Strange Bedfellows

In an essay discussing the rise of “woke capitalism” after the news about the capitulation of Chic-fil-A in the Culture War I made the point that the alliance between “conservatism” or “the Right” and “capitalism” which dates back to the rise of socialism, the mutual foe of both, in the nineteenth century was an unnatural alliance, and that those who wish to preserve or recover elements of the heritage, history and tradition of Western Civilization that predate modern liberalism need to reconsider this alliance with a force that has been a far more effective engine for the uprooting of communities, destruction of traditions, and alienation of individuals than socialism ever has. In this essay, I wish to follow up on that by looking at another unnatural alliance, that which exists between “environmentalism” or “The Green Movement” and socialism.

An alliance between environmentalism and conservatism would be much more natural. I am speaking, of course, of the unadulterated, original versions of both environmentalism and conservatism, neither of which is very recognizable in the present day movements by those names.

Environmentalism began with the concern that something valuable, which had come down to us from past generations, was disappearing and in danger of being lost to future generations. That something included both natural resources valued for their utility, their usefulness to man and his enterprises, and the beauty of our physical surroundings, especially the countryside. Environmentalism grew out of the instinct to protect these things and preserve them for generations yet to come. Hence the earliest form of environmentalism was the conservation movement.

Conservatism, which obviously shares a common root with conservation, grew out of a similar concern that something valuable, which had come down to us from past generations, was disappearing and in danger of being lost to future generations. For Edmund Burke and the original conservatives, that something included both the institutions that the Tories of previous generations had fought for – the monarchy and the Apostolic Church – and the constitutional rights and liberties for which the Whigs had professed to have been fighting. (1) Conservatism was originally the instinct to protect and preserve these things for future generations, against those who wished to bulldoze them down in the name of building a fanciful earthly paradise, on the foundation of their rationalistic, abstract ideals.

Given the very similar instincts and starting points of these two movements it is rather astonishing that they did not develop a strong and enduring alliance. There have always been outspoken advocates of ecological conservation on the Right. The reactionary, Roman Catholic philologist, poet, and novelist J. R. R. Tolkien made it rather plain what he thought about industrial de-forestation in his famous fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Michael Wharton, who for decades as the writer of the “Peter Simple” column for the Daily Telegraph was the most right-wing columnist in the United Kingdom, said in The Missing Will, the first volume of his autobiography, “I had developed, partly because of my general loathing for ‘progress’ and technology – I can claim to have been what is now called, somewhat nauseatingly, a ‘friend of the earth’ thirty years before the Environment was invented – an extreme hatred of Communism which has never left me.” Nevertheless, the environmentalist movement has long tilted left, and conservatism in response has viewed it with suspicion. This is due, in part, to conservatism’s mistake in seeing capitalism as a friend rather than a foe, a mistake which has grown over time to the point that present day conservatism, or “neo-conservatism” has little interest in preserving anything other than capitalism. The other contributing factor is environmentalism’s mistake in seeing socialism as a friend rather than a foe. Both mistakes arose through the faulty reasoning “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Both mistakes were magnified by the erroneous assumption, which became almost universal in the twentieth century, that if one was not a capitalist one was therefore a socialist and vice versa.

To understand why socialism is not a friend of true environmentalism, it is important that we understand the nature of socialism. Socialism is not being compassionate and charitable to the poor. Socialism is not “standing up for the working man.” Socialism is not the application of the classical idea of restraint to human greed. (2) The many different socialisms that arose in the nineteenth century all sprang out of the same common idea: that the private ownership of property is responsible for most or all human suffering and must therefore be eradicated.

One of the oldest observations that pertain to conserving resources and the beauty of our surroundings is to be found in the third chapter of Book Two of Aristotle’s Politika. This is the section of that work in which Aristotle made the case for private ownership against complete communal ownership. As translated by Benjamin Jowett, he wrote:

That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.

Universal experience confirms what Aristotle has written here. Take houses, as just one example. Houses that are owned by the people who live in them, whether they take care of them themselves or are rich enough to hire a staff to do it for them, are generally the ones that are kept in best repair and which are a pleasure to look at. Houses that are owned by the public, rented out at low cost, and maintained by employees of the state with no other personal interest in them, are the most likely to be run down, eyesores. Other arrangements that fall between these polar opposites also typically fall between them in terms of their level of upkeep.

Despite the fact that any one of us can confirm with his own eyes the truth of what Aristotle pointed out twenty-three and a half centuries ago, environmentalists continue to talk as if the exact opposite were the case and human societies took better care of their environment before there was private property and will do so again once socialism eliminates private property.

There is a widespread myth, that pre-civilized tribal societies, without a well-developed and defined sense of private property ownership, had more of a connection to land, nature, etc. and so took much greater care not to pollute the environment or to waste their resources. This myth, which like capitalism and socialism has its roots in the pets de cerveau of the so-called Enlightenment of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, and was popularized by Romantic poetry and Disney cartoons, is completely counterfactual. The societies in question hunted animals to extinction, set forests on fire to drive the wildlife out into the open where they could be more easily hunted, and were far more wasteful than property owning societies. Nevertheless, nowhere is this myth more prevalent than among environmentalists.

If it is a myth that pre-property societies were ultra-Green and eco-friendly it is laughable folly to suggest that post-property societies are so or will be so. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we learned that not only was the great experiment in Communism a failure economically – instead of elevating the living conditions of the workers it lowered them, leaving them in worse poverty and virtual slavery – but it was a disaster ecologically as well. Nowhere in the world were there dirtier cities, more depleted forests and other natural resources, more soil erosion, acid rain and polluted air and waters than in those countries unfortunate enough to have fallen behind the Iron Curtain. Nor, until relatively recently, have things been any better behind the Bamboo Curtain.

Has any of this caused environmentalists to renounce socialism?

No, in spite of it, environmentalism seems to be more in bed with socialism now than it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Think, for example, of environmentalism’s present obsession with warding off a climactic apocalypse. The entire anthropogenic climate change horror story is nonsense that is easily demonstrated to be such. Carbon dioxide is the natural product of human and animal respiration and the food of vegetable photosynthesis. It is hardly a pollutant. The global climate has never been static, but has gone through cycles of warmer and cooler periods throughout known history. A myriad of factors contribute to this, the majority of which, and the most important of which, are beyond human control. Furthermore, it is a rather obvious historical fact that human life and civilization, as well as all other life, animal and plant, have thrived much more in warmer periods than in cold periods. Climate change alarmism requires one to believe the opposite of all of this. While environmentalists claim that “the science” backs them up, by “the science” they mean the kind of phony consensus that can be produced by threatening the research grants, potential tenure, and the like of those who dissent. Science, in other words, in the same sense in which Lysenkoism was once considered “science” in the Soviet Union.

Environmentalists insist that the climate crisis demands immediate action on the part of the world’s governments. Their proposals, however, from the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 to the Paris Agreement of 2015 to the Green New Deal currently being touted, are all designed to create global socialism – central economic planning, wealth redistribution, etc. on a planetary scale. Since socialism was ecologically catastrophic for the Soviet Union and its satellites on a national scale, the most likely outcome of these accords is to create a genuine global ecological crisis in the name of averting a chimerical one.

If there is any genuine concern left in the Green movement for preserving natural resources and the beauty of the countryside they will abandon their unnatural alliance with a socialism that can ultimately work only against these ends. (3)




(1) In my, unreconstructed Tory, opinion the actions of the Whigs, and their predecessors the Roundheads, did more to damage these than to defend them.

(2) George Grant, a conservative who recognized that capitalism was not the friend of conservatism, absurdly tried to define socialism this way in Lament for a Nation, showing that even the best of thinkers can be guilty of huge errors. Grant’s mistake arose out of the erroneous assumption that one must be either a capitalism or a socialist.

(3) I am not saying that everything that is objectionable in environmentalism can be traced back to its strange alliance with socialism. Volumes could be written, and have been written for that matter, about the influence of neo-pagan, earth and nature worship, on the Green movement. Further, for about seventy years now environmentalist thinking about the limits of natural resources has been informed by neo-Malthusianism. Back in the nineteenth century, the Reverend T. Robert Malthus had warned that the human population was growing at a much higher rate than was food production and that if not corrected this would lead to poverty, war, etc. He advocated correction that was consistent with Christian ethics, such as chastity before marriage and postponing marriage until one could afford to raise a family on his means. The neo-Malthusianism, favoured since the 1950s by United Nations environmental agencies, the Club of Rome, secular ecological groups, and alarmists like Dr. Paul Ehrlich, reworked Malthus’ theory into a prophecy of imminent, global, ecological collapse, not unlike the climate change alarmists’ doomsday scenario, and proposed solutions that the Rev. Malthus would have found ethically repugnant – forced sterilization, mandatory artificial birth control, abortion, quotas on family size, etc. Thus, the whole objectionable “culture of death” aspect of environmentalism which can be attributed to this neo-Malthusianism, was present even in the writings of such dissident ecologists as the late Dr. Garrett James Hardin, who had been Professor of Human Ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who was otherwise a refreshing voice of sanity in an increasingly mad environmentalist movement. He defied the environmentalist mainstream in such articles as “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, 1968, and his unfortunately subtitled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Psychology Today, 1974. In the former he made the Aristotelean case that private ownership is the right choice for the conservation of resources and that collective ownership combined with universal, egalitarian access is the recipe for ecological disaster. In the latter he opposed the mainstream, environmentalist, tendency to think on a global scale and urged countries to focus on their own, national ecosystems, arguing for the metaphor of hundreds of lifeboats adrift on the sea rather than the “Spaceship earth” metaphor preferred by most environmentalists, and applied this by arguing against mass immigration and foreign aid. This year, a fifteenth anniversary edition of Ronald Wright’s 2004 Massey Lectures series, A Short History of Progress, was published. The original edition came out a year after Dr. Hardin left us, and in these lectures Wright made all of the mistakes which Hardin had avoided, as well as all of the ones he had not, thus tainting what might otherwise have been a valuable look at the problems human civilization can cause for itself, through the shortsighted pursuit of technological progress. Perhaps a new edition of Dr. Hardin’s Living Within Limits, Stalking the Wild Taboo, or The Ostrich Factor would be more in order.

GTN Tory Classics No. 7: Production, Limits, and Private Property

There are nine words in the following essay, the fourth in the seven-part series of economic essays that I wrote in 2009, that I wish I had not included. Those are the words “The latter is not particularly relevant in this context” in reference to Dr. Garrett Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics”. What Dr. Hardin had written in “Lifeboat Ethics” is in fact very relevant to the subject matter of this essay.

This essay is both an economic and an ecological essay. It begins with the basic economic argument for growth – that a company by producing larger quantities of its product can sell its product at a lower cost per unit to the consumer and increase the wages of its employees while increasing its profits. It then moves to the ecological question of the sustainability of growth. The kind of economic growth where consumer and producer, employer and employee, all benefit from increased productivity cannot be sustained forever because we live in a finite world with finite resources. In the final part of the essay, I contrast Ronald Wright’s approach to the subject of limited resources with Garrett Hardin’s as expressed in “The Tragedy of the Commons”.

The point I was arguing towards was the goal of the conservation of resources is better served by private rather than collective ownership. Both of the Garrett Hardin essays I mentioned are on the subject of the conservation of resources. “The Tragedy of the Commons” speaks directly to the question of private resources vs. common resources. “Life-boat Ethics” does so in a less direct manner. In the late 1960’s, Kenneth Boulding had written an essay about limited resources and conservation in which he compared people living on this planet to the crew of a spaceship, who must co-operate with each other, and conserve their limited resources, for their voyage to be a success. The “spaceship earth” metaphor caught on and had become popular among ecologists when Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics” was published by Psychology Today in 1974. Hardin suggested that a more appropriate metaphor was that of lifeboats, adrift at sea, each with room and resources for a limited number of people. There are people in the sea surrounding the lifeboat, and the compassionate thing to do would seem to be to bring those people onto the lifeboat. If the boat is already at its carrying capacity, however, this will cause the boat to capsize. If that happens, then an act of compassion, intended to take people who are in a place of peril in the sea and put them in a place of safety in the boat, will have the opposite result of putting everyone on the lifeboat into the same perilous situation as those they intended to but failed to rescue.

Hardin applied this metaphor by criticizing liberal immigration and foreign aid policies. While I agree with much of this criticism I did not see it as relevant to the point I was trying to make by referring to Hardin’s other essay. It occurred to me, however, as I re-read my essay in preparation for posting it here, that there is another aspect of Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor which does speak to the matter of the conflict between growth-fuelled prosperity and limited resources. In Boulding’s original “spaceship” metaphor, the entire planet is one spaceship and ecological problems are global problems. In Hardin’s “lifeboat” metaphor there is not one lifeboat but many, every first world country being considered a lifeboat. This suggests that problems which the “Spaceship Earth” metaphor treats as global problems are better thought of as local problems and addressed on a smaller scale.

Economic growth is like biological growth. The division and multiplication of cells is necessary for good health, but only up to a point. When cells multiply past that point they cause harm rather than health. We call this cancer. Likewise, economic growth can be good and necessary or it can be harmful. When economic growth results in lower prices to the consumer, higher wages to the worker, and more profits for the company this is good. At some point, however, growth becomes harmful. Economically, that point is when more of a product is produced than there is demand for. When growth passes this point it ceases to be beneficial to everyone – sales drop off, profits decline, production has to be slowed down or halted and there are massive layoffs. This is also the point where growth necessarily becomes ecologically harmful – to produce more of a product than there is demand for is wasteful, although it is possible for growth to become ecologically harmful at an early point if demand for a product is greater than the available resources.

There is a tendency among ecologists to blame private ownership and freedom for the problems of excessive growth. This is unfortunate because, as Hardin has shown, privately owned resources are better maintained and conserved than publicly owned resources. Or, more accurately, resources are best maintained when the person who profits from their use is also the person who pays the cost for their use. The “tragedy of the commons” occurs because in a commons, people privately profit from their use of commonly owned resources in which the cost of use is divided and spread out. A person or company could try to export the cost of use of his or their privately owned resources, and it is human nature to try and do just this, but it is easier to accomplish this, especially on a large scale, with the collusion of government. Just as a private bank can inflate currency and cause an economic bubble and recession, but a large central bank can do so on a much larger scale, so a company looking to pass its costs off onto other people will find it easier to do so by making use of taxpayer funded public utilities and infrastructure and with the help of the people who make and enforce bylaws. At the heart of most if not all of the economic and ecological problems caused by excessive growth that we experience today you will find a large, heavily centralized, state.


Production, Limits, and Private Property


By Gerry T. Neal
June 21, 2009

Here’s a question: Can a business at the same time a) increase its profits, b) increase its wages/salaries, and c) lower the price of its profits?

The answers that probably spring to mind are either “Yes, if it wants to go broke” or “No, you idiot, where did you learn your math?”. Without information as to how a company would go about doing this these answers are both reasonable. After all, lowering your price lowers your revenue, while increasing wages increases your costs. How can both exist simultaneously with an increase in profit? Something doesn’t add up.

Actually, however, there is a way to do it. Let’s say you have a company that is producing 1000 units of its product an hour and selling them at $5.00 a unit. Your revenue then, after selling an hour’s worth of your product, is $5000. From this you pay the costs of that hour of production (including wages) and after costs what remains of the $5000 is your profit.

Now let’s suppose you take that profit and re-invest it in a capital-improvement project that increases your company’s productivity so that with the same labor force you can now produce 5000 units per hour. Since you are now producing more you decide to lower the price of your product by half to $2.50 a unit. At this lower price, the revenue from selling an hour’s worth of your product is now $12,500. That is 2 ½ times more than you made previously. From that you can increase the wages of your employees, which you should be doing as their productivity has gone up making their labor more valuable to you. You will still be able to make a greater profit than you did before.

When a company improves production, then, it benefits everybody – the owner/shareholders, the employees and customers of the company. They are all better off than before.

What works for a company can also work for a country. If a country’s leaders wish to improve the standard of living of their people what is the best way to do it? Pass minimum wage laws? Set price controls? Create safety nets of social benefits to create a “floor” beneath which your citizens theoretically cannot drop? No. Each of these methods is known to backfire making things worse than they were before.

A government that wishes to increase its people’s standard of living should encourage the improvement of production so that there is more material wealth being generated. Recognizing this fact, governments have attempted to do just that in one of two ways.

Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union attempted to increase industrial production with their New Economic Policy and Five Year Plans. Mao in Red China attempted to increase agricultural and industrial production in his “Great Leap Forward”. Both of these experiments in central, state-planned economic development, proved to be catastrophic failures. So has every other attempt to do it this way.

In contrast, in Western countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, production was left in the hands of privately owned companies that were allowed and encouraged to compete with one another in a free market. This is the method that has always worked. Improved production generated higher profits and wages and lower costs for the consumer increasing the standard of living in general.

Of course a large part of the benefit of improved production has been eaten up by our governments. They have raised taxes to an obscene level and generated inflation by printing more money to support their projects, most of which are wasteful and useless. Raising taxes takes money out of production in the private sector where it can be more useful. Inflation decreases the value of money which in term decreases the benefits to the consumer of lower costs in the marketplace brought about by improved production.

Now we come to another question. That question is this: Can the improvement of production go on forever?

A lot of people seem to think the answer to this is yes. These people believe that history is marching ever upwards and that human ingenuity will always find newer, better, more efficient ways of making newer and better products, causing today’s luxuries to become tomorrow’s necessities, as the standard of living keeps rising higher and higher. The name for this belief is “progress”. It is what progressives, aka liberals, used to believe before they switched over to believing in the infinite capacity of the state to bring out the natural goodness in people and morally improve society through social programs.

The answer, however, is no. While production can be improved, generating high profits, high wages, low costs and a general improved standard of living, this can only be done within certain limits. For we humans are finite, limited creatures, living in a finite, limited world. We forget this to our own peril.

What are the limits in question? Well, if we wish to have our three-fold benefit of improved production, the obvious first limit to come to mind is that of demand. Demand refers to how much of your product people are willing to buy. It is the other criteria determining market price. Remember that you and your employees only benefit as producers from improved production if you are able to sell enough of your product at the reduced price to generate more in revenue that you did prior to the improvement. Whether you are able to do this or not depends entirely on how much demand there is for your product.

A company that ignores that limit will generally harm only itself. The same cannot be said for the next limit. That limit is the availability and cost of raw materials and energy. These are limited resources. Some raw materials are renewable resources, like wood for lumber and paper companies, but being renewable does not mean being infinite. Trees take a long time to grow after all. Other raw materials, such as metals and useful stone like granite and marble, exist only in set quantities. These may be recyclable or reusable but they are not renewable. Yet other raw materials exist only in set quantities, are not recyclable or reusable, and can be used up. The obvious examples of these are petroleum and coal, which are used both as raw materials and as sources of energy.

Ecologists remind us of these limits, even if economists are often prone to forget them. Unfortunately, their recommendations for conserving resources are generally less than helpful. Ronald Wright, for example, in his 2004 Massey Lectures published as A Short History of Progress, tells of how human societies in the past have got carried away with production and ignored the limits of their resources, falling into “progress traps” that led to tremendous human suffering when the resources were depleted. He warns, in the alarmist fashion of the typical environmentalist, that we are doing the same thing today on a larger, global scale, that we are almost at the point of no return, and that this is our last chance. He is very vague in his recommendations as to how to go about fixing things, however, although one quickly picks up on the fact that he is sympathetic to socialism over the free market.

An ecologist who was helpful, on this subject, was the late Dr. Garrett J. Hardin. Apart from Hardin’s Law – “you cannot do only one thing” - his most famous contributions to ecological thought were the concepts of “The Tragedy of the Commons” and “Lifeboat Ethics”. The latter is not particularly relevant in this context but “The Tragedy of the Commons” deals with the heart of the matter.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a story of a medieval commons – a pasture owned collectively by a community in which each member of the community was allowed to keep his sheep. Since the cost of maintaining the commons was shared but the profit from raising the sheep was private, everyone who kept their sheep there had a stronger motive to increasing their own number of sheep at the public expense than to try and conserve the resource. As a result the pasture became overgrazed.

The point of all this, Hardin argued, was that a system where costs were shared, but profits were private, was the worst possible system for preserving limited resources. The other options are to make the profits collective (socialism) or to privatize the costs by privatizing the resources.

The privatization of resources, Hardin argued, was the best way of conserving them. Observation easily bears Hardin out on this. Domesticated animals are never on the endangered species list. Paper and lumber companies make sure that plenty of trees are replanted. If you want to see well kept houses, green lawns, and beautiful gardens, you go to neighborhoods where people own their own homes, not to rental districts.

Conversely, if you want to find litter the best place to look is in ditches and public parks. Pollution is a problem primarily in rivers, lakes, seas, and the air, all of which are resources which are held in common.

To put it simply, people take care of their own property, and are much more likely to take a long-term view of resources which are their own, than resources that are held in common with others.

Private property, then, is the foundation of both true ecology and sound economics. Private property owners competing in a free market are the best producers. They are also the best conservers of resources. The companies that are most likely to deplete resources rather than conserve them are the companies that try keep their profits private while throwing their costs onto the public. That is accomplished through collusion with government.

The Beauty of Nature, Man’s Dominion, and the Environmentalist Movement

Beauty is that quality of certain sights and sounds which appeals to us and draws us back to look or listen again in appreciative contemplation. There are many different kinds of beauty. There is the human beauty which plays a large role in sexual attraction, the beauty which men see in women, and women in men. Then there is the kind of beauty which human beings create in art. The arrangement of words in a poem and of notes in a symphony are examples of this kind of beauty as are the amphitheatres and temples of ancient Greece, the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the porcelain of the Song and Ming Dynasties in China, and the sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance masters.

Then there is what is often called natural beauty – the beauty of the world around us. This is the beauty that we will be considering in this essay and we will start by noting that there are different meanings attached to the word “natural” which correspond to the radically different ways of thinking about natural beauty which exist today.

The different meanings of the word “natural” are actually different meanings of the word “nature”, for natural is an adjective that derives its meaning from a source noun by attributing the qualities of that source noun to that which it is modifying. When we say that something is “natural” we mean that in some sense it is by, of, or from nature.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word for “give birth” and its earliest English usage reflects an important concept in classical philosophy. It was originally used to refer to something’s essence, to the qualities and traits which make that something what it is and not something else. We still use the word nature in this sense today. If we say that something is a certain way “by nature” then we mean that it could not be different and still be itself.

It is from this meaning of nature that the concept of the “natural sciences” was originally derived. Today we often use the word science to refer to the natural sciences but originally the term science was used to refer to organized knowledge of all sorts. When qualified by the adjective natural, it referred to the pursuit of knowledge of how everything in the physical world works. This was because people who pursued this kind of science were trying to discover the nature of everything they observed in the world around them.

This usage, however, led to a change in the meaning of the word nature. It came to mean “that which natural scientists study”, i.e., the physical world. From this it developed a narrower sense of “living organisms in the physical world”. Very recently it took on the meaning of “everything in the physical world, especially the living organisms, except mankind”.

The difference between the oldest meaning of nature as something’s “essential qualities” and the most recent meaning of nature as “everything except mankind” is reflected in the different ways in which people think of natural beauty today. This becomes clear when we ask the question: Does beauty have to be untouched by the hand of man in order to be natural?

Those who answer this question with a “yes” are using the word “natural” in accordance with the more recent meaning of “nature”. Those who answer the question with “no” are using the word “natural” in its classical sense.

Now let me state out front that I am one of those who would answer the question “no”. To that I would add that it is this understanding of “nature” and “natural” as excluding mankind and his influence that is precisely what is wrong with the environmentalist or “Green” movement at its worst.

In saying that I do not mean to suggest that humans are incapable of acting in ways which can have a negative effect upon their world and its beauty. Of course we are, we do it all the time. Human activity can mar natural beauty severely. Human activity can also enhance that beauty, however, and the idea that we have a responsibility, in choosing our behavior, to take our impact upon the appearance of our world into consideration and select behavior that enhances rather than mars that appearance, is environmentalism at its best.

We will return to that momentarily. Before doing so, I should note that natural beauty is a fairly recent subject of serious thought. The Athenian philosophers talked and wrote about beauty but they did not have the beauty of streams and fields, forests and meadows, in mind when they did so. They wrote about the beauty of human beings, the erotic love it inspires, and the higher ideal Beauty which it is an earthly image of.

The 19th Century German historian Jacob Burckhardt describes how the natural world came to be considered an object of beauty in the Italian Renaissance:

The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. (1)

Burckhardt believed that the ability to see the beauty in the world around us is “always the result of a long and complicated development”. He went on to summarize the history of the way people thought about the natural world – its beauty entered into the arts and poetry of the ancient world only after they had covered everything else, the Germanic peoples had a reverence for nature which they abandoned when they accepted the Christian faith, until finally around 1200 “at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence…which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods”. (2)

All of that, however, Burckhardt maintained, was “foreground without perspective”. It was in the writings of Dante and Petrarch that he saw the birth of modern serious contemplation of natural beauty. Of Dante he wrote:

Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning air and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view—the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so. (3)

Dante and Petrarch were poets, of course, writing at the dawn of an era in which the systematic pursuit of knowledge would be divided up into numerous specialized fields. It was much later that Alexander Baumgarten took the Greek word for “feeling” or “sensitivity” and from it coined the term aesthetics to refer to the philosophy of beauty, art, and taste. It was in the 18th Century that Baumgarten coined this term and Roger Scruton – himself a philosopher who specialized in the field of aesthetics – tells us that:

When, during the course of the eighteenth century, philosophers and writers began to turn their attention to the subject of beauty, it was not art or people but nature and landscape that dominated their thinking. (4)

This did not last long. Two chapters later Scruton begins his discussion of artistic beauty by telling us how in the 19th Century “the topic of art came to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics”. (5) If natural beauty was bumped by art from the centre to the periphery of aesthetics in the 19th Century, however, it also came to be included within the context of an entirely different discussion, that of environmentalism.

Environmentalism is neither a science nor a branch of philosophy. It is an ideology and the political movement that speaks for that ideology. It purports to be based upon and informed by science, particularly the science of ecology (6), but as with all movements that make this claim it is questionable to what extent it allows scientific findings to influence its ideology rather than bending the science to fit its ideology.

Environmentalism started as a reaction against industrialization. Industrialization began a couple of centuries ago when modern science was applied to methods of producing material goods, and ways of producing goods in large quantities in short periods of time were developed. Industrialization brought many blessings to mankind – material goods became plentiful and more affordable, items previously considered to be luxury goods became more widely available, work hours were decreased and leisure time increased.

These blessings did not come without a price, however. There was a negative side to the industrialization process. The large scale production of material goods meant that the raw materials from which these goods were produced were being used up on a larger, faster scale as well. The production of usable goods from raw materials also results in byproducts which are often unusable and discarded as waste. The enhanced production of goods meant that waste was produced on a larger scale as well. Industrialized production required machinery which consumed energy resources on a larger scale than ever before and which produced smoke on a much larger scale than ever before as well.

The increase in the speed and scale with which we consume resources was a potential problem because of the danger that we would use up those resources faster than we could replace them, or, in the case of resources that cannot be renewed, that we would use them up altogether and be stuck without an alternative. The increase in the production of waste was a more concrete problem because that waste needed to go somewhere and many methods of disposing of it resulted in pollution of streams, ditches, fields, oceans, the underground water supply, and the atmosphere.

It was in order to address these problems that environmentalism was born. Originally, environmentalism had the good of human beings at heart. The concern that resources were being used up too fast was a concern that a tremendous amount of human misery would be produced when the resources are no longer sufficient to sustain the human population. The concern that the large scale production of industrial waste was creating pollution was a concern that human beings would be drinking tainted water, breathing polluted air, and would be living in an environment contaminated by pollutants.

One thing that stands out about these concerns is that they are intrinsically conservative in nature. This is even reflected in the name for the branch of environmentalism that addresses the question of resources. That branch is called conservationism a term derived from the same root as the word conservative. Those who dismiss these concerns, on the other hand, by affirming their faith that science and technology will always find an answer, are affirming a belief in progress. (7)

In North America, however, opposition to environmentalism is mostly found among those who identify themselves as conservatives and support of environmentalism is mostly found among those who identify themselves as progressives. This can partly be explained by the fact that many North American conservatives are really liberals. There is more to it than that however. (8) Environmentalism has changed from being a concern for the environment for the sake of mankind which needs that environment to being a concern for the environment for its own sake in which mankind is regarded as an enemy.

This brings us back to the meaning of nature and the question of whether natural beauty must be beauty that is untouched by man.

The topic of natural beauty inevitably became part of the environmentalist discussion because it is by definition the beauty of man’s environment. When we talk about pollution’s harmful effects upon the environment we usually think first about how waste products released into water or the air can make sick or kill the people and other animals who drink the water and breathe the air. Pollution can also harm the environment by marring its beauty and producing ugliness.

We recognize this immediately when we think about the kind of pollution we call littering. A lawn, garden, public park, or even a ditch beside a road, looks terrible when it is covered by empty potato chip bags, cigarette packages, and beer and soda pop cans.

Some people might be inclined to think that this is the most trivial of environmentalist concerns. The depletion of resources and the poisoning of others are matters which pose direct threats to human beings. It might annoy us if the appearance of our surroundings is marred by pollution but this does not threaten our existence. Are we not constantly told that outward appearances are superficial, trivial matters that only shallow people concern themselves with?

Cultural warnings against judging by outward appearances, however, pertain to how we regard other people not how we think about our environment. The idea behind them is that we should not allow a person’s appearance to overrule his character. And while it is true that other concerns might be of greater importance this does not make concern for the appearance of the world around us a trivial matter. Try and imagine living in a world where everything we regard as beautiful has disappeared and been replaced by something ugly. The thought of living in such a world should be sufficient to convince us that environmental beauty is anything but trivial.

We are able to appreciate beauty in ourselves, in art, and in the world around us because this ability is part of our nature as human beings. Our human nature also manifests itself in the universal human activity of attempting to make our personal appearances, the appearance of our homes, and the appearance of our arts and crafts, as pleasing to the eye as possible. In both of these aspects of human nature can be seen a tremendous human need for beauty. (9)

It is this human need for beauty which makes natural or environmental beauty something which we should try to conserve along with natural resources. To conserve something is to preserve it for the future by being careful not to waste it in the present. To conserve things we have inherited from past generations – our civilization, our culture, our laws and rights, our art, our resources, our environment – for future generations is to behave responsibly by taking a long view of things in which we rank our long term good higher than our immediate short term good. To take this view, requires that we think of ourselves primarily as communities or societies and only secondarily as individuals, for individuals have only brief lifespans in comparison with the multigenerational life of a community or society. It also requires that we cultivate and practice the virtue of temperance or self-control, of keeping our desires and passions subject to our reason, itself subject to the good of the community reflected in its laws.

These attitudes and behaviors are consistent with pre-modern classical and Christian thought. They are at odds with modern thought, however. Liberalism, the predominant ideology of the modern age, consists of unfettered individualism which insists upon the primacy of the individual over the community. The classical idea of governing our passions is the polar opposite of the message of “indulge yourself”, “express yourself”, and “if it feels good do it” that is found everywhere today. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that the idea of conserving our natural resources and the beauty of our environment finds itself at odds with modern utilitarianism and pragmatism.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the movement which has concerned itself with the conservation of environmental beauty and natural resources, has aligned itself, not with the classical and Christian pre-modern traditions of Western civilization, but with the radical forces dedicated to their destruction. The result of this mismatched alliance has been that the environmentalist cause has been twisted and its very understanding of nature and natural beauty has been warped.

At some point the environmentalist movement began to lay the blame for the problems created by industrialization at the feet of Christianity. In Genesis 1:26-29, God creates man and gives him dominion over the earth and all living things therein. Environmentalists pointed to this passage and identified it as the source of industrialism’s use of science and technology to exert man’s will over the natural world, and therefore of industrial depletion of resources and massive production of waste and pollution.

Having placed the blame on Christianity for the industrial threat to our ecosystem, environmentalism then adopted a worldview in which nature was elevated to the level of the divine. In some cases this was very literal as some environmentalists turned to a naturalistic, neopagan religion, in which nature or the earth was worshipped as a goddess. These were the radical fringe of the movement – most environmentalists did not go this far but they insisted that we adopt an attitude of reverence towards nature of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths teach should be reserved for God

This was a reversal of the positions held by man and the rest of the physical world in the hierarchy of Creation in Christianity. One of its effects was to remove mankind from “nature” in the thinking of the environmentalists. In Christian doctrine, God created man in His own image, gave man dominion over the natural world within which He placed man. Man’s vice-regal dominion over Creation was to be exercised from within Creation. To elevate nature above man the environmentalists had to separate nature from man.

The concept of a nature which is separate from and does not include man is a false concept, a distorted concept and this has in turn distorted the way those who hold this concept view mankind. (10) Wendell Berry comments on the unnaturalness of this dichotomous view of man and nature:

The defenders of nature and wilderness – like their enemies the defenders of the industrial economy – sometimes sound as if the natural and the human were two separate estates, radically different and radically divided. The defenders of nature and wilderness sometimes seem to feel that they must oppose any human encroachment whatsoever, just as the industrialists often apparently feel that they must make the human encroachment absolute or, as they say, “complete the conquest of nature.” But there is danger in this opposition, and it can be best dealt with by realizing that these pure and separate categories are pure ideas and do not otherwise exist. (11)

Berry goes on to say that it is not good for human beings to live for very long in either “pure nature”, i.e., wilderness unshaped by man, or in “a condition that is purely human”, i.e., completely artificial or man-made. (12) He then explains that:

People cannot live apart from nature, that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and they change it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places. (13)

This is not an endorsement of industrialism, of which the agrarian Berry is a fierce critic, but it displays an understanding of the relationship between man and nature which is sorely lacking among most contemporary environmentalist critics of industrial activity.

If it is a mistake to divide “man” and “nature” into separate categories then the answer to our question about natural beauty must be no, that the condition of being unshaped or untouched by the hand of man cannot be the sine qua non of natural beauty.

Common sense would tell us this as well. A world in which cities of concrete and steel, roads of asphalt, advertising billboards, and landfills have completely hidden from view any trace of what it looked like prior to these things would be a world suffering from a beauty deficiency. But so would be a world consisting entirely of wilderness. It is no insult to creation or to its Creator to say that human activity can enhance a landscape and make it more pleasing to the eye than it was before. Since God placed man in this world, and gave him the ability to affect its appearance, it was clearly part of His intention that human activity would have just this effect.

We see this in the way in which well maintained lawns have a more refined beauty than wild grass that grows long and goes to seed, and in the way hedges which are trimmed and trees which are pruned of their dead branches have an elegant beauty that has been enhanced beyond that of the raw forest.

This is not to say that all parts of nature can be improved by mankind in this way. The world is a vast place with a wide variety of different views which respond to the influence of man in different ways. Some are best left as close to the way we found them as possible, others would seem incomplete without evidence of the presence and activity of mankind.

If God’s creation of man in His own image and placing him in the world with dominion over it included the intention that human activity which alters the appearance of creation would enhance and improve its beauty, then the free will that He gave to man, which created the potential for man to abuse his gifts and sin against his Creator, included the potential of man to mar and ruin the beauty of creation as well. Man, as the Scriptures tell and as can be seen everywhere we look, fell into sin and evidence that his sin has included the abuse of his creative abilities to distort and mar the beauty of creation is abundant.

This has been especially true in modern times. Large highways, paved with asphalt, do not complement their surroundings the way older country roads do. Large cities, in which urban dwellers can live their entire lives without seeing the beauty of the countryside, or even the beauty of a star filled heaven at night, do not blend into the country which surrounds them in the way smaller towns and villages do. The vast landfills needed to accommodate the waste of modern, industrial, urban living, are among the many eyesores which scar the beauty of the land as a result of modernization.

The modernization which produced these things does not flow out of the belief that God gave man dominion over creation. It comes rather from the belief that man must seize dominion over creation for himself by forcing creation to bend to his will rather than receive dominion over creation as a gift from the hand of his Creator. This unleashing of the human will to power is what we were left with when Christian faith began to wane in the modern age.

The desire to conserve the beauty of the world for future generations is a natural and a noble desire. It results only in folly, however, when those who posses that desire blame the Christian faith for the problems of industrialization, separate man from nature, deifying nature and demonizing man (14), and place their faith in government and international bureaucracies.



(1) Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon Press, 1944, 1960), p. 178. This is the translation by S. G. C. Middlemore which first appeared in two volumes in 1878. The German original was published in 1860.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid, p. 179.

(4) Roger Scruton, Beauty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2011), p. 49.

(5) Ibid., p. 82.

(6) Ecology is the branch of biology which studies how living things interact with each other in a common environment. The term ecology was coined in the 19th Century to refer to this discipline. It comes from the Greek word word oikos. Oikos literally refers to a house, but the meaning that crosses over into “ecology” is “place where you dwell, surroundings”. The word economy is ultimately derived from the same root, but the Greek compound oikonomia was already in existence in ancient times to refer to “the administration of household affairs”.

(7) Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004) which consists of his Massey Lectures for that year, is a work of doomsday scare-mongering which nevertheless correctly identifies the correlation between a belief in progress and an irresponsible attitude towards the conservation of resources.

(8) The environmentalist movement has to a large degree embraced socialism, an economic system based upon the rejection of private property. Conservatives and liberals – by liberals I mean “classical liberals” - both believe strongly in private property, and hence cannot accept socialism. Environmentalists should not be so quick to reject private property either. One environmentalist, the late Garrett J. Hardin, who was professor of human ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, (and also a conservative Republican), argued in a number of essays and books, that resources which are privately owned, are better maintained and conserved, than those which are treated as common resources. This has been observably true since ancient times. Other reasons why conservatives are suspicious of the environmentalist movement are its belief in, reliance upon, and support of government and international bureaucracies who interfere in people’s lives from afar, and its increasingly addiction to alarmist rhetoric and doomsday scenarios, such as the supposed “global warming” crisis. These are good reasons to be wary of the environmentalist movement, but not to reject its basic idea that earth’s natural resources and beauty are something we should conserve for future generations to enjoy.

(9) Roger Scruton, in the chapter on natural beauty in his book cited above, points to Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty was a proper subject for philosophy because taste, the ability to appreciate beauty, was a human universal. This made natural beauty the primary object of taste, because all human beings can appreciate it, whereas appreciation for the arts is more limited. Scruton also discusses those, such as the Marxists, who held an opposing view, but he himself is quite sympathetic to Kant on this point.

(10) Environmentalism has allied itself, for example, with what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death”, and environmentalists have frequently spoken of the propagation of the human species in extremely derogatory terms.

(11) Wendell Berry, Home Economics, (New York: North Point Press, 1987), p. 6. This is the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Getting Along with Nature”, which is the second of the fourteen essays which this book consists of.

(12) I can think of some people who would probably disagree with the second assertion but they are not good advertisements for their position because it arises out of the kind of perpetual immaturity that results from being completely immersed in technology all one’s life.

(13) Berry, op. cit., p. 7.

(14) Note, as Berry did in the first quotation above, that the environmentalists and those who see dominion over nature as something man must seize for himself, although each others enemies, have this separation of man and nature as their common ground.