“Indeed, environmentalism is the quintessential conservative cause, the most vivid instance in the world as we know it of that partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn that Burke defended as the conservative archetype. Its fundamental aim is not to bring about some radical reordering of society, or the abolition of inherited rights and privileges. It is not, in itself, interested in equality, except between generations, and its attitude to private property is, or ought to be, positive; for it is only private ownership that confers responsibility for the environment as opposed to the unqualified right to exploit it. Its cause is local attachment, not global control, and it stands against globalization in all its forms, not least that advocated by environmentalists on the Left, whose aim is to fit us to a worldwide agenda of prohibitions.”
—Roger Scruton, Confessions Of A Heretic—
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To speak of one’s first encounter with nature is rarely to speak of one’s first time out in nature. To recall my first time out in nature would be to recall the time when my parents—still a young couple only married a few years—lived in an abandoned red train caboose that sat in the middle of a field of bluegrass on the outskirts of Giddings, Texas. A place where cows grazed among the oak and sycamore trees, and the local ranch owner hired my father to tend them. I do remember (vaguely, hazily) this time as a toddler, wandering about and stomping on anthills as distant pumpjacks pulled their oil from the ground.
But that was not my first encounter with nature. A first encounter is a more substantial and intense experience, where a boy or girl, upon beholding natural beauty with a more developed mind, begins to wonder what nature is for. Its glory is so much glory, its majesty is so much majesty, its grandeur is so much grandeur, that the very abundance of its spiritual weight overpowers our being to such an extent the notion can never be entertained—not for a moment—that the purpose of nature is somehow up for subjective individual interpretation. It’s too big for that. Too primordial and too towering even at its lowliest for such sheer egotism by transients.
The fact that this question “What is nature for?” in the minds of children is instinctive, then, is yet one more sign that we do not live in a materialist universe. In a materialist universe comprised only of atoms and empty space, this question would not occur because it could not occur. Which isn’t to say that a child who wonders what nature is for will not later become an atheist as an adult and conclude nature is not for anything. They may well do that. But here I am only saying that a child as a child is able to “pierce the veil” of nature’s possession of meaning, because their potent innocence is yet unobstructed by learned dismissiveness and rationalization. And what emerges, in a boy or girl’s mind during their first encounter with nature whereupon they ask what it is for, is an answer that is at once immediate, astonishing, and bewildering: beauty. Beauty is what nature is for. Beauty exists for its own sake. And this is astonishing and bewildering, because if beauty can exist for its own sake, what implications might this have for the transcendent and transformative power and properties of beauty? (Which, if one does not become an atheist later into adulthood, prompts curiosity about the transformative power of beauty’s Maker, the Ultimate Beauty, from which all other proceeding observable beauty is but a lesser imitation).
My first encounter with nature was in February of ‘03, just before I turned 12, during our move to California, when I stared out the car window heading from Three Rivers into Kings Canyon National Park. Lining the sides of the hills beside large boulders and trickling springs were globemallows, gooseberrys, manzanitas, rockcresses, asters, and daggerpods, while chaparral, white firs, incense cedars, and ponderosa pines blanketed the valleys and the creeks. And they all led up—as the mountains go—to the park’s crescendo, the Redwood Trees, which stood at 300-350 feet, and gave shelter to pipits and marmots and finches and black bears looking to escape howling winds. For a kid who had just seen Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers and was eagerly awaiting Return Of The King, the impression couldn’t have been more clear. This was Middle Earth.
In Merida, where I currently live, the city at the westernmost tip of Yucatan boasts along its streets yellow oleanders, royal poincianas, pink tabebuias, blue jacarandas, and morning glories. Even more beautiful are the Spanish words describing these: “adelfa amarilla”, “flor reale”, “roble de sabana”, “azul mimosifolia”, “campanilla morada”, which tumble and tap on the tongue with a sweetness rivaled only by the state’s cheap cubes of regional caramel. The beaches—while at no risk of being slapped with clichéd terms like “pristine”, “balmy”, “serene”, or “windswept”—are nonetheless places where the jagged rocks and clam shells are not intermingled with trash and glass; freeing locals to walk along the peninsula’s deckle-edged shores with metal detectors in search of the lost treasure of French pirate Jean Lafitte.
The late British philosopher Roger Scruton had a term for my sentimentality: “Oikophilia”
A love of home that leads to its conservation.
A suspicion that the small, the local, the old, and the particular are better than the big, the global, the new, and the abstract.
Moreover, when we consider the lives of some of the saints—like St. Gerasimus of the Jordan or St. Seraphim of Sarov or St. Paisios of Athos or St. Jerome of Stridon—we are reminded, through their intriguingly deep friendships with animals, that conservation and stewardship are holy acts springing foremost from love and not from duty or superiority.
“Okay ‘Springing foremost from love.’ That’s sappy and doesn’t mean anything.” Well not really. I’m actually being pretty specific with my use of “love” here, in that conservation and stewardship must proceed from a recognition that creation was (and is) an expression of infinite love by the Logos toward us, and thus our love back at it is a gesture of our love for Him. As such, conservation and stewardship take on a “eucharistic” character: in that just as we are regularly nourished and ever-renewed by Christ’s body and blood, so we in turn must regularly nourish creation in anticipation of its ultimate renewal.
Far from being a fringe perspective on nature and God, one could look to St. Irenaeus, the second century bishop who wrote nearly identical sentiments in his refutation of gnosticism Against Heresies. Or we could look to St. John of Damascus, the eighth century monk, who in his defense of icons On The Divine Images says, “I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake; who willed to take His abode in matter; who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it not as a god, but because God has filled it with His grace and power.” Yet I think the best (and more involved) expression of creation care can be found in the spiritual diary of Sergei Bulgakov, a 20th century Russian theologian, economist, and priest who writes:
“The world abides in God, although it is not God, and God’s relationship to the world in Divine Providence is defined not as the unilateral action of God on a world lying outside of and foreign to Him, but as the synergy of the Creator with creation. For this, both parties to the synergy must, first of all, possess their own reality and independence, but also mutual connectedness and dependence. To become independent, the world must be divine in its positive foundation. That is what manifests it, because the world is created Sophia, the fullness of divine thoughts and powers, which being immersed in non-being in the divine act of creation, have acquired other-being for themselves in the world. The one Sophia and the one divine world exist both in God and in creation, although in different ways: pre-eternally and in time, absolutely and relatively (creationally). The Sophianicity of the world is the divinity of its foundation; its createdness is the relativity and limitedness of its existence. Thanks to the divinity of its foundation, the world preserves its authenticity in the eyes of God, although it is created out of nothing; thanks to its createdness it preserves the independence of its being also in the eyes of God. At creation, God gave the world true reality which He had laid down for all ages and for the Creator Himself. By virtue of this divine reality, and by virtue of this insuperable distinction, the world exists both for itself and for God, and the relationship between them cannot be anything other than of the order of synergy… however deep, intimate, and multifaceted it be, to the point where the two natures merge, the Divine and the created, and to the deification of mankind in Christ and the Church. For this synergy to be complete, it is unavoidable that the two sides should not only have their reality, but moreover be like each other or correspond to each other. In man, God created His own image in all its reality, gave it life, made it His friend for Himself. But at the same time, the created world is not capable of an independent extra-divine life; it is contained in the hand of God, and—for all its authenticity—cannot fall away from God whilst preserving the fullness of its being.”
Hence, while the materialist conserves from a sense of doom and survival—believing this life is all there is and that humanity is just one among countless insignificant species capable of being wiped out by indifferent cataclysms—the religious conservative man and woman must lead not only with a confidence that we are children of God who one day will judge fallen angels, but with a conviction as well that beauty should be conserved purely for its own sake; the logoi, inhabiting each one of its objects, a unique partaker in the being of the Logos.
In short, the foundation of conservative environmentalism must necessarily be theological and not secular.
Now and ever and unto ages of ages.
But this is only a foundation for a conservative environmental movement. Now we need to frame the house.
The next step on that front is recognizing that a conservative environmental movement should be more local, less national, and never “global”.
There is a plague of “global thinking” in our time.
A plague of snotty, arrogant, self-important monied elites who—believing themselves to be “citizens of the world”—have taken it upon themselves to tell the world what to do with missionary zeal. International organizations from the United Nations to the World Bank to the IMF to the World Economic Forum exist as gathering places for aristocracies to float dystopian dreams beneath a thin veneer of altruism. The resulting climate policies, “Great Resets”, and trade agreements that are then sold to the public under the guise of “responsibility”, “sustainability”, and “commitment to the future” all operate in ways that benefit major corporations and banks, appease googly-eyed activists (momentarily), and make life miserable for regular folk.
Yet it’s not merely the people involved that is the problem with “global thinking” as such. The problem inherent to “thinking globally” is that one can only do so vaguely and therefore crudely. You’re simply never going to implement “universal” solutions that rightly fit every country, every culture, every tribe, every village, every household. You can only make clumsy sweeping attempts at policies that stab blindly at whatever current scientific consensus presents as the culprits of problems; and any time sweeping policies are imposed on very large amounts of people (who are not intricately known, but considered only in the abstract), the consequences are always disastrous. Great Leap Forwardism doesn’t get less “starvy” just because it listens to The XX and drives a Prius.
This isn’t a novel observation. Wendell Berry, the Kentuckian essayist, poet, and farmer, said the same in a piece he penned for The Atlantic 32 years ago when he wrote that “Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have ‘thought globally’ (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.”
Thus, in contrast to the schemes of globalists, a big part of forming a conservative environmental movement is recognizing that any conservatism worth espousing must be a local conservatism that centers around land and labor. That is, a conservatism concerned with the wellbeing of the soil and those who till it. But not a patronizing concern. Not a distant looking-down concern. No, “concern for the wellbeing of the soil and the ones who till it” in the sense that whoever is chosen by a local populace to be a representative or magistrate must study how best to cultivate and preserve common lands; and, moreover, must concern himself with how to encourage a communal setting where laborers of land (farmers, gardeners, foresters, etc.) receive as much societal praise as surgeons and soldiers. In other words, just as the foundation of the conservative environmental “house” must be theological and not secular, so also must the “frame” of a conservative environmental movement be a proper (i.e. non-pagan) reverence for creation and the exercise of wise dominion over it at a local level. Rarely, if ever, should we dream of environmental policy to be implemented on a national level, and we should never assume we are so wise that we can derive ecological solutions for an entire planet.
