Think locally, act locally: Time for the Right to hijack environmentalism

BOSTON, U.S.A.—About a month ago, Britain's The Daily Telegraph published an op-ed column entitled "You don't have to be Red to be Green." It was written by two (British) Conservatives, Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, who kicked off their piece by asking, "Why should environmentalism be left to the Left? Aren't conservatives, as the etymology suggests, obvious conservationists?"
This is what I have long always thought and argued. I am not only interested in conserving the tried-and-true ways of education, law and order, and societal norms, but the environment as well. I'm a conservative, thus I am a conservationist as well. I don't like rapid change, either socially or environmentally. The environment is the sort of thing I like to leave up to nature.
It's really odd because the Left is normally quite misanthropic: the whole death culture reigns among liberals—abortion being their banner cause—and mankind is blamed for every conceivable ill afflicting the planet. Yet at the same time, they advocate a cleaner environment for people. Well, what better way to achieve population control than to let third-world people starve or bake to death via global warming? Why advocate anything that will enhance people's lives and help them to live longer? Just let the city-dwellers drop dead from carcinogenic pollutants.
Then you have those on the Right to whom the environment is a mere commodity, to be subjugated along with animals, women and homosexuals, and something that should never be a barrier to their comfortable, live-for-today lifestyle. Plastic packaging? More of it, we the people demand our food fresh! Global warming? Hell with that, don't dare tell me I can't have an SUV with which to scare sissy Nissan drivers! Trees? Who needs 'em when you can have paper? Recycling? Something only tu-tu wearing, tree-hugging fairies do! Just throw it all away. Haven't you heard, there's a big hole into which it all disappears! Why worry? Oh, and did you know that the Earth is flat? You probably thought it was round, you goddarned sissy!
For too long, we've had the hippy-dippy, grubby, grungy socialists on one side demanding, as Hannan and Carswell write, "slower growth, higher taxes, more regulation, less freedom and a loss of national sovereignty." In other words, members of the Great Unwashed who, laughably or sadly, expect to be taken seriously. But then we've also had the Right-wing, "this is God's Land, goddamnit" types who would point a gun at you if you simply asked them if they recycle or whether or not they take showers as opposed to baths, while screaming at you to stop impinging on their freedom.
But aren't those on the Right more concerned about people than those on the Left? Doesn't the Right want healthy, strong American children? The problem is, if you live simply for today and don't worry about the impact on the Earth come tomorrow, you're leaving future American generations to deal with an even larger mess. I continually get frustrated at my fellow conservatives who just shrug when you ask them about the environment.
The problem is, as Hannan and Carswell write, "much contemporary environmentalism, in short, is intrinsically anti-localist: it prefers state regulation to voluntary action, and international treaties to local initiatives. Perhaps understandably, some on the Right have come to suspect the Green agenda is a front for a Red one. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, this was the attitude taken by conservatives throughout the English-speaking world. In consequence, the mainstream Right left the entire filed to a mob of elflocked anti-globalisation demonstrators. Few bothered to suggest free-market or localist solutions to environmental problems."
The free market may be responsible for its own waste but it's only because people don't hold businesses' feet to the fire. Plastic carrier bags could disappear for good tomorrow if people only held local protests in their communities and if that sentiment carried across from community to community on a nationwide basis, as it inexorably would.
Hannan and Carswell provide good examples of free market environmentalism: "When rich people buy swathes of rainforest, they make sure that no-one degrades their property. When, by contrast, Sting made over a chunk of the Amazon to its indigenous population, local chiefs promptly set about reducing their tribes to near-slavery, and started logging and mining on an unprecedented scale. Why? Because, as in the old USSR, the land was owned communally, not privately. Now look a little closer to home. The EU's Common Fisheries Policy is run on the socialist principle of equal access to a common resource and, sure enough, it has led to ecological calamity. Iceland, on the other hand, has worked out an ingenious quota system that effectively privatised fish stocks, giving each skipper a stake. Its waters are teeming."
Those on the Right need to put an end to this attitude that all environmental initiatives must automatically be socialist in character. A cleaner environment makes for a healthier, happier population and is in character with the tendency to conserve the status quo.
"'Think global, act local,' say the Greenies," write Hannan and Carswell. "Left-wingers are good at the first bit, coming up with all manner of symbolic targets that require big, supranational technocracies. But the second bit is generally best performed by those who believe in devolving power to local communities and individual citizens."
Exactly so. It is time to wrestle the environmental agenda away from the Left if we truly want to be free. I beseech my fellow conservatives to take environmental issues seriously and appeal to the groundswell of support for them. Let's not continue to let the Left hijack this support for themselves. We will lose out if we do. If we have so much faith in the free market, then let's start proving it by demonstrating how local services and incentives can transform a nation's environmental policy—and, ultimately, that of the world's.