A Greener Shade of Right

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Several years ago, at a conference for conservative college students, historian John 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: “You cannot be conservative and be on the side of the concrete pourers and the cement mixers.” The students flocked around Lukacs after his talk.

You might not know it from the exhibit tables at most conservative gatherings, stacked as they are with explicitly anti-environmental flyers, articles, and books, but America’s conservative movement was once intimately linked with conservation. The influential conservative thinker Russell Kirk wrote warmly about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring when it was published in 1962 and frequently held forth on the dangers of pesticides, the protection of endangered species, and the preservation of farmland. In fact, a near-apocalyptic tone suffused the environmental writing of many conservatives during the first decades after World War II. So, how did we get from there to where we are now, with environmentalists firmly established as the favorite whipping boys of conservative intellectuals, pundits, and politicians?

This is the question John Bliese has taken up in his book The Greening of Conservative America (Westview Press). Bliese marshals an impressive array of evidence for a proto-environmentalist streak within conservatism in the post-war years—proof, he says, that conservatives can comfortably approach environmental issues from within their own intellectual tradition. This issue is particularly important to Christians, whose faith counsels a sacramental vision of nature and opposition to the hubris underlying the modern economy and its institutionalized disregard for the care of God’s creation. “You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility,” writes Wendell Berry.

Intellectual historians generally credit the journalist Frank Meyer with the successful unification of libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-communists in a single political front that today is known as conservatism. Meyer’s basic thesis, often called “fusionism,” was that in order for freedom to have meaning, it has to be grounded in the recognition of universal, objective moral norms, which are best articulated in the Western intellectual tradition. The pursuit of virtue, he argued, is possible only where men and women actually possess the freedom to choose the good; coerced virtue is no virtue at all.

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