11 Conservation and Conservatism
The philosophy of free-market conservatism has swept the political
field virtually everywhere, and virtually everywhere conservatives
have been, in varying degrees, hostile to the cause of conservation.
This is a problem of great consequence for the long-term human
prospect because of the sheer political power of conservative governments.
Conservatism and conservation share more than a common
linguistic heritage. Consistently applied they are, in fact, natural allies.
To make such a case, however, it is necessary first to say what conservatism
is.
Conservative philosopher Russell Kirk (1982, xv–xvii) proposes
six “first principles” of conservatism. Accordingly, true conservatives:
• believe in a transcendent moral order
• prefer social continuity (i.e., the “devil they know to the
devil they don’t know”)
• believe in “the wisdom of our ancestors”
• are guided by prudence
• “feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established
social institutions”
• believe that “human nature suffers irremediably from certain
faults.”
For Kirk the essence of conservatism is the “love of order” (1982,
xxxvi). Eighteenth-century British philosopher and statesman Edmund
Burke, the founding father of modern conservatism and as
much admired as he is unread, defined the goal of order more specifically
as one which harmonized the distant past with the distant future.
To this end Burke thought in terms of a contract, but not one
about “things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary
and perishable nature.” Burke’s societal contract was not, in
other words, about tax breaks for those who don’t need them, but
about a partnership promoting science, art, virtue, and perfection,
none of which could be achieved by a single generation without veneration
for the past and a healthy regard for those to follow. Burke’s
contract, therefore,was between “those who are living, those who are
dead, and those who are to be born . . . linking the lower with the
higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world” ([1790]
1986, 194–195). The role of government, those “possessing any portion
of power,” in Burke’s words, “ought to be strongly and awefully
impressed with an idea that they act in trust” (ibid., 190). For Burke,
liberty in this contractual state was “not solitary, unconnected, individual,
selfish Liberty. As if every man was to regulate the whole of his
conduct by his own will.” Rather, he defined liberty as “social freedom.
It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality
of restraint” (quoted in O’Brien 1992, 390).
As the ecological shadow of the present over future generations
has lengthened, the wisdom of Burke’s concern for the welfare of future
generations has become more evident. Moreover, if conservatism
means anything at all other than the preservation of the rules by
which one class enriches itself at the expense of another, it means the
conservation of what Burke called “an entailed inheritance derived to
us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an
estate belonging to the people” (Burke [1790] 1986, 119). Were
Burke alive today, there can be no doubt that he would agree that this
inheritance must include not only the laws, traditions, and customs of
society, but also the ecological foundations on which law, tradition,
custom, and public order inevitably depend. A society that will not
conserve its topsoil cannot preserve social order for long. A society
that wastes its natural heritage like a spendthrift heir can build only
the most fleeting prosperity, leaving all who follow in perpetual misery.
And those societies that disrupt the earth’s biogeochemical balances
and destroy its biota are the most radical of all. If not restrained,
they could force all thereafter to live in an ecological ruin and impoverishment
that we can scarcely imagine.
In light of Burke’s view that society is a contract between the living,
the dead, and those to be born, what can be said about the conservatism
of contemporary conservatives? What, for instance, is conservative
about conservatives’ support for below market-cost grazing
fees that federal agencies charge ranchers for their use of public
lands? Welfare for ranchers runs against conservatives’ supposed antipathy
for handouts to anyone. But that’s a quibble. The more serious
issue concerns the ecological effects of overgrazing which result from
underpricing the use of public lands. Throughout much of the American
West, the damage to the ecology of fragile ecosystems is serious
and increasing, with worse yet to come. In a matter of decades these
trends will jeopardize a way of life and a ranching economy that can
be sustained for future generations only by astute husbandry of soils,
wildlife, and biota of arid regions. The ruin now being visited on a
large part of public lands for a short-lived gain for a few is a breach of
trust with the future. There is nothing whatsoever conservative about
a system that helps those who do not need it while failing to sustain
the ecological basis for a ranching economy into the distant future.
What is conservative about the ongoing support many conservatives
give to the Mining Law of 1872? That piece of archaic legislative
banditry permits the destruction and looting of public lands in the
service of private greed while requiring little or nothing in return. The
result—economic profligacy and ecological ruin—meets no conceivable
test of genuinely conservative ideals and philosophy. It is theft on
a grand scale, permitted because of the political power of those doing
the looting and the cowardice and shortsightedness of those doing the
governing.
What is conservative about getting government off the backs of
citizens while leaving corporations there? Burke, who had a healthy
dislike for all abuses of power, would have wanted all tyranny curtailed,
including that of corporations. How do price increases, for
example, differ from tax increases? How do cancers caused by toxic
emissions or deaths resulting from safety defects in automobiles differ
from unjust executions? How does the ability of capital to abandon
one community for another that it can exploit more thoroughly differ
from government mismanagement? To those who suffer the consequences,
such differences are largely academic. The point is lost,
nonetheless, on most contemporary conservatives who often detect
the sins of government in parts-per-billion while overlooking corporate
malfeasance by the ton. Burke, in our time, would not have been
so negligent about economic tyranny.
What is conservative about squandering for all time our biological
heritage under the guise of protecting temporary property rights?
Conservatives have long scorned public efforts, meager as they are, to
protect endangered species because, on occasion, doing so may infringe
on the ability of property owners to enrich themselves. Any restrictions
on private property use, even those which are beneficial to
the public and in the interest of posterity, they regard as an unlawful
taking of property. But this view of property rights finds little defense
in a careful reading of either John Locke, from whom we’ve derived
much of our land-use law and philosophy (Caldwell and Shrader-
Frechette 1993), or in the writings of Burke. For Locke, property rights
were valid only as long as they did not infringe on the rights of others
to have “enough and as good” ([1690] 1963, 329). It is reasonable to
believe that this ought to include the rights of future generations to a
biota as abundant and as good as that which sustained earlier generations.
And for Locke, “nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or
destroy” (ibid., 332), a concept that has not yet been fully noted by
many conservatives. The point is that Locke did not regard property
rights as absolute even in a world with a total population of less than 1
billion, and neither should we in a world of 6.3 billion and rising.
What’s conservative about a quarter century of opposition to national
efforts to promote energy and resource efficiency? Even on narrow
economic grounds, efficiency has been shown to be economically
advantageous. The fact that the United States is far less efficient in its
use of energy than Japan and Germany, for instance, places it at a
competitive disadvantage estimated to be between 5 and 8 percent
for comparable goods and services. Economics aside, energy and
resource profligacy is the driving force behind climatic change and
the sharp decline in biological diversity worldwide. Nothing could be
more deleterious to the interests of future generations than for this
generation to leave behind an unstable climate and the possibility
that those changes might be rapid and self-reinforcing. And short of
nuclear war, no act by the present generation would constitute a
greater dereliction of duty or breech of trust with its descendants.
The willingness of many conservatives to accept the risk of catastrophic
and irreversible global changes that would undermine the
well-being of future generations is a profoundly imprudent precedent.
We have no right to run such risks when the consequences will
fall most heavily on those who can have no part in making the choice.
What is conservative about the extension of market philosophy
and narrow economic standards into the realm of public policy?
Many conservatives want to make government work just like business
works. Government certainly ought to do its work efficiently, often
much more efficiently than it now does. That much is common sense,
but it is a far cry from believing that public affairs can be conducted
as a business or that economic efficiency alone is an adequate substitute
for farsighted public policy. Many good things, including compassion,
justice, human dignity, environmental quality, the preservation
of natural areas and wildlife, art, poetry, music, libraries, stable
communities, education, and public spiritedness can never meet a
narrow test of profitability, nor should they be required to do so. This,
too, is common sense. These things are good in and of themselves and
should not be subject to the same standards used for selling beer and
automobiles.
What is conservative about perpetual economic growth? Economic
expansion has become the most radicalizing force for change
in the modern world. Given enough time, it will first cheapen and
then destroy the legacy we pass on to the future. The ecological
results of economic growth at its present scale and velocity are pollution,
resource exhaustion, climatic instability, and biotic impoverishment.
Uncontrolled economic growth destroys communities, traditions,
and cultural diversity. And through the sophisticated
cultivation of the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice,
gluttony, and lust, economic growth destroys the character and
virtues of the people whose wants it purports to satisfy.
Conservatives (and liberals) have been unwilling to confront the
difference between growth and real prosperity and to tally up the full
costs of growth for our descendants. In the words of former Reagan
administration Defense Department official Fred Ikle, “Growth
utopianism is a gigantic global Ponzi scheme [leading to] collapse, engulfing
everyone one in misery” (1994, 44). Ikle continues to say that
the cause of this collapse would not be a shortage of material goods
but the destruction of society’s conservative conscience by our Jacobins
of growth.
That conservatives, by and large, have been deeply hostile to evidence
of ecological deterioration and to the cause of conservation is profoundly
unconservative. A genuine and consistent conservatism
would aim to conserve the biological and ecological foundations of
social order and pass both on as part of “an entailed inheritance derived
to us from our forefathers and to be transmitted to our posterity”
(Burke [1790] 1986, 119). If words mean anything, there can be
no other standard for an authentic conservatism.
Like that defined in Kirk’s first principles, a genuine conservatism
is grounded in the belief in a transcendent moral order in which our
proper role is that of trustees subject to higher authority. It would
honor and respect the need for both social and ecological continuity.
It would respect the wisdom of past and also the biological wisdom
contained in the past millions of years of evolution. A genuine conservatism
would prudently avoid jeopardizing our legacy to future
generations for any reason of temporary economic advantage. It
would eschew cultural and technological homogeneity and conserve
diversity of all kinds. And a genuine conservatism, chastened by the
recognition of human imperfection, would not create technological,
economic, and social conditions in which imperfect and ignorant humans
might wreak ecological havoc.
An authentic conservatism has much to offer in the cause of conservation.
Conservatives are right that markets, under some circumstances,
can be more effective tools for conservation than government
regulation. The conservative dislike of unwarranted taxation might be
the basis on which to shift taxes from things we want, such as income,
profit, and labor, to things we do not want, such as pollution and
energy and resource inefficiency (von Weiszacker and Jesinghaus,
1994). An authentic conservatism would encourage a sense of discipline,
frugality, and thrift in the recognition that “men are qualified
for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral
chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a con-
trolling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the
less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained
in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate
minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters” (Burke,
quoted in epigraph to Ophuls 1992). A genuine conservatism would
provide the philosophical bases and political arguments for prudence,
precaution, and prevention in public policy and law. And a genuine
conservatism would recognize that avoidance of some tragedies requires
“mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon” (Hardin 1968, 12),
which, in turn, requires robust democratic institutions.