Why Aren't Conservatives Conservationists?
Jeremy Beer
January 1, 2002
The historian John Lukacs has a talent for aphorisms. Several years ago, at a conference for conservative students, Lukacs argued that Greens were the natural allies of the Right. At the climax of his talk, he surveyed the young audience and magisterially proclaimed, in a syrupy Hungarian accent: "You cannot be a conservative and be on the side of the concrete pourers and the cement mixers."
Students flocked around Lukacs after his talk. He was a hit.
But at another recent gathering of conservatives, the exhibit tables were devoted primarily to the display of explicitly anti-environmental flyers, articles, and books. "What are the anti-sprawlers doing in your state?" screamed one orange leaflet cautioning against "overreaction" against urban sprawl in Pennsylvania, despite the fact that the state lost to development an area the size of Delaware in the 1990s alone. Clearly no one at the conference was expected to be an "anti-sprawler"-no doubt to the chagrin of Professor Lukacs, nearly asphalted over in his Chester County home northwest of Philadelphia.
Yet the American conservative movement was once intimately linked with conservation. The traditionalist writer Russell Kirk wrote warmly in his syndicated newspaper column about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring when it was published in 1962. He wrote not infrequently about the dangers of pesticides, the protection of endangered species like the loon, and the preservation of farmland. In 1977 he wrote an admiring review of Wendell Berry's agrarian manifesto, The Unsettling of America. In the 1940s and 1950s, Kirk walked most of Scotland, and his essays on the beauty of the Scottish countryside and the forces threatening to despoil it are among his best. In Fife, "open-cast mining," ...
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