We all remember David Cameron’s gimmicks to prove the Conservatives in Great Britain were now a party of the environment. The clumsy cynicism of the husky sledge or cycling to work with a car carrying his papers discredited the PR campaign to prove that conservation could be conservative. With the recent publication of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine - on the unmaking of humanity this writer formerly of the Left, former eco-warrior and Wicca and now convert to Orthodox Christianity, there is presented to us a genuinely conservative case for environmental conservation against the technocratic and corporate implementation of a technological and profit-driven solution that does not conserve, but rather turns our country into metal and destroys farming. In his book Kingsnorth taps into a worthy tradition of men of letters from Cobbett to E. F Schumacher to Chesterton and Simone Weil. We are reminded in his work of an English tradition that seeks to conserve.
The trouble with conservatism in Britain today is that it has been hijacked and ideologically captured by the vested interest of global capital. The preferred ideology of the globalist capitalists is of course neoliberalism - individualistic and materialist. The need for a sense of roots and place is deliberately attacked by the neoliberal who seeks to reduce us to the economic unit of the atomised individual. In its emphasis on net zero, which unlike roots and a sense of place, is quantifiable, the globalist presents the solution to the problem as more technological manipulation and the destruction of all that is human scale.
The point here is that true conservatism is not about profit and global business without borders and neither is it about technocratic solutions and disregard for our countryside that gives us a sense of place. Do not look though to Great Britain’s official Conservative Party for any protection of the human scale, of roots or tradition. It sides with big and international business and open borders that require more house building over our countryside, much to the delight of the speculative developer.
There is though a genuinely conservative position that addresses conservation. It is directly opposed to the Malthusian environmentalist as it is to the anti-human global capitalist. It places the emphasis on roots and place and history. An analogy can easily be drawn with Burke’s case for the conservation of our inherited constitutional system. Just as the British system of government is an intricate and evolved system of relationships, not easily subjected to a rationalist reduction, so too the natural ecosystem, which (as mush as Kingsnorth opposes the historical event of enclosure) is a delicate and intricate relationship between nature and Man’s use of the land as the small farmer, as opposed to big agribusiness or the identikit housing development. Just as we are trustees for our inherited mixed constitution of Monarch, Lords, Commons and established Church, so we hold our environment on trust. It is the same moral responsibility of conservatism in both cases. And it is conservation that puts man rightfully in a relationship with Nature - totally opposed to the Malthusian agenda of the likes of the misanthropic George Monbiot who rather than seeing us as custodians seems to see us as a blight on some imagined unspoilt pre-human Nature. Let’s not shy away from declaring that much of the Malthusian environmentalism such as the programme of Extinction Rebellion has a diabolical character and origin.
Human beings as the imago Dei then are stewards and custodians of our natural environment. And that natural environment is in a symbiotic and not an adversarial relationship. That is for as long as we resist the neoliberal and global capitalist agenda, just as much as we resist the anti-human environmentalism. Both remove the human - one because humans get in the way of global profit and the other because we are seen as an oppressor of nature, not as caretaker.
The traditional small farm, notwithstanding Kingsnorth’s opposition to enclosure, the smaller and old built community, not the sprawling idenitikit housing estates imposed in the middle of the Sussex countryside, are Man working with the English countryside. And its Englishness is central. When we understand we are custodians of our “green and pleasant land” rather than being called to be the rootless revolutionary who is actually destroying our countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, then we see how to restore things to a natural order.
Kingsnorth takes a particular line that stands in a genuinely conservative tradition of care for what he lists as “people, place, prayer and the past”. We find this in Wordsworth’s shock at the changes to nature, in Blake’s revulsion at the dark Satanic mills, in the Fen tigers protecting their environment, in Cobbett’s advocacy of the rural economy, Chesterton’s and Belloc’s distributism, in Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful”, in the old Church of England caring for a whole country that is a network of parishes, in our long island story of over a thousand years. This is not the anti-human cult of the type of environmentalism tacitly encouraged by the technocratic elites. It is real and rooted, it is patriotic and it is conservative in the ordinary dictionary- sense of the word. It is also a specifically English manifestation of the idea of our responsibility as the gardener and the caretaker. This is conservation within a valid tradition. It stands against the secret alliance between global capitalism and revolutionary environmentalism. And at its heart it is based on the Christian idea found in Man’s role in Eden and our continuing role as being uniquely placed as the authoritative trustees and custodians of our environment, of Creation.
