering access to energy storage and innovative carbon-capture technologies while removing regulatory hurdles to development. And bipartisan bills such as the Growing Climate Solutions Act of 2020 encourage growth while incentivizing environmental renewal, by helping agricultural businesses access lucrative carbon-credit markets and earn extra income through carbon-sequestration practices.

 

In favoring this bottom-up approach over a top-down one, conservative environmentalism places the dignity of the human person at the center of its moral understanding. This is a direct contrast to the disturbing progressive-environmentalist view of humanity as locked in a zero-sum struggle with nature: “You have this Malthusian tendency in a lot of the Left’s language about the environment,” says Robinson. “It’s anti-humanist. . . . People have been conditioned to think of humans as a virus and our existence as inherently degrading to the Earth, as if we’re foreign parasites.”

 

In the age of the coronavirus, that belief has taken on a particularly macabre tone. Some activists have celebrated the dip in carbon emissions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, ignoring the enormous human suffering required to produce such a reduction. The drop in carbon emissions caused by the coronavirus “is [at] roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming,” Eric Holthaus, a prominent progressive environmentalist, tweeted approvingly. “This is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all of society’ looks like. . . . Action on this scale is what’s needed to transform our world into one that sustains and nurtures life in all its forms.”

 

This antipathy toward human life extends beyond the celebration of our current economic misfortune. Bernie Sanders revealed his hand last year when he told a town hall that he was “very, very strongly” in favor of funding abortions in developing countries as a way to fight overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich, a prominent Stanford ecologist, has advocated a host of anti-natalist policies, such as the subsidization of vasectomies and the spiking of food and water with sterilizing drugs. And many rank-and-file progressive thinkers have increasingly questioned the basic morality of having children.

 

This anti-humanism is likely the reason for the environmentalist Left’s deep distrust of free markets. For the progressive and radical environmentalists who view the fight against climate change as requiring revolutionary political change, capitalism is the sworn enemy of environmental sustainability, and the great wealth that it produces is at the direct expense of our natural world; a worldview holding that human and natural interests are necessarily at odds will regard the vast material wealth produced by democratic, capitalist systems as an object of suspicion. “Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money,” proclaimed Greta Thunberg at the COP24 climate conference in Poland. “And if solutions within this system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.” Following Thunberg’s lead, progressive environmentalists have made “System change, not climate change” a rallying cry of their movement.

 

By contrast, the conservative-environmentalist movement understands and appreciates the importance of markets in helping us combat environmental degradation. “It gets the incentives for conservation right,” says Hannah Downey, the policy director for the Property and Environment Research Center, a free-market environmentalist think tank in Bozeman, Mont. “Centrally planned approaches to environmentalism, on the other hand, struggle because they lack the local information and values needed for cooperative, sustainable solutions.”

 

Conservative environmentalists such as Downey see capitalism as a force for greater sustainability and environmental renewal. “Oftentimes, capitalism is blamed for businesses’ exploiting natural resources to meet the greedy wants of the rich,” she says. “I would argue, however, that it is a lack of clear property rights that causes many of our environmental problems. Clear property rights are essential for markets and capitalism to function properly, [and] clear ownership is also important to realize the scarcity of resources and spur innovation.”

 

There’s real merit to this assessment: As Nick Lindquist wrote at National Review Online in May, weak property rights on America’s public lands create a “tragedy-of-the-commons effect” in which private citizens and public-land agencies “have a weak mutual understanding of what is and isn’t allowed on a given plot of leased public land, furthering the degradation of the land in question.” This manifests itself in everything from private benefactors’ not being allowed to bid to purchase land for conservation purposes to perverse incentives for water-usage rights, where a “use it or lose it” approach “encourages ranchers and landowners to divert as much water from rivers and streams as they can, because they will lose the rights to however much water they don’t divert the following year.”

 

But beyond questions of efficiency and incentive, the decentralized character of markets also allows for subsidiarity and local self-determination — values that lie at the heart of conservative environmentalism. Love of place, not an abstract and ever-expanding notion of “climate justice,” forms the basis of the conservative-environmentalist sensibility.

 

“It is incredibly important that environmental solutions directly involve local communities,” Downey says. “The people who are on the ground and engage with the environmental problem on a day-to-day basis will best understand the nuances of the problem and the economic or cultural challenges that drive it. This local knowledge can then inform how to fix the problem in a way that actually gets the incentives right for conservation, so that solutions are actually implemented.”

 

At their best, markets are not just a means of achieving the efficient allocation of goods and resources, but a catalyst for a spontaneous order that allows environmental sustainability free from the imposition of a faceless bureaucracy. For this reason, conservative environmentalism is a much richer conservationist tradition than its radical left-wing competitors: It does not demand adherence to one-size-fits-all utopian visions, but is instead harmonizable with the traditions and ways of living that particular communities have accustomed themselves to.

 

The conservative understands that oikophilia — the love of home — is what leads to the desire to conserve. This is why the conservative approach to environmentalism also has far more political potential than the utopian ambitions of the environmentalist Left: It promises to renew people’s attachment to their communities rather than demand that they transform them. Such an approach “has massive potential for creating a new environmental movement,” says Robinson. “But, honestly, I think it kind of offers a potential salve for some of the larger societal ills that we’re struggling with right now as well. The forming of ‘little platoons’ and Tocquevillian local interest groups is something that the United States has a long tradition of, but we’re not doing it so well right now. We need more human contact and people coming together around shared interests, and I think environmental stewardship is a very healthy medium for that.”

 

In the conservative view, the human community and its natural habitat are connected rather than mutually exclusive. Gratitude for our natural heritage therefore does not preclude an appreciation for the political and moral traditions of our ancestors, nor is the conservation of one the necessary destruction of the other. The two are inextricably linked. As the late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote:

 

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 overarching 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.

 

Understanding this, the Right should welcome the young conservative-environmentalist movement as one might a long-lost family member.

 

It is to the modern environmentalist movement’s great shame that it has been co-opted by angry radicals with little to say beyond expressions of their incoherent dissatisfaction with the state of existence. But conservative environmentalism has little use for protests and bullhorns. Rather, it is an attachment to the quiet dignity of what Russell Kirk called the “Permanent Things”: the untamed vastness of the Pacific Northwest, the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and the gloomy fog of the rocky coasts at the easternmost edge of the great American continent. It is the desire to conserve those unchanging monuments, standing through the passage of generations as persistent reminders of truth and beauty in a fallen world.