Is Sustainability The New Conservatism?
I’ve been reflecting for a while on the connection between truly conservative beliefs and sustainability.
I certainly don’t mean neo-conservatism (oy gevalt), nor conservative politics, which is more about slowing the pace of change (and must ultimately fail in an era of climate change and Peak Everything). So the intellectual examination becomes a play on language, an examination on the nuance of conservation, a practical conservatism that has more to do with limiting waste and valuing the entirety of something, not just the immediate practical utility that defines grab-n-go consumerism.
I’m already weary of “green” sustainability. I think we need to be very careful about not replacing petro-chemical-based consumerism with “green”consumerism. In fact, I believe — as I began writing about Boulder’s Eco-Paradox this summer — that we’ve got to stop buying stuff, and not just because we’re out of money. It’s time for a new prevailing ethic that considers the long term value of goods and services, not simply its price at the pump.
Sounds kind of conservative, really. I think some of these values go back to my New England roots. And although he was not a conservative in his day, much of Thoreau’s thought underpins a style of conservatism that seems to me to be related to the emerging sustainability movement.
At the same time, liberal thinking — accepting that we must find new ways to relate to our world — is an important approach if you accept the production-consumption meme of the past 50 years and the radical financial leverage (and related issues) of the past 20 as the baseline for comparison. But it can also be argued that liberal thinking includes some intellectual slop and moral relativism that has helped midwife our current crisis.
As much as the innovative minds of our time will be transfixed on how to do things more effectively and efficiently while restoring natural resources, not just using them less quickly, and applying complex technology to things that might be solved by reducing, not adding, I think that there are some elements of conservatism that ought to be reconsidered.
Here’s an interesting piece at “CrunchyCon” (a curious conservative blog) talking about how food system though leader and darling of the sustainability movement, Michael Pollan, is really a “Burkean Conservative,” that lays out a position largely aligned with what I’m talking about.
And I’ve grown quite fond of regular discussions along these lines with Bill Shutkin, who in many ways transports a neo-Walden ideal with him from Cambridge to Boulder as the new Chair of Sustainable Development at University of Colorado.
So amidst all the half-finished metaphors, split infinitives and contradictory logic herein, this point is this: a new meme is forming, and for us to only look forward to a shiny bright green future without considering saving the conservative baby from the neo-con bathwater will perpetuate some of the mistakes we are still learning that we just made.
Today this is all still more of a supposition and inquiry than a strong position. But in this radical transformation we’re all experiencing, I wanted to share the evolution of my own thought, and contribute somehow to the new synthesis; the chapter we are writing now.
