Conservatism and the Environment
Below is an "extended abstract" for a review paper I’m hopefully presenting at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in August. It’s a bit more academic, but might answer the question, “So, wait, what are you studying again?” If you like this stuff, subscribe to my non-LinkedIn Newsletter HERE to get more!
The concept of conservatism has been a topic of debate in sociological literature for decades. Early works identified three theoretical orientations: historical, idealistic, and formal definitions of conservatism. Historical definitions view conservatism as a reaction to the Enlightenment French Revolutionary values of individuality, equality, and materialism. Idealistic definitions consider conservatism as a constellation of values transcending social movements over time, including commitments to inequality, religion, family, and social order. Formal definitions of conservatism view it as a political role that resists change to societal organization or “defends what is.”
More recent scholarship treats conservatism as a relational sociological phenomenon, constantly being renegotiated over time. Our review follows this relational approach, identifying five major socio-historical forms of conservatism in relation to the natural world in Western societies: Romantic, Progressive, Nazi, Neoliberal, and Post-Liberal. The review draws on an historical range that includes these different forms of conservatism and explores how they relate to environmental thought and current social movements and institutions.
In a sense then, this review is one part relational sociology, part formal sociology. In other words, categorical boundaries must be drawn between socio-historical settings to make claims, while also acknowledging the constantly evolving nature of conservatism. This study challenges the presentist orientation of most social analysis of conservatism, which colloquially equates conservatism with post-War neoliberal conservatism. The review expands the concept of conservatism across an historical range and examines the basic conservative ideological differences across different eras with an eye toward the political ideological use of the nonhuman world.
Nature and the environment too have had a tenuous and complex relationship with the field of sociology. It was a central focus for early sociologists to demonstrate the independence of human societies from nature in order to distinguish the field from physical and human geography and their often problematic theoretical commitments. Thus, when environmental sociologists began to ‘bring the environment back in,’ skepticism abounded.
However, since the 1970s environmental sociology has since emerged as a subfield that has evolved to include behavioral research on environmental attitudes, social movements research on environmentalism, risk science, and political economy. Recent trends have focused on climate change and environmental justice, with some arguing for a focus on the inseparability of human society from nonhuman natures and the centrality of inequality and power that shape both.
In this review we distinguish between two major categories of environmental thought: environmentalism and ecologism. While environmentalism focuses on technological solutions to environmental problems, ecologism emphasizes the need for radical changes in our relationship with the non-human world and our mode of social and political life. Environmentalism is linked to mainstream progressive and neoliberal conservatism, while ecologism bridges the radical ideological breaks from modernity that constitute Romantic and Post-Liberal conservatism.
The relationship between Romantic conservatism and the environment is the root of all that followed. Romantic Conservatism emerged in response to Enlightenment philosophy and its revolutionary political manifestations in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Edmund Burke is recognized as the father of the movement as it is conceived today, and his political philosophy prioritized emotion, religion, and idealism over rationalism, science, and materialism. In our full review, we discuss how Romantic Conservatives and contemporary environmental thought share an orientation toward realism and a commitment to being guided by what is possible rather than what is desirable. Romantic conservatism prioritized intergenerationality, with current generations being stewards of the Earth for future generations, and a subjugation of the individual to the community or broader social organism within and across generations. However, while contemporary environmental thought is oriented toward progressive ideals of equality, Romantic Conservatives invoked environmental thought to justify pre-revolutionary aristocratic social relations, where inequality was acceptable, and the wisdom of the landed aristocracy ensured the preservation of the landscape and its rural population.
As feudalism faded in the 19th century and nation-states became the naturalized form of political organization, the goal of conservative social thought focused on a return to a landed aristocracy was replaced by managerial bourgeois utopian teleology. The translation of Natural Darwinism into Social Darwinism by Herbert Spencer laid the groundwork for two important metaphysical dimensions of Progressive conservatism. The realism of previous Romantic conservatives was replaced by a utopian sense that society could be perfected through the application of scientific bureaucracy. George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature charted environmental devastation throughout the Roman Empire, Western Europe, and the United States and ushered in an era of environmental policy making. Conservationists like Madison Grant also penned racist nostalgic screeds. For Progressive conservatives, inequality was natural and should be managed through a meritocratic bureaucracy that ensured the competitive advantage of one nation over another.
Over time, the wilderness and conservation aesthetics of American Progressive frontier expansion became popular throughout the globe. The myth of the American West served as the backbone for the myth of the German East, and there was ongoing knowledge sharing between German Naturschutz and American conservation policy makers throughout the first half of the 20th century. In 1933, the Third Reich came to power and American conservationist Aldo Leopold, after a visit with Nazi foresters in Germany, published his famous Game Management, which remains a seminal text for predator management in US conservationism.
More than any other historical context, the relationship between nature, the environment, and the social movements that collided to form the Third Reich abounds with literature. Here, we argue that, more than other concurrent fascist administrations, the Nazi regime combined Romantic conservative political ideology with Progressive bureaucratic means in pursuit of its ends. Our article explores the ideological roots of Nazism, particularly the Volkisch philosophy, which promoted an idealized German identity tied to the landscape. The Nazis' agroecological politics of “blood and soil'' borrowed from the science of ecology and was used to justify Aryan superiority over other races. The article also examines social movements such as the Wandervogel and the Artaman League, as well as policies on air pollution, conservation, organic agriculture, and forest conservation.
We compare the Nazis to the emerging literature on the role of nature in concurrent regimes. In particular, we are interested in the growing literature on the connection between nature, environment, and Italian fascism. It also looks at the concept of ecofascism and its various definitions, as well as theories and frameworks for understanding the relationship between nature and nation in the context of far-right politics. Overall, we shed light on the complex and multifaceted relationship between fascism and the environment.
We then turn to the political ideology that is often meant when the term conservatism is invoked today. The emergence of this new form of conservatism, known as "fusionism," brought together two distinct political ideologies - free market libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism - under one umbrella. This ideological fusion led to an incoherent political orientation toward the natural world that both led Nixon to found the EPA and then Reagan to burn it down.
During the second half of the 20th-century, environmental justice work and mainstream environmental activism emerged in response to the threat of environmental degradation. Simultaneously, conservative concerns over population growth and technology were central to the deep ecology movement. Our text also covers the emergence of ecoterrorism in the 1990s, which later took a backseat after the 9/11 attacks. During the 1990s and 2000s, the Republican Party shifted from passing environmental acts to denying climate change and as a result the literature on misinformation proliferated. And yet, at the same time another trend was emerging. Namely, the reintegration of older conservative ideological fusions into modern ecological forms.
The relationship between conservative and right-wing ideologies and the environment is evolving, with a fusion of environmental discourse and far-right politics being observed in Western Europe, Nordic countries, Central Europe, the United States, Brazil, India, and Australia. A collection of essays from around the globe called The Far Right and the Environment was the first effort at bringing scholars together around this issue, and a subsequent special edition of Environmental History recently expanded the effort.
Scholars have noted the connection between authoritarian populism and the environment, with a recent Annual Review focusing on this relationship. Meanwhile, a special issue of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in 2022 explored the intersection of climate change and terrorism. While previous scholarly attention has been focused on environmental misinformation and Cornucopianism within conservative communities, there is a growing interest in the positive relationship between the right-wing and the environment.
Today, conservative politicians like Marine Le Pen and far-right communities like the American altright are successfully integrating ecology into their politics in order to naturalize an anti-Enlightenment, post-liberal worldview. Ultimately, the purpose of this review is to give historical context to such contemporary movements and bring together the enormous yet diffuse literature on today’s globalized far-right environmentalism.