Towards a Conservative Environmentalism
Notes on a properly-ordered ecology
Opposition to radical environmental activism has long been a staple of conservative politics since the emergence of the Green left out of the tumultuous 1960s and early 70s. Young conservatives of my age would recall our high school teachers hailing Greta Thunberg’s emotional speech at the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit. We might recall the massive climate strikes in September of that year and how Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic in a carbon-neutral, toilet-free yacht to join protesters in New York. More recently, we have seen activists taking direct action, smearing mashed potatoes on Monet’s Haystacks and tossing soup at the Mona Lisa to highlight what they hyperbolically claim is a “climate crisis”. A minority have even questioned having children—see the 2021 Pew Research Center survey—out of fear that the world will become unlivable in the next decades. If we do not take drastic action to stop climate change soon (the date keeps changing), these activists warn, the human race will not have a future.
In short, it is easy for denizens of the right to react—as I do—with mistrust and disdain at the antics of today’s veritable constellation of outspoken, largely Gen-Z climate warriors. It is more than understandable why conservatives have adopted a leery stance towards environmentalism. Whether it be proposals to ban gas stoves by 2026 or embracing an “anti-speciesist” veganism, there is no shortage of absurd positions on the fringes of the green left.
These hysterical views should certainly be rejected. However, having been to several political rallies this election year, I saw in person the MAGA faithful cheering Donald Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill,” protect fracking, and privatize swathes of public lands. While rejecting the alarmism of the left, should the normative conservative approach towards ecology merely consist of a negation of environmentalism?
I think not.
From a historical perspective, most conservatives would be aware that there is a strong tradition of conservationism on the American right. From Teddy Roosevelt’s drastic expansion of the National Parks to the foundation of the EPA during the Nixon administration, there is no shortage of past precedent for a conservative environmentalism. Of course, we should not pursue a certain type of politics on the basis of prescription or custom alone. I believe there are also good reasons for conservatives to adopt a properly-ordered environmentalism.
From a theological perspective, to claim that it is man’s right to do whatever he wishes with his surroundings does not seem commensurate with a Christian worldview. The natural order is a created order, with man being at its center because he is created in the imago dei. But the entire world is part of creation as well. It is part of a creation which, as Genesis 1:31 says, God found good. Furthermore, at Genesis 1:26 God gave the human race dominion over bird and beast. I think it reasonable to say that just as man is obligated by Scripture to steward the good things he is given governance over such as his family, man writ large has a moral duty to care for the land—that which He gave us to use. Stewardship of that which we are allotted is a cornerstone of Christian deontology, and the same holds true in our duties to God’s material creation.
If a Christian rationale remains unconvincing, a conservative concern for the environment can also be founded on more worldly affections. The Romantic writers described the ineffable emotions people feel when experiencing the natural world as the sublime. As a Catholic, of course, I would argue that all nature (by virtue of being created) partakes in the good. But even when extracted from a Christian framework, there seems to be an inherent value and pull to the landscape, which can inspire a sense of the majestic, the tranquil, the transcendent.
Even imagery of the wilderness in literature can stir the heart. I think about the serried ranks of tall, dark pine on a high Canadian hillside in Alistair MacLeod’s short stories. Or the warm wind blowing soft off the Aegean and rustling the olive-boughs in the novels of Stratis Haviaras. Walter Scott’s craggy Scottish Highlands in Waverley, his drama of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. There is also Major Freeleigh’s reminiscences of the North American bison thundering over the Great Plains in Ray Bradbury’s wonderful Dandelion Wine. I often also think about Kenneth Graeme’s account of Mole’s riverside home in his The Wind of the Willows or Tolkien’s description of the land of Ithilien in the Two Towers:
“Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing… and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.”
What I am arguing for is not a care for the environment on a purely nostalgic or aesthetic basis. Conservatives should not be environmentalists solely because the natural world is beautiful, though that itself might be reason enough to preserve it. The environment also has its way of creeping into our quotidian forms of existence—our towns, our schools, our way of life. Farmers draw their livelihoods from the soil, fishermen from the waters, trappers and hunters from the woods. For the sake of our continued economic prosperity, it seems wise to safeguard the country’s natural resources for use by future generations. The United States’ old pioneer traditions of ranching and Jeffersonian small farming—the preserve of men “tied to their country and wedded to its liberty,” as Jefferson wrote to John Jay, can only be sustained if the land remains useable.
Another reason why conservatives should embrace environmental causes lies in the connection between the ecological, our surroundings, and by extension, ourselves. The value of a place is not derived merely from its people and their respective culture (though these are very important); regional locales are also conditioned by their relationship to the land, which in turn shapes the unique character of America’s various communities. Agricultural towns built into the dry hillsides of California’s Central Valley will inevitably be different from logging villages in the northern woods of Minnesota or seaside towns in New England. The important point is that the land bequeaths a certain quality upon a place. It gives birth to tangible ways of living, yes, but also intangible ways of knowing—memories, associations, and mentalities. And from these arise the distinct culture and identity that makes a given place unique and valuable.
If we believe in preserving what is right and good in America, stewarding the natural world is a good place to start. I am not proposing a Green New Deal or the wrecking of America’s crucial natural gas industries. I do not want to outright end coal mining and put hardworking Appalachians out of work. Nor do I believe that we need switch immediately to electric cars lest the world end.
However, there are legitimate ecological problems which need solving. Chemical runoff and dumping by Monsanto and other corporations is threatening the water supply. Invasive foreign species like carp and the Japanese lantern fly are wreaking havoc on native flora and fauna. Bad storms are becoming more common and destructive—we all what happened in the South with Hurricane Helene in 2024. These are real problems that impact real Americans. To do nothing would be to neglect our communities and give the left carte blanche to dominate the discourse.
I will be even more explicit: the conservative movement will be left morally and physically impoverished if it does not look to protecting its natural inheritance and, in doing so, fail to defend the very fabric of its historical culture and distinct way of life.
What, then, is to be done?
I do not have a definitive solution to our growing environmental problems, though a good starting point lies in the conservationist work A Sand County Almanac. Written by Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) and published posthumously in 1949, the Almanac is a unique sort of book—half-autobiographical, half-literary—that recounts a year on Leopold’s farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. Leopold conceived of conservation as a “state of harmony between men and the land,” an ideal which he tried to uphold when be bought his farm, then a sandy and overworked plot of around 110 acres in 1935. He spent over a decade restoring the property to its natural and wild state, planting native species in a landscape once stripped bare. Interspersing Leopold’s dour musings on technology and progress with his observations of the natural world, the Almanac offers much to a right-leaning audience.
While conservatives may quibble with Leopold on certain issues—despite being an avid hunter, he was critical of reducing the American landscape to a recreational space, for instance—I think the Almanac serves as a means to reorient environmentalism within a non-leftist framework. Leopold recognized the integral relationship between people, places, and the natural world. As a man dedicated to his small patch of Wisconsin earth, his work is stridently parochial, ordering concern for the ecological within the context of his personal connection to it. Reading the Almanac made me realize that left-wing environmentalists get things backwards. They call upon relatively abstract notions of “the planet” and “Mother Nature” which contain little appeal to the average person, save perhaps to a certain type of crunchy urbanite. They emphasize the international and neglect our real connections with the local. Leopold’s work can serve to put things right by pointing us towards the fact that a true ecological ethic first begins with concern for those concrete instantiations of the woods and waters that exist in our own lives and communities. It may be easy to ignore ecological destruction in an exotic foreign country, but it is harder to look aside when degradation alters our own backyards for the worse.
It is this attachment to the local which can serve as the cornerstone for a right-leaning conservationist movement. Recognizing the connections between the land and our way of life—both regionally and nationally—we can look in our own neighborhood, find things worth preserving, and take action to conserve these good things.
For instance, I remember walking along my neighborhood beach when I was little, my grandmother pointing out the teeming colonies of mussels which were exposed in the muddy flats when the tide went out. As a kid my siblings and I used to dig them up to cook during the summertime, but when I was a teenager chemical runoff seeped into the bay and killed the mussels off. A connection between myself, my beloved grandparents, and the land was destroyed. Witnessing the degradation of our local shoreline, members of the community successfully lobbied to ban the dumping of certain harmful substances. As a young adult, I can happily report that mollusks have slowly begun to return to our beaches, and I look forward to passing on the tradition I shared with my grandparents to my children.
Others undoubtedly possess similarly rooted experiences and memories—blueberry picking, hunting, hiking, fishing—which inspire a love for our communities, a love for the land, and a desire to protect them.
Of course, local action is only a pragmatic starting point, and future conversations about climate science, public lands, and the role the federal government and international institutions ought to have in conservation should be held. However, I insist on one thing. A right-leaning environmentalism must always start at the local level and cannot be separated from our other related loves of culture, community, and memory. Without embracing these loves as a unity, we will drift either into a dead-end leftist hysteria or an equally untenable rejection of all things ecological.
Conservatives rightly worry about the radical cultural changes sweeping this country. We want to defend the things we love. Our families, our faith, our cherished way of life. I, for one, feel called to “take my stand”, as the Southern Agrarians would put it; yet there is no preservation of a beloved nation without consideration for the land. Ecology is an inseparable part of the complex matrix of loyalties we hold to kin, country, memory, and all that is our own. If we wish to save America, we must save the American landscape, too. And we can do it by starting local.
