Conservatives are the real conservationists

Protest groups and eco-Leftists will demur, but the greenest ideas lie in free market thought

The clue is in our name: we conservatives are instinctive conservationists. The idea of stewardship, of holding things in trust for future generations, is central to how we think. Edmund Burke, the intellectual founder of conservatism, defined society as a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn. Is there a more vivid realisation of that doctrine than passing on an unspoilt environment?

That shouldn’t need saying, but it evidently does. The Government’s emphasis on green issues has elicited a graceless and sullen response from several pressure groups that have spent years calling for precisely such measures. It’s too little too late, they say. It’s all about promises and targets (things which, in other contexts, they love). And anyway, how can you trust the Tories on the environment?

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for many environmentalists, dislike of Tories trumps concern for forests and oceans. Environmentalism, in its modern form, has become about state control, supranationalism and wealth redistribution.

There is often a misanthropic subtext, a dream of a world in which (to quote an old missionary hymn) “every prospect pleases, and only man is vile”.

Consider, for example, the encounter on Newsnight last week between Stanley Johnson and the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas. Stanley is a hard man to dislike. Warm, clever, affable and funny, he has dedicated most of his life to the cause of environmental protection, and was understandably delighted with the breadth of the Government’s ambition: banning plastic waste, creating more habitats, promoting biodiversity, preserving coastline. Caroline was having none of it, though, managing to be petulant and negative about proposals which, one suspects, she’d have cheered had they come from a different party.

In the end, she revealed the cause of her sulkiness. The Conservatives’ interest in the environment, she said, was worthless as long as they remained committed to economic growth.

Ah, now we reach the rub. Behind much of the Left’s environmentalism is a dislike of wealth creation. Growth, to greenies, means more and more people, breeding like maggots and squeezing out all the pandas and polar bears. That thesis might have a certain specious appeal, but it’s bunkum.

In fact, the best thing that can happen to the environment is economic growth. As the science writer Matt Ridley likes to point out, wolves, tigers and lions were all endangered in the 20th century. Now, wolves are multiplying, tigers are flatlining and lions are still declining. Why? Because wolves live in rich countries, tigers in middle-income countries and lions in poor countries.

As I type this article, I can see two red kites through my window. I had never glimpsed one in the wild before my thirties. Now, they are as common in these parts as magpies. Two years ago, for the first time outside captivity, I saw an otter. (I would have doubted my eyes, but you can hardly mistake an otter for anything else.)

Beavers are set to make a comeback. Why? For the same reason that we have more trees than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. The same reason, come to that, that you breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water in London than in Lahore. Because Britain is a capitalist country.

Aristotle taught that that which no one owns, no one will care for. Private property is nature’s strongest defender. The earliest examples of what we now call environmentalism in this country took the form of antipollution lawsuits brought by disgruntled neighbours. Indeed, the clean water acts were partly brought in to protect businesses from such litigation, laying down national standards instead.

Karl Marx, conversely, saw nature as a resource to be exploited, a view that found brutal expression in the smokestack economies of the Soviet bloc. The United Nations identified the Warsaw Pact states as the filthiest on the planet. Communism turned Lake Baikal into a sewer and the Aral Sea into a desert, and poured so much oil into the Volga that ferry passengers were warned not to toss their cigarettes overboard. To find that level of pollution today, you generally have to go to surviving socialist enclaves like North Korea.

Milder forms of state control cause environmental destruction on a commensurately smaller scale. The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy, for example, has caused a collapse in North Sea stocks, in sharp contrast to the fisheries policies of Iceland, New Zealand and the Falkland Islands where private ownership of quotas is incentivised. The Common Agricultural Policy for years encouraged the felling of hedgerows and the use of pesticides in pursuit of output-based subsidies.

Michael Gove, who is shaping up to be every bit as transformative in his job as environment secretary as he was at education, sees Brexit as an opportunity to replace these monstrosities with policies suited to our own soil and seas.

Again, you’d think the lobby groups would be overjoyed. But – possibly because of the subsidies they have had from Brussels over the years – they are instead peevish and suspicious.

Just as private ownership is good for the environment, so is sovereignty. Indeed, the protection of our green spaces is based on a feeling that runs against the whole thrust of the European project: love of homeland. We conservatives feel it in our bones. I suspect, though, that our eco-agitator friends will never believe us.

‘Communism poured so much oil into the Volga, ferry passengers were warned not to toss cigarettes overboard’