I grew up on, and still help on, our family’s farm on the west side of Grand Rapids, Mich. This past year, the last hundred acres of farmland within the confines of the city, just down the highway from our fruit stand, was destroyed to make way for a cheap subdivision. Now ours is the only farm left even partially within the city limits.

As Russell Kirk, who lived two counties north of us, wrote, “This brutal destruction … of the very landscape, in this age of the bulldozer, constitutes a belligerent repudiation of what we call tradition. It is a rejection of our civilized past—and a rejection out of which sharp characters may make a good deal of money.”

While the destruction of the natural world may be embraced by neoconservative “sharp characters,” such destruction cannot be accepted by the traditional conservative. If one affirms and seeks to preserve what enriches human life, then it is not possible to endorse the ruin of the natural world. Indeed, historically as well as etymologically, conservatism and conservation go hand in hand. What is a conservative if not one who seeks to conserve?

The traditional conservative identifies with a particular place, a particular family, a particular region and landscape. The very idea of conserving what has come to us from the past assumes that something has come to us from the past and that something has to be actual—a place, language, cultural inheritance, a particular forest, lake, orchard, vista. One’s fundamental impulse is to preserve what is actual, what has meaning and gives meaning.

By contrast, the ideologue affirms what is abstract. The corporate ideologue is concerned with abstract profit. If that pursuit blows up mountains, lets debris clog rivers, and digs out the exposed coal and minerals, so be it. Consider Communist China’s massive Three Gorges dam project, the largest in the world. When such a project destroys farmland and ruins the ecosystem, causes massive flooding and immense human suffering, the ideologue says this does not matter; what matters is the ideology of the state that justifies it. Or again, consider the Islamic religious ideologue who, as a terrorist, is willing to blow up a nuclear reactor and ruin a countryside to punish infidels and, as he thinks, to enter an abstract future paradise by dynamiting the present. The impulses and self-justifications here are disturbingly similar: abstract good justifies destruction of the immediate.

Traditional conservatism is significantly different from what has come to be known as environmentalism, even though it shares many of the same aspirations. Environmentalism includes perspectives from the ecological vandalism of the Earth Liberation Front to the activism of Greenpeace to corporate-sponsored ecotourism. But nearly all of these movements have at their center an emphasis on preserving the natural world more or less free from human intervention or use. To preserve wilderness is without question a natural part of traditional conservatism, but the emphasis in traditional conservatism is more on the human relationship to the land.

Historically, American traditional conservatives drew upon Thomas Jefferson’s legacy of encouraging an agrarian republic, and this reflects the fundamental conservative impulse toward the preservation of culture and land in relationship to each other. Arguably the most important American traditional conservative works of the 20th century were the two Southern Agrarian collections entitled I’ll Take My Stand and Who Owns America?, which featured essays by such seminal figures as Herbert Agar, Andrew Lytle, Frank Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate.

The Southern Agrarians were arguing chiefly against corporate hegemony and in favor of the family farm and of living culture. In the first essay in I’ll Take My Stand, John Crowe Ransom wrote,

Ambitious men fight, first of all, against nature; they propose to put nature under their heel; this is the dream of scientists burrowing in their cells, and then of the industrial men who beg of their secret knowledge and go out to trouble the earth. … It seems wiser to be moderate in our expectations of nature, and respectful; and out of so simple a thing as respect for the physical earth and its teeming life comes a primary joy, which is an inexhaustible source of arts and religions and philosophies.

Striking in this passage is Ransom’s hostility to the industrialist dogma of perpetual progress and his emphasis on respect for the earth and for life.

The Southern Agrarians were in a unique position to see and oppose corporate creep because they came from a region with cultural identity, traditions, and agrarian roots. The Agrarians wanted to preserve family farms for the same reasons that Jefferson did, but above all they recognized the immense importance of developing and maintaining a human culture that corresponded to and augmented the landscape rather than ruining it. The Agrarian vision was of an American republic that cherished its regional variety and encouraged responsible local governance.

The primary insight of the traditional conservative regarding conservation is that just as corporate-industrialist hegemony eliminates individual freedom, destroys the landscape, and wrecks culture, an agrarian republic is the surest check against these because it is the surest preservation of culture, without which life is leached of meaning. Culture, in all its forms—art, literature, philosophy, and above all religion—is how we find relevance in our lives. Without culture (in the classic meaning of the word), as the poet Yeats recognized, things fall apart, the center does not hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Culture is what draws people to a region and the reason that they love it; it is the bond between humanity and landscape and the divine by which human life in a particular place has lasting significance.

In this respect, environmentalism is the result of a society in which culture has so bled away that only the final and extreme principle of preserving wilderness is left. Radical environmentalism is the last desperate cry of those who wish to preserve at least something of nature from human depredation.

Historically, there are two reasons that conservatives have been antagonistic toward environmentalists. First is the confusion of corporatism with conservatism, for as soon as conservatism became allied with libertarianism and opposed government regulation of corporations, it abandoned its roots in rural and small-business America and became something akin to an arm of the Chamber of Commerce with considerable hostility toward those who insist that a representative republic must protect the good of people, not conglomerates. Second is the natural conservative dislike of centralized government, required for the enforcement of laws protecting land, water, and air.

But the truth is, from a traditional conservative perspective, federal and state governments have one primary function that cannot be fulfilled as effectively or fairly by any other organization: protection. The chief function of government is to protect its citizens from foreign invasion or interference and from domestic predators who, absent the policing power of government, would prey upon citizens’ possessions or destroy their common inheritance. All other government functions are ancillary at best.

The libertarian and neoconservative view is that the “free market” and corporations unfettered from inconvenient regulation would somehow arrive at a balance that protects the natural world and citizens’ health, but in fact even a modicum of experience shows that this is nonsense. A corporation exists primarily to avoid individual moral responsibility or legal liability, so without the external check of government-enforced accountability, corporations will do whatever garners the most profit the fastest.

If the traditional conservative’s ideal polis suddenly came into being, there would in fact be very little need for centralized government’s environmental regulation because that regulation exists largely to counterbalance the centralized power of corporations. Were one suddenly in a world of family farms, small businesses, regional culture, and a rich communal and cultural life with a religious center, one would not need federal agencies to police environmental laws: the capacity and appetite for massive destruction of the natural world or human life simply would not be present. On a decentralized local level, without the pressure of an artificially induced population increase through immigration, and without the inhuman greed fostered by corporate economism, caring for the natural world is simply a basic human instinct.

That this is so is borne out in every landscape that has existed largely unplundered since human settlement. I stayed for a week one summer in a castle in Provençe, and the surrounding landscape was little changed from when it was a troubadour’s stronghold in the 13th century. To preserve the castle and the landscape for all those centuries required no federal agency, only the conservation of the landscape’s beauty and meaning over the centuries by the people who were born there and loved the place.

Alas, the United States has no such history of conserving ancestral lands. We have numerous parks and preserves, but our record of conserving agricultural and private open land is execrable. The 20th century saw the continuous loss of farmers and the obliteration of small farms, the decline in open and forested land near cities, and the higgeldy-piggeldy sprawl across the countryside of suburbs and exurbs. Rare indeed is the family that owns acreage for more than a generation. As a result, the United States has become a nation of resident aliens located in placeless places with strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions that resemble anywhere—everywhere—else in the country.

My family has worked the same orchards and fields in Michigan since the 19th century, but this became increasingly difficult as the 20th century turned into the 21st. The advent of global free trade meant China could export its cheap apple juice via multinational corporations, undercutting American farmers and dragging the price of our fruit far below the cost of production. What is more, American fruit co-operatives and packing and juice-producing companies have been driven out of business so that American farmers no longer have any venue to sell their fruit. Families that had farmed hundreds of acres of orchards since the 19th century, good farmers, have been driven out of business, and in the wake of their loss come subdivisions and shopping centers.

The conservation of land cannot be separated from the conservation of whatever is left of a local culture. Culture emerges out of a particular landscape, and when that landscape is destroyed by consumerism in which everything is rendered uniform and sterile, then culture itself is obliterated. We have reached a point now where cultures of every variety are rendered nearly extinct because the culture has no natural setting in which to reside. There remain a few oases here and there, like Pennsylvania Dutch country, but even there the monosociety undermines it by converting the culture into a tourist spectacle, an object for consumption.
If American conservatism is to have a vital future, it must recognize its roots in the land itself. There is nothing conservative in policies that destroy farming families to line the pockets of globalist corporate executives. The sooner that traditional conservatives and environmentalists realize that they have at least one aim in common—conservation of agricultural and wild land in order to maintain the quality of American life and culture—the sooner a political coalition can emerge that will challenge the globalist exploitation and destruction of the natural world. _________________________________________________

Arthur Versluis is a Professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University and author of numerous books including Island Farm.