Should conservatives conserve the environment?

The title of this post is obviously a leading question—conserving the environment is a good thing ceteris paribus, although there can (and should) be reasonable debates on where to draw the line. For a variety of reasons, the words “conservative” and “liberal” mean things in the US today that they have historically almost never meant—signifying membership of one tribe or the other. Call them Team C and Team L, if you will. It is thus entirely possible for a self-identified American “conservative” to call for the shutting down of the Environmental Protection Agency and for increased oil prospecting in national parks. Although there may be good reasons for these two positions, neither of them seem to be in resonance with the attitudes of old-school conservatives like Sir Edmund Burke. Indeed, there seems to be a near-total alignment of the American environmental movement with Team L, which makes it almost impossible for a supporter of Team C to express any conservationist attitudes at all.

This is why I found the article “A Righter Shade of Green” by Roger Scruton interesting. Some of it is sanctimonious, much of it is written from within the tribalist mindset, but some of its arguments are worth pondering over.

Political solutions represent agreements among the living, but our real problems are transgenerational. At present, we are externalizing our costs not to people who can complain but to unborn people who can’t. Democratic politics, Burke and Chesterton pointed out, has an inbuilt tendency to disenfranchise the unborn and the dead. 

So what is to stop us from externalizing our costs onto future generations? Within our own families, we recoil from doing such a thing. I don’t want to dump the costs of my life on my son, even though I shall be dead when he feels them. Nor would I wish my grandchildren to pay the price of my selfishness. 

It is here that I think we Anglophone conservatives can show our relevance. The common law of England developed, through the branch known as equity, a concept that has no real equivalent in Napoleonic or Roman legal systems: the concept of the trust. Trusteeship is a form of property in which the legal owner has only duties, and all rights are transferred to, and “held in trust for,” the beneficiary … This form of ownership, and the moral idea contained in it, ought to be regarded as defining the conservative approach. We don’t solve environmental problems by abandoning our attachment to private property or free enterprise, but we can make sure that these notions are shaped by the spirit of trusteeship.

Scruton makes the point that, since modern societies are “societies of strangers”, erosion of trust and of social capital in general makes it very hard for people to adopt attitudes other than self-oriented individualism. The cultivation of an attitude (and of the institution) of trust offers the sort of motivation that human beings are naturally responsive to.

Scruton’s perspective seems close to Wendell Berry’s, at least insofar as both see the structure of our society as the fundamental problem, and think that the pre-moderns got it right to the extent that their communities were structured around trust and a natural sense of belonging. Thought-provoking though Scruton’s piece is, it is unclear to me how he envisions society re-cultivating the attitude of trust. But что делать?