Imagination.

Harrison on preserving the sacred ...

In the past few years I have spent more time than I wished wondering how I evolved a land ethic that so troubles my sleep. Up above my desk I keep a small piece of paper that states “You’re just a writer,” which is what a studio head in Hollywood barked at me years ago. Though meant as an insult, this is an essential idea, in that it promotes the humility needed to function as a human being rather than as an ideologue, an altruistic ranter and raver, a religious lunatic who believes that God gave us the earth and we have metaphorically an actually chewed off the fingers and hands of the gift giver. Unfortunately, with my overfed imagination I can see this vision in the manner of a William Blake or Goya painting. To return myself to earth I walk daily with my dog in empty areas that are naked, blasted, and gutted of their essential nature by our own behavior. They are still beautiful, these mountains and valleys in the Southwest and the rivers and forests of my native northern Michigan. They would be much more beautiful if I didn’t know what they could look like, but then they will have to do because they’re all that we have.

Further ...

At my remote cabin, during my sixty-third summer, I dreamt that after a lifetime in which I had spent thousands and thousands of days outdoors looking “at” nature, I was finally inside nature looking out. The meaning of this was imprecise, but the feelings have stayed with me. As a poet, it became far simpler to imagine myself a tree or a boulder, a creek or a field, and easier yet to imagine myself a fellow mammal. When Shakespeare said, “We are nature, too”, he was making a leap away from the fundamental schizophrenia in Western culture that few have made. At my cabin made of logs there is less distance between inside and outside. You can smell the heart of the forest as you sleep, and hear the river passing by the north side of the cabin. At my winter casita, near the Mexican border, the walls are made of adobe, the dried mud of earth. This is comforting, but it doesn’t discount the elegant imagination of man. I once visited a bedridden old woman in the immense bedroom of her hunting lodge in the Forest of Rambouillet, in France. The walls were of quarried stone and covered with ancient tapestries. From the ceiling were suspended hundreds of sets of bronze-tagged stag antlers, the history of centuries of hunting. The property had once been owned by Charlemagne, and the lodge itself seemed to grow out of the forest. The inside and outside circulated freely between each other. I felt as comfortable there as I had sitting in the doorway of an abandoned Hogan on the Navajo Reservation watching the dawn, which seemed to emerge from the ground and into the sky.

Oikophilia.

Vital to the conservative environmental movement has been the love of beauty. Through art, literature and local activism the British people have given voice to the idea of beauty as a shared resource, an irreplaceable fund of  "social capital". Beauty, they have recognized, acts as a barrier to the top-down brutalities of the exploiters and the social engineers.

Environmental demagogues are determined to brush such obstacles aside. Littering the landscape with pylons and wind-farms appeals to them not because it has any scientific authority – for the science, such as it was, has been exploded – but because it refocuses the problem as a global one. To destroy the home that we have built over centuries is to afflict conservatives in the heart of their way of life. It is to deprive people of the primary source of oikophilia, and to make conservatism – the only political outlook that has ever done anything for the environment – irrelevant.

Moreover, it is through the pursuit of beauty that we could solve our most pressing environmental problem, which is the need for new homes. People resist large-scale development, because they know that it will produce an eyesore ...

The sad thing is that the Conservative Party has said so little to clarify what is at stake. Why do those old-fashioned words like trust, settlement, beauty and home so seldom pass the lips of those who are now, nominally at least, in charge? And why is the agenda still set by those for whom climate change, renewable energy and global warming define the problem, and for whom the favoured solution involves the total destruction of the things we love?

Sir Roger Scruton, from "Conservatism and the Environment"

Yearning.

Scruton on conservative environmentalism ...

“The form of environmentalism which emerged in the 19th century, both in this country and in America, is not really an ‘ism.’ It’s not a system of belief at all,” he says. “It’s a yearning towards the old way of doing things and the old connection to the natural world, and a desire to integrate and to develop in a harmonious way. People like Ruskin in Britain and John Muir in America didn’t necessarily want the same thing, but they did want to get back to a more natural connection with the world. That has endured, and it’s not especially political, though of course it has political implications, and it’s not a form of millenarian belief.”

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