The environmentalist movement is filled with loons. That’s obvious enough. Frank Soto dismembered the extremists in his great recent post “Gaia Demands a Sacrifice“. As always, Frank is precise in his reasoning and hilarious in his takedown, but there is something of the knee-jerk in here, something that has cost conservatives much. Environmentalism should be a conservative cause, and, even amidst the lunacy, there is something to be said for Gaia and man’s place with her.

Reid Buckley made this point in a 2009 article at The American Conservative:

But within the hysteria and exaggeration of political activists, mostly of the Left, too often supported by cooked science, there is often a kernel of legitimate concern, be it economical, sociological, aesthetic, or environmental. We conservatives have shut our ears.

Why are we deaf? Is it because we have no alternatives? Buckley wondered whether, on the environment and elsewhere, conservatives have left themselves with ridicule as the only response to the left:

For 40 years, smug, snide right-wingers have made merry mocking Greenpeace fanatics and ecological doomsayers without learning a blessed thing about the precariousness of the ecology and the effect of human action (not to speak of avarice) on it, as when we promiscuously exfoliate the rain forests or condemn yet one more green acre on the southeastern shore of New Jersey to the desolation of heedless urban development. We conservatives are so self-satisfied that we have incapacitated ourselves from peering beneath the antics of idiots and the wild exaggerations of scruffy environmentalist kooks to the gathering of real dangers that their hysterical rhetoric obscures.

There are environmental disasters. To deny this, or to reassure ourselves that the market alone will take care of it, is naïve and even dangerous.

The market can create horrific ugliness.

I live in Montana, a state of wondrous beauty. But it is also a place of environmental degradations that are beyond comprehension. In Butte, long the center of copper mining in the US, the Anaconda Company — which operated the mines and smelters for nearly a century and which left the state in 1978 — bequeathed a pox of ugliness one and one half miles wide and nearly 1,800 feet deep. Once among the largest open pit mines in the world, the Berkeley Pit, which is right in the middle of town, is now full of water so filthy that insects fear to tread.

And the pit has done just what Buckley warned against:

…it is ugly, an affront to the eye, accustoming thousands of human beings to dehumanizing blows against the aesthetic sense until it is benumbed. The good, the true, and the beautiful are inseparably joined. One cannot damage one without doing harm to the others. Those who fail to comprehend this are morally in error on the dialectical front, though they may be personally virtuous.

Butte is a sad place.

Disdain and mockery may trigger the visceral satisfaction that comes from a sense of superiority, but it will gain us nothing if we fail to recapture a conservative ecology. Writing in The Guardian, Paul Foote argues that environmentalism lies deep within the conservative heart:

As the grandfather of modern conservative political thinking, Edmund Burke, put it: we are “temporary possessors or life renters” of this world and have a moral obligation not to squander our natural inheritance, lest we “leave to those who come after … a ruin instead of a habitation.” Respect for the past and responsibility to future generations creates a duty to conserve our resources and protect the environment.

A modest proposal is for conservatives to remember their roots. “Home is where one starts from,” Eliot said. Humans have natural affection, not just for home sweet home, but for their community and their nation. But as Burke said, “to be loved our country must be lovely.” A conservative environmentalism naturally springs from the understanding of man as creature in the world living together with those other walking shadows who seek the peace which home and community afford, and who also understand that it is wrong to soil one’s own nest. Foote adds:

A conservative argument for championing environmentalism involves marrying the principles of responsibility, conservation and security to an emphasis on the local environment. It is about guarding our green spaces, the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we live and work on. It is the environment people see, experience, enjoy or hate – but in any case it is the immediate context of all our lives

Conservatives have a duty to enter the environmental debate, and not merely to call out the crazies. Conservatives need to offer an alternative ecological philosophy that is grounded in love—of country and community. Otherwise we will surrender what should be our issue to leftist environmental monopolists who are sure to send us into a nightmare of “global initiatives” that will only further the ecological entropy and rob us of the very thing conservatives most cherish: home.

Conservatives were once out in front on the environmental cause. As Governor of California Ronald Reagan laid out the conservative ecological position in quite certain terms:

“[There is an] absolute necessity of waging all-out war against the debauching of the environment. . . The bulldozer mentality of the past is a luxury we can no longer afford. Our roads and other public projects must be planned to prevent the destruction of scenic resources and to avoid needlessly upsetting the ecological balance.”

This means that a conservative environmental philosophy must recognize and honor sacrifice. It will sometimes be necessary to say no to the new factory, the strip mall, or the pipeline, not merely because they pollute, but because they are ugly, dehumanizing, and a breach of the trust we hold for coming generations. We need to remember, as Burke wrote in The Vindication of Natural Society, that “the great error of our nature is not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable acquirement; not to compound with our condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable pursuit after more.”

Sometimes Gaia must be given her due.