SOURCE: Bliese, John R. E. “Richard M. Weaver, Russell Kirk, and the Environment.” Modern Age 38, no. 2 (winter 1996): 148-58.

[In the following essay, Bliese depicts Kirk as a conservationist and compares him with other conservative figures for whom care for the environment figures prominently, such as Richard M. Weaver and Wendell Berry.]

Over the last thirty years or so, environmental and natural resource issues have been prominent in our public policy debates. During that time, many of these problems have become ever more compelling. We now realize that by our actions we are able not only to pollute our neighborhoods, but also to affect adversely the ecology of the entire planet.

Yet conservatives have largely ignored environmental issues. When conservative politicians and writers have taken part in the public debates, it has usually been merely to oppose measures to reduce pollution and to oppose protecting our natural resources. This is an unfortunate state of affairs. It is also rather surprising that traditionalist conservatives have not been at the forefront of the debate, calling public attention to the degradation of our environment and proposing solutions.¹

If we go back to the “Founding Fathers” of American traditionalist conservatism, we will find a solid philosophical basis that would lead conservatives to be environmentalists. Here, I will consider primarily the works of Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk, two of the most important figures in the post World War II conservative movement, focusing on those aspects of their thought that pertain to today's environmental and natural resource issues. This will not be the place to analyze specific environmental problems or to advocate specific policies. I will, however, use some general examples to illustrate the attitudes and approaches proper for conservatives.

Of course, the great conservative writers who, in the 1950s and 1960s, laid the foundations for the modern conservative movement, were not themselves environmental activists. Their political thinking was largely formed in the days of the Depression and World War II, when the dominant concerns were elsewhere. Most of our current environmental problems became acute some time after the War, that is, after much of their most important work was done.² But their philosophy establishes a firm basis from which a traditionalist conservative today should be an environmentalist.³ And, as we will see, Russell Kirk did in fact draw that conclusion.

Today, unfortunately, we often see “conservative” columnists and politicians blindly supporting whatever position “business interests” take on environmental issues. The business community too often opposes conservation of resources or environmental protection because it might increase their costs. But the traditionalist conservative philosophy never was one of blanket support for anything that maximizes profits. In fact, in many ways, the traditionalist conservative is opposed to the “business mentality” that sees getting and spending as the ultimate goals of society.

George Nash, in his history of the American conservative movement, emphasizes that the early traditionalist conservatives did not identify with the business community. Peter Viereck insisted that his conservatism “had nothing to do with rootless, ‘cash nexus,’ selfish, laissez-faire individualism.⁴ Stephen Tonsor contended that “the leaders of the new conservatism are not now, nor will they be, identified with the American business community.”⁵ Russell Kirk claimed that “the conservative interest in America … never had much sympathy with industrial aggrandizement.” While he recognized that businessmen have historically been “a great prop of American conservatism,” he severely criticized them for being “intent upon getting and spending to the exclusion of almost every cultural and social interest.” We should never forget that “a conservative order is not the creation of the free entrepreneur.”⁶ “Conservatism is something more than mere solicitude for tidy incomes.”⁷ The assertion that equates conservatism and business interests is pure philosophical chicanery, which Clinton Rossiter called “the Great Train Robbery of American intellectual history.”⁸

Traditionalist conservatism cannot be equated with business interests for the most fundamental of reasons: a conservative is not a materialist; he rejects the modern belief that the highest end of man is to be a consumer. The anti-materialist stand runs through virtually all of the fundamental works of traditionalist conservatism. Kirk rejected the “reduction of human striving to material production and consumption.”⁹ Economic production should not be “the primary concern of the individual or the state,” for “economic production is not an end in itself.”¹⁰

Many of Richard Weaver's works are sustained critiques of materialism and the consumer culture. In Ideas Have Consequences, he contrasted the concept of man created in the divine image with that of man the wealth-seeking and consuming animal. If we want to restore values in America, we must first realize that “there is no correlation between the degree of comfort enjoyed and the achievement of a civilization.” He contrasted our shabby striving for “comfort and mediocrity” with the conception of Plato and of Christianity, “of pursuing virtue until worldly consequence becomes a matter of indifference.” He rejected postulating the laws of economics as “the ordinances of all human life.”¹¹

In Visions of Order, Weaver argued that culture is an engagement of the spirit lying beyond the thinking of those who are dominated by material concerns, and he contrasted the pointless series of new inventions, which delight the modern barbarian, with authentic creations of the spirit. He rejected the mentality of the businessman, the state of mind which develops when all virtues are subordinated to moneymaking.¹²

Much of Weaver's professional life was devoted to a defense of Southern culture. With all its faults, which he realized only too well, the Old South was admirable in one overriding respect: it was, he believed, the last non-materialist society in the Western world. And he would have us take its example as a challenge: to save the human spirit by re-creating a non-materialist society.¹³

These earlier traditionalist conservatives rejected much that they found in modern society, especially its materialism and consumerism. They would have us return to several fundamental values which, applied to our current conditions, would lead a conservative to be an environmentalist.

Perhaps the most fundamental value or attitude for a conservative is what Weaver called “piety.” Piety is “a crowning concept which governs [man's] attitude to the totality of the world.” Weaver saw “no way to sum up the offense of modern man except to say that he is impious.” He believed that to bring harmony back into the world, we must regard three things with the spirit of piety: nature, other people, and the past.¹⁴ His attitude to nature is of primary interest here.

Man has been waging “an unrelenting assault” on nature, which Weaver believed was nothing less than a “sin.” He believed that “creation or nature is fundamentally good, that the ultimate reason for its laws is a mystery, and that acts of defiance such as are daily celebrated by the newspapers are subversive of cosmos. Obviously a degree of humility is required to accept this view.” The modern war against nature “impiously puts man in the place of God.”¹⁵

Weaver observed, as do today's environmentalists, that we know little about nature and that our attacks on it produce unforeseen consequences. “It is a matter of elementary observation that nature reflects some kind of order which was here before our time and which … defies our effort at total comprehension. … We get increasing evidence under the regime of science that to meddle with small parts of a machine of whose total design and purpose we are ignorant produces evil consequences.”¹⁶

Weaver maintained this position throughout his professional life. In 1958, he wrote: “We have before us a tremendous creation which is largely inscrutable. Some of the intermediate relationships of cause and effect we can grasp and manipulate, though with these our audacity often outruns good sense and we discover that in trying to achieve one balance we upset two others. There are, accordingly, two propositions which are hard to deny: we live in a universe which was given to us, in the sense that we did not create it; and we don't understand very much of it.” He related the story of the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest, with the British expedition members talking about “conquering” the mountain and the Sherpa who reached the summit speaking of his desire to visit the Buddha who lives at the top. “The difference between these attitudes is a terrible example of the modern Western mentality, with its metaphysic of progress through aggression.” This attitude is above all a rejection of “piety.”¹⁷

At the end of his life, he returned to the theme. In an article that appeared in 1964, Weaver wrote that one's attitude toward nature is “basic to one's outlook or philosophy of life.” Since nature is “the creation of a Creator,” therefore “man has a duty of veneration toward nature and the natural. Nature is not something to be fought, conquered and changed according to any human whims.”¹⁸ In Visions of Order, he wrote: “If nature is something ordained by a creator, one does not speak of ‘conquering’ it. The creation of a benevolent creator is something good, and conquest implies enmity and aggression.” He condemned modern industrialism which “is constantly making war upon nature, disfiguring and violating her.”¹⁹

This attitude toward nature was not unique to Weaver. Kirk also argued that “‘piety’ includes respect for the natural balance in the world” and warned of the dangers of trying to “conquer” nature.²⁰ Consider also T. S. Eliot's prescription for a Christian society, which Russell Kirk highly recommended:

Religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life. … A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God, and … the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of life; it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live on this planet.²¹

Piety toward nature is, thus, a fundamental attitude of traditionalist conservatism, and this obviously has profound implications when we confront today's environmental disasters. Now that only a minute fraction of our wilderness is left, piety towards nature would lead the conservative to favor preserving that little bit of creation intact. In stark contrast, look at a clearcut hillside in a National Forest. What had once been a magnificent forest now begins to look like a World War I battlefield, the soil rapidly eroding, choking the streams and destroying them as habitat for fish and other creatures. And, to add insult to injury, the timber was probably sold at a loss to the taxpayers. Surely the subsidized, systematic destruction of our public forests can only be seen as the height of impiety, on top of being sheer stupid policy. Likewise, with his respect for nature, no traditionalist conservative could sympathize with an industry that opposes clean water regulation simply because it is so much cheaper to dump its toxic wastes in the river—and if it destroys the life of the river and pollutes drinking water for those downstream, too bad, but the profits on the bottom line look great.

Another fundamental principle of traditionalist conservatism is that society is “inter-generational.” Edmund Burke supplied the locus classicus in his often quoted description of society as “a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are now living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”²²

The implications of this belief are profound: we are always to act as trustees, as faithful stewards of all that we have inherited. “The spirit of trusteeship—the sense of receiving a precious heritage and handing it on intact and perhaps even slightly strengthened—pervades Conservatism.”²³ This principle of responsibility for the future is also one of the animating principles of environmentalism. As Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote: “If there is anything that has distinguished the environmental movement during the past 100 years, it has been our insistence that we not plan for a one-generation society, that the future matters.”²⁴ Margaret Thatcher drew the logical connection for conservatism in her famous environment speech: “No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease.”²⁵ We have no right to hand on to our heirs a depleted, impoverished, and polluted planet.

Kirk likewise argued that violation of Burke's principles has produced many of our problems, including environmental ones. He affirmed Burke's judgment

… that one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and its laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation.

Kirk then concluded that “the modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum, and ruthless mining … is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.”²⁶

T. S. Eliot also warned that our disregard for nature “is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.” He pointed as an example to abuse of the land that produces soil erosion: “the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert.”²⁷

Eliot contended that we must make a “distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation.”²⁸ And that is precisely what environmentalists are attempting to do with the concept of “sustainable development.”²⁹ We have a duty to design our economy so that we can produce our goods in a way that does not impair the planet's ability to provide for future generations. Nonrenewable resources—such as petroleum and, in some areas, ground water—should be used very carefully, ideally no faster than they can be replaced with substitutes. Renewable resources—such as forests or fisheries—should be used no faster than they can be replenished.

Unfortunately, we are now wasting enormous amounts of non-renewable resources for very trivial ends. Most of our cars still get very poor gas mileage. In many places we are “mining” ground water that will take thousands of years to recharge, just to water golf courses or to grow grain nobody needs, profitable only because it is subsidized. Even worse, we are depleting many renewable resources. Many of the world's fisheries are so overfished that they will take many years to rebuild stocks, and some may not recover at all. Tropical rain forests are being destroyed to grow meager crops for a year or two until the soil is exhausted.

In similar fashion, we are devastating our land for the most trivial of reasons. The lands of the American West, often unsuitable for cattle in the first place, are grossly overgrazed, “cow bombed”—to grow a minute fraction of America's beef. Huge tracts are turned into lunar landscapes by heap leach mining—to make a few more gold chains for the affluent to wear. Examples of such disasters which we are leaving for future generations could easily be multiplied. We are not acting as good stewards of our earth; our economies are not designed to be sustainable for the long term. As economist Herman Daly put it, “there is something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.” Unfortunately, that is precisely what we are now doing. And traditionalist conservatives should be actively involved in changing all this.

For traditionalist conservatives the most important virtue in politics is prudence. Burke claimed that “prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director.”³⁰ Kirk called it the “transcendent conservative virtue”³¹ and titled one of his last books, The Politics of Prudence. Rossiter characterized this quality as “a cluster of urges—toward caution, deliberation, and discretion, toward moderation and calculation, toward old ways and good form.”³²

This central political value also has important implications for confronting some of our most daunting environmental problems. Several of the greatest environmental concerns today are caused by the ways in which our technology can now affect the entire planet. As Robert Solo warned:

Throughout his habitat on earth, [man's] technologies have been formed on the assumption that the autonomous system that produces the environment needed for life cannot be reached by what we do nor destroyed by us. And here, I think, a crucial change has come. The [earth's] life system itself is no longer beyond the reach of man's technology nor beyond his power to disarrange, degrade, and destroy. This is a danger no age has ever faced before. The volume of activity and the magnitude of consumption increase with terrifying rapidity, and technology, following an ancient momentum, takes no account of the limited capacity of the biosphere to rearrange what man disarranges.³³

Consider two areas in which we are performing uncontrolled and irreversible experiments on the entire planet: climate change and extinction of species. These surely call for prudence above all in setting policy.

Scientists warn us that we may be altering the earth's climate and that the results could be catastrophic—but there is at this point no certainty about the consequences. We know we are increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere by our use of fossil fuels, by burning tropical forests, and the like. We know that carbon dioxide can produce a “greenhouse” effect, warming the earth's climate. If that happens, climates would change much faster than they do naturally, and the consequences could be disastrous. Entire ecosystems could have inadequate time to adapt, the polar ice caps could melt and flood many coastal areas, the frequency of violent storms could increase, and so on. All that could happen. But our marvelous planet may have ways of absorbing or compensating for excess greenhouse gases that we do not yet understand.

So what would a prudent policy be? Surely not to do nothing until we know with absolute certainty that the consequences will be terrible—by then it would be far too late to do anything. A prudent, conservative course of action would be to adopt precisely the kind of policies advocated by climatologist Stephen Schneider. We could slow significantly the addition of carbon dioxide and buy time for more scientific studies simply by using energy much more efficiently—which would be entirely beneficial on its own. We, especially in the United States, waste enormous amounts of energy. Merely by becoming more efficient we could reduce the output of greenhouse gases significantly, while saving lots of money and becoming more competitive economically.³⁴ The conservative principle of prudence, applied to the problem of global warming, would surely result in wiser public policies than we are now pursuing.

The decline of biodiversity is another problem that calls for prudence. Planet earth is populated by a wonderful diversity of living things and scientists estimate that we have identified only a small fraction of all the different species. Even for those we have identified, we know very little about their roles in their ecosystems and consequently we know very little about what might happen as more and more species are eliminated. Nor do we know what their potential uses for humans may be, as sources of medicines or of food or as substitutes for depleted natural resources. In nature, species die out and vanish all the time, but today the impact of man—by polluting the environment and destroying habitat—has increased the rate of extinction to hundreds or even thousands of times its natural rate.³⁵ We are impoverishing the earth, with what consequences we cannot now know. But as biologist Edward O. Wilson warns, the catastrophic reduction of species diversity throughout the world is the folly future generations are least likely to forgive us for.³⁶

Prudence would dictate that we follow Aldo Leopold's homely advice: the first rule of the mechanic, when you take something apart, is to save all the pieces.³⁷ As the slogan says, “extinction is forever.” Traditionalist conservative values would have us make major efforts to preserve all the forms of life on earth, as a matter of prudence and good stewardship.

Our Judaeo-Christian heritage also offers us sound advice in the form of an allegory for our time. While God may have given man “dominion” over the earth, He also gave us the “Noah principle.” Noah was ordered to save every kind of creature, not just the ones he thought were cuddly or photogenic or convenient to live with for a few months. Prudent and pious policy would be to do no less today. The key is to adopt policies that preserve sufficient habitat unpolluted and undamaged—and God's creatures will then take care of themselves.

We have seen how the fundamental values of traditionalist conservatism support reasonable and prudent policies to protect our earth. Just as there is no question of a conservative turning into a pagan extremist, neither does prudent environmental protection require us to freeze in the dark. Kirk, advocating measures to humanize our age, contended that we have the greatest “economic margin” in history “to aid in solving the problems.”³⁸ And we are immensely wealthier today than when he penned those words. The authors who developed the concept of global limits to growth likewise believe that “there is so much waste and inefficiency in the current global economy, that there is tremendous potential for reducing throughputs [use of resources] while still raising the quality of life.” For example, they illustrate how our forests could be saved and timber harvests substantially reduced simply by eliminating waste and by recycling.³⁹ Prudent, conservative policies could solve many, perhaps most of our environmental problems simply by exercising good stewardship of natural resources that we are now squandering.

Whenever pollution control or resource conservation issues arise, closely connected with them are questions of property rights—the right to use private property as the owner sees fit. Traditionalist conservatives have always been staunch defenders of property rights. But our “founding fathers” were defending something very different from the faceless industrial corporation that causes so many of our environmental and resource problems today. As Rossiter explains, “the Conservative defense of private property is most certainly not a defense of its abuse, neglect, or existence in grotesque forms and exaggerated concentrations. Nor is it primarily a defense of industrial capitalism or large scale private enterprise.”⁴⁰

The traditionalist position was perhaps best developed by Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences. He called the right to private property “the last metaphysical right remaining to us.” But he quickly qualified this and specified that this right “offers nothing in defense of that kind of property brought into being by finance capitalism. Such property is, on the contrary, a violation of the very notion of proprietas. … The property which we defend as an anchorage keeps its identity with the individual.” “Big business and the rationalization of industry … abet the evils we seek to overcome.” Weaver was defending individual ownership of small properties, homes owned by the people who live in them, independent farms and businesses which are the livelihoods of their owners.⁴¹

There is a profound difference in the ways property is treated by individual owners and by industrial corporations. An individual is likely to view his farm, for example, as his patrimony. It may well have been in his family for several generations. It is the source of his livelihood and support for his family. And he hopes to pass it on to his children and grandchildren, as a means of support for them indefinitely. The land must be protected and its productivity maintained for the very long term. A corporation, by contrast, would view the land merely as an investment. If it ceases to provide returns at least as high as the bond market or other alternative investments, the company will dump the land, probably liquidating any and all assets on it first, and put its money elsewhere. Indeed, sometimes a corporation can maximize immediate profits by purchasing some land, liquidating its natural resources, and re-investing the income in some higher return, “growth” industry. An individual owner normally is a good steward of his property, a concept that means exactly nothing to the accountants of a giant corporation.

These two different attitudes toward property have significant environmental consequences. Besides trying to conserve his soil, the family farmer will want a pleasant place to live. If the economic system will allow it, he will probably leave a considerable amount of habitat for wildlife, for its amenity value if for nothing else. The corporation would be more likely to insist on maximum production from every square inch of land. Or consider two different kinds of timber companies. A family business would probably not turn its forests into barren clear cut wastelands or chemically induced monoculture tree plantations, but would leave them as healthy, thriving, complete ecosystems. And those forests would provide timber and a living—and habitat—indefinitely. Quite different would be the attitude of a huge corporation that acquired some timber in a leveraged buy out and would systematically log every single tree to pay off its junk bonds, leaving devastation everywhere except in its accountants' books.⁴²

There are obviously limits to property rights. The conservative, for example, does not believe anyone has the right to use his property in ways that hurt other people, say by spewing out toxic fumes for his neighbors to breathe. Moreover, the conservative believes that a person who has rights also has duties. “No right carries with it greater obligations than the possession of property, which is a legacy from the past, a power in the present, and a trust for the future.”⁴³

The ways in which a traditionalist conservative would balance rights and duties of property ownership are exemplified in a column by Kirk in which he objected to developers and speculators destroying beautiful historic buildings and bulldozing whole neighborhoods to replace them with super highways and ugly monotonous high rises. “Few people are more reluctant than this writer to interfere with private property and free enterprise. Yet no man, and no corporation, has a vested right to make a town and a country ugly and monotonous, or to annihilate the past for immediate profit. The time has come when governmental powers must be employed to save what remains of our visible heritage.”⁴⁴ Kirk's reasoning would a fortiori apply to saving the earth.

We have now seen that the traditionalist conservative philosophy provides a firm foundation for environmental protection and resource conservation. But, as noted earlier, most of the work of our Founding Fathers was done before environmental and resource problems had become acute. Most of their thinking was devoted to other issues, such as the concerns that grew out of the Depression, the growth of the welfare state, and the post war expansion of Communism. Moreover, most of their work was devoted to cultural critique and political philosophy, rather than to analysis of specific policies and problems. But Kirk for some years wrote a syndicated newspaper column in which he did address the more specific issues of the day. In the 1960s and early 1970s, on several occasions he wrote about the environment and his stand on these issues was completely consistent with the arguments I have made here. Many of his columns would be perfectly at home in the Sierra Club magazine today. Consider just a brief summary of several of these pieces, in chronological order.⁴⁵

In 1962 Kirk wrote about the dangers of pesticides, which pollute our rivers and decimate our fish, fowl and animals. He recommended Rachel Carson's new book, Silent Spring, and lamented the decline in the bird population in southern Michigan. He concluded that: “the public needs to bring pressure upon state authorities, everywhere, to take measures against the polluters of every sort.”⁴⁶

In 1965, he deplored the fact that “rare, strange and beautiful animals are shrinking toward extinction in much of the world.” He argued that “preservation of the multitudinous animal species has been enjoined by religion since the dawn of human consciousness,” with specific reference to the story of Noah. He wrote this piece in South Africa's Kruger National Park, but added that “we Americans have done our despicable share in decimating the animal kingdom.”⁴⁷

Later, in that same year, he condemned industries that pollute our air and turn our lakes and rivers into cesspools with their wastes. He condemned extirpating fish by overfishing, disturbing the balance of nature, and wiping out “birds, bees, moles and Lord knows what by misuse of insecticides.” He levelled this wide ranging attack also against strip-mining that desolates the landscape, and against wasting sources of energy that can never be replenished. “Posterity—if we have any—will curse … vehemently those people in our generation who, for immediate profit and quick results, have been laying waste whole countries.”⁴⁸

In 1970, Kirk “applauded” college student activists who were protesting about pollution and destruction of forests. “Nothing,” he claimed, “is more conservative than conservation.”⁴⁹

Later that year, he wrote that “pollution, exhaustion of natural resources, the transformation of city and countryside for the worse, and various social afflictions are bound up with our swift technological advance.” He singled out atomic wastes as a particular problem, because no one knows how to dispose of them permanently. He warned that “the rising generation has the prospect of bad air to breathe, poisoned rivers and lakes, cities devastated by a ‘progress’ hastened through technology, and a society that may become little better than a sullen and violent producer-consumer equation.” He therefore approved heartily that many young people were then questioning “obsessive materialism and total infatuation with technology.”⁵⁰

As a final example we can take a column he wrote in 1973 in which he lamented the rapid loss of the countryside to development. “Farmlands, woodlands and wetlands retreat before suburban sprawl, gigantic highways, ‘resort’ and tourist development and industrial expansion.” He thought it had become so bad “that restraining action has become necessary” and he approved a new policy in Vermont “which should restrain thoughtless development by bulldozer and speculator.”⁵¹

Recently John Gray, one of England's outstanding conservative political theorists, has also drawn conclusions similar to the ones presented here. He believes that “a Green agenda should come as a natural one for Tories, for whom the past is a patrimony not to be wantonly squandered.” He observes that “on the whole, conservative thought has been hostile to environmental concerns” largely because they “have been represented as anti-capitalist propaganda under another flag.” But this is a considerable mistake: “… far from having a natural home on the Left, concern for the integrity of the common environment, human as well as ecological, is most in harmony with the outlook of traditional conservatism.”⁵²

Like Weaver, Kirk, and other earlier traditionalists, Gray criticizes the materialism of modern society that idolizes the market and consumerism. He concludes his essay on environmental policy in a manner reminiscent of Weaver: human reason can “barely understand, let alone redesign” the natural world. “In nature, we depend always on an order that we did not invent, and cannot recreate; our task can only be to remove the obstacles that we have ourselves put in the way of its natural healing, and, where this is not enough, to provide prophylaxis against hazards generated by our own virtuosity.”⁵³

The traditionalist conservative philosophy, as we have seen, includes an attitude of piety toward the natural world that supports preserving the health of its ecosystems. It supports protecting our citizens from polluted air and water. It supports prudence and restraint in those actions of ours that affect the entire planet, with consequences we cannot predict. And it supports the principle of sustainable development. A traditionalist conservative should not only oppose any actions or policies that are contrary to these principles, but also be as horrified at our devastation of the earth as was Kurt Vonnegut when he predicted what may be its epitaph: “The planet was not saved because it was not found to be cost effective.” A traditionalist conservative should be an environmentalist and be foremost among all those who are trying to preserve our temporal home: our earth and all its wonder and all its splendor.

Notes

1. As George Nash emphasizes, there are two primary schools of thought in the American conservative movement: traditionalist and libertarian or free market; The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York, 1976). Here I will be concerned only with the former, with the conservatism that traces its lineage to Edmund Burke. For free market conservatives, disciples of Adam Smith, a case can equally be made that they, too, should be environmentalists, but the arguments are very different. They focus on the very great extent to which our environmental problems are either the result of government subsidies or are what economists call “externalities,” costs of production and consumption that should be paid by the producer or consumer but that are instead imposed on third party victims.

2. Barry Commoner provides an excellent summary of the “massive transformation in agriculture, transportation, power production, and manufacturing that began after World War II” which, combined with an increase in population and a spectacular increase in individual consumption, has produced the serious environmental effects we suffer today; Making Peace with the Planet (New York, 1990), chapter 3.

3. Of course, no traditionalist conservative will ever turn into a tree hugging nature worshipper, no more than a traditionalist conservative would ever become a flaming right wing radical. But neither are 99٪ of the environmentalists tree hugging nature worshippers or ecowarriors. Both groups have suffered plenty of embarrassments from their extremist fringes, and conservatives should sympathize with mainstream environmentalists on this score.

4. Nash, 81.

5. Ibid., 136, quoting Tonsor's letter to the editor, The Reporter 13 (Aug. 11, 1955): 8.

6. Russell Kirk, “The American Conservative Character,” The Georgia Review 8 (1954): 253-5.

7. Nash, 81, quoting Russell Kirk, A Program for Conservatives (Chicago, 1962), 23.

8. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism In America, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 204.

9. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 7th ed. (Chicago, 1986), iii.

10. Russell Kirk, “Ideology and Political Economy,” America 96 (January 5, 1957): 390.

11. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948), 6, 116, 119, 144.

12. Richard Weaver, Visions of Order (Baton Rouge, La., 1964), 18, 32-3.

13. Richard Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, ed. George Core and M. E. Bradford (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1968), 391.

14. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 170, 172.

15. Ibid., 171, 172, 175.

16. Ibid., 172.

17. Richard Weaver, “Up From Liberalism,” in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays (Chicago, 1965), 140-3.

18. Richard Weaver, “The Southern Tradition,” New Individualist Review 3 (1964): 13; reprinted in George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr., ed., The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (Indianapolis, 1987), 220-1.

19. Weaver, Visions of Order, 121, 123.

20. Russell Kirk, “Impious Generations Are Often Rebuked,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (Feb. 26, 1968): (1) 9.

21. T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture (New York, 1949), 48-9; for Kirk's praise of this work, see The Politics of Prudence (Bryn Mawr, 1993), 55-6.

22. Quoted in William R. Harbour, The Foundations of Conservative Thought (Notre Dame, 1982), 114.

23. Rossiter, 52.

24. Carl Pope, “Clinton's Layaway Plan,” Sierra (May/June, 1994): 16.

25. Quoted in Frances Cairncross, “Costing the Earth” (Survey section), The Economist (Sept. 2, 1989): 3.

26. Kirk, Conservative Mind, 44-5.

27. Eliot, 48-9.

28. Ibid., 26, emphasis in the original.

29. The 1987 “Brundtland Report” by the World Commission on Environment and Development (chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland) defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” and advocated making it the central goal of economic policy; quoted in Michael Jacobs, The Green Economy (London, 1991), 59.

30. Quoted in Rossiter, 26.

31. Kirk, Conservative Mind, 184.

32. Rossiter, 26.

33. Robert Solo, “Problems of Modern Technology,” Journal of Economic Issues 8 (1974): 863.

34. Stephen H. Schneider, Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (San Francisco, 1989), 283-4.

35. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 346.

36. Quoted in Dyan Zaslowsky, These American Lands (New York, 1986), 102.

37. Aldo Leopold, “The Round River,” A Sand County Almanac with Other Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York, 1966), 177.

38. Kirk, “Ideology and Political Economy,” 391.

39. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits (Post Mills, Vt., 1992), 139, 63.

40. Rossiter, 38.

41. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 131-3.

42. Unfortunately, our economic system too often forces even family farmers to abuse their land to make a living. The examples of timber companies are composites that have their counterparts in the real world of forestry. Nor is it merely the isolated case in which a corporation finds it profitable to liquidate natural resources. Colin Clark observes that, given the structure of our economy, “a corporate owner of property rights in a biological resource might actually prefer extermination to conservation, on the basis of maximization of profits;” “The Economics of Overexploitation,” Science 181 (Aug. 17, 1973): 630. His article presents the economic analysis in detail.

43. Rossiter, 38-9.

44. Russell Kirk, “Destroying the Past by ‘Development,’” National Review 17 (April 6, 1965): 285.

45. A full list can be found in Charles Brown, Russell Kirk: A Bibliography (Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, 1981).

46. Russell Kirk, “Pollution Might Be Spreading Over Land,” Los Angeles Times (Morning) (Nov. 26, 1962): (2) 5.

47. Russell Kirk, “Man Undoing Noah's Preservation Program,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 1, 1965): (1) 9.

48. Russell Kirk, “Peril of Technology Is Self Destruction,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (Nov. 10, 1965): (1) 13.

49. Russell Kirk, “Conservation Activism Is a Healthy Sign,” Baltimore Sun (May 4, 1970): A 17.

50. Russell Kirk, “Fears Earthly Hell in Technology's Gain,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (Dec. 16, 1970): (1) 11.

51. Russell Kirk, “America the Beautiful? Not Without Some Countryside,” Detroit News (March 22, 1973): B 15.

52. John Gray, Beyond the New Right (London, 1993), 62, 124.

53. Ibid., 176.