The Love of Home

Green Philosophy by Roger Scruton (2012)

Conservatism and environmentalism may seem like strange bed-fellows. Roger Scruton agrees; that’s why he wrote Green Philosophy, to explore how the natural world might be—should be—defended from a conservative viewpoint.

There are more starting points for a “green conservatism” than one might think. The words “conservatism” and “conservation” are related; they are about conserving different kinds of things. And the godfather of English conservatism, Edmund Burke, once described society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” There is an obvious congruence here with the idea that we are only trustees of the earth and must leave it in good shape for generations to come.

Conservatism’s local affections put it at odds with the broader constellation of environmental politics, most of which obey the formula that climate justice, being something which affects the whole world, is therefore going to need a globally coordinated response. Scruton disputes the efficacy—and possibility—of such a global solution. International treaties, lobbied for by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), don’t always translate into a meaningful course of action for those who sign up. Nor do they bring about a tangible change in the incentives (and therefore behaviour) of producers and consumers. When these efforts fail, nobody is responsible. Though the world is more interconnected than ever, diverse countries still struggle to reach a consensus, and ultimately cannot compel each other to do anything. The nation-state therefore remains as the top-most level of effective political action.

The problem with “top-down” solutions—whether national or international—is what Scruton calls their “radical precaution”. Whatever the problem is that must be solved, a centrally planned solution will proceed by identifying certain risks and proposing measures or regulations to eliminate their possibility. But everything in life carries some level of risk. In all that we do, we are constantly trading off expected outcomes against foreseeable risks. This is a finely tuned sense that we can only calibrate through personal exposure to risk and harm. By “disaggregating” risks and attempting to reduce them to zero, radical precaution ends up generating negative externalities: “Normally you can reduce one risk to zero only by increasing risk elsewhere: and the risks that stand to be increased will be the concern of some other department, and thus removed from consideration.” (ch. 4)

Scruton gives an example from the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak:

A European directive issued in response to the slight risk that meat from sick animals might enter the food chain insists that no abattoir can function without the presence of a qualified vet. Qualified vets are expensive in Britain; hence all small abattoirs had to close. When Foot and Mouth disease broke out in 2001 it was not, as in the past, confined to the local source of the outbreak, but carried around the country by animals travelling a hundred miles or more to the nearest legal abattoir. Some 7 million animals were slaughtered in the attempt to confine the disease, and the cost to the economy was £8 billion. Such was the short-term cost of an edict that considered only one fairly insignificant risk among the many that cohabit in the management of livestock. (ch. 4)

Other side-effects of the top-down “health-and-safety regime” have been disastrous for the environment. For minimal gain in hygiene, the barrier to participation in the food economy is raised enormously. Large corporations become the only ones with the means to follow (or evade) the strict regulations. They squeeze out local businesses. Above a certain size, they divest themselves of all motives apart from their own profit and growth, and no longer have a reason not to externalise costs where they can. Now that society comes to rely on supermarkets to supply the necessities of life, more goods must be transported over longer distances; urban planning begins with the needs of the car, which becomes another hidden subsidy for the large corporations. The overall result is to incentivise everyone—producer and consumer—towards more petrol and plastics.

When it comes to conserving a natural resource, a top-down approach might involve the state administering it on behalf of individuals, perhaps with quotas limiting the overall amount that can be taken. However, this results in a tragedy of the commons: every individual has a motive to take what is theirs from the common fund, but no single person has the motive to protect that fund, nor to prevent other individuals from depleting it below the point of replenishment.

What is common to top-down solutions is that they make sweeping changes to large, complex systems comprising many independent actors combining in unpredictable ways. We can never know precisely what the effect of a top-down solution will be; their implementation is slow; their inflexibility means they tend to squander the precious “social capital” on which they depend.

Instead of trying to change the world, Scruton implores us to look at existing systems of resource management around the world. The successful stories, he argues, have occurred bottom-up, where access to the resource was managed through a system of property rights transferable in a market, circumscribed by a “moral economy”, the parameters of which are determined by local custom and community.

Take the United Kingdom’s fisheries. Before the United Kingdom’s accession to the European Union, rights to fish in certain areas were recognised by common-law courts and could be transferred from one owner to another. The fisherman’s entire way of life—both the pride he took in his work and his literal ability to put food on the table—depended on him maintaining his fishing grounds. A system of Tort law ensured that the cost of social harms were returned to those who produced them. Producers and consumers were both directly responsible for the environment’s health in a cooperative, adaptive system of “voluntary restraint and conflict resolution.” (ch. 5)

Much of Scruton’s argument builds on Elinor Ostrom’s empirical studies. Her research illustrated many examples from around the world where resources had been successfully conserved by systems of management rooted in local communities, without the need for top-down directives. Scruton typifies the successful cases thus:

… they are managed by a local community; those with a right to them are clearly identified and others clearly excluded; there is a system of sanctions in place to punish misappropriation and abuse; there is a collective decision-making process with easily accessible procedures for resolving conflict; and the rights of the community are recognized by higher-level authorities. (ch. 5)

If customary systems succeed where the global think-thanks do not, they owe it to the bonds of solidarity out of which they were grown. Going back to Scruton’s ideal of the local food economy—in which food is partly grown, partly shared with friends, partly bartered with strangers—we can imagine that a household (oikos) has more motives than mere profit. It is bound by the human scale of its interactions. The individuals are constrained by personal inclinations and social responsibilities and legal requirements that cannot be simply ignored or bought off. Identification with the community—and the attendant need to conform and belong to it—discourages the individual from putting his desires before the common wealth.

When we demand the world change its ways, we address everyone, but speak to no-one. But when we demand that we change our ways, speaking in the first-person plural to those like us, we affirm and assimilate the decisions of the community as our own, and take responsibility to act within the boundaries and imperatives laid out by our own collective decision-making. Given the right incentives from above, the local community forms a self-correcting homeostatic system. Despite the flux of individual decisions and inconstancies, the whole thing tends towards balancing out the contending risks and rewards across the whole of society with a sense of proportion and harmony. The solutions emerge organically. They are not planned or designed. They are often not even recognised as solutions, for they exist within durable customs and traditions persisting beyond any one lifetime:

[Traditions] contain the residues of many trials and errors, and the inherited solutions to problems that we all encounter. Like those cognitive abilities that pre-date civilization they are adaptations, but adaptations of the community rather than of the individual organism. Social traditions exist because they enable a society to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next. (ch. 7)

What motive rallies the members of a community to protect their home? Scruton calls it oikophilia.¹ Oikophilia is a sense of belonging somewhere. It is a love of our entire human habitat: the natural world around us, the homes we make, the people we deal with, the friends we meet, the family we are born into, the culture that expresses who we are, the ways of life that identify us as ourselves, and the common wealth we have inherited from the past, which must be preserved for the future. Oikophilia originates in “in our need for nurture and safety, but it spreads out across our surroundings in more mysterious and less self-serving ways.” It invites us “to look on things in our ‘homescape’ as we look on persons, not as means only, but as ends in themselves.” (ch. 8)

When we have a sense of belonging somewhere, we are hurt to see it destroyed. Because we love and respect that which is ours, we are willing to change our life in order to conserve and protect it. Oikophilia, argues Scruton, characterises good stewardship of the earth. It is an essential component of any environmentalism. From the “top-down” perspective, all we can do is set up the right incentives; it remains for communities, acting out of love and veneration, to develop the solutions themselves.

So what are the right incentives? What can governments do? The book ends with a few suggestions. The de-centralization of energy, as in Denmark, might encourage local industries to search for more efficient sources of energy production, while also decreasing transmission leakage. The mandating of biodegradable packaging will reduce waste. Carbon and consumption taxes are needed to incentivise both producer and consumer to change their behaviour. Strict immigration laws will help to preserve the social capital out of which oikophilia grows. Raising the pension age will discourage the elderly from transferring the cost of their lives to the young. Lastly, the ending of all subsidies—especially agricultural ones—will stop hidden benefits accruing to large businesses at the expense of smaller ones.

Actually, on many of these points, Scruton doesn’t sound all that different from the global think-tanks he likes to criticise. Yet even if we set up the right incentives, what is the guarantee that the individual, having discovered his love of home, will actually live in harmony with the trees and the animals?

We are entering the province of nostalgia, a wistful realm from which you may gaze over the past, but remain powerless to do anything about its destruction. Most of us no longer live (if we ever did) in a world delimited by the horizons of our ancestral pastures. Our world is rather more hyperconnected and hyperkinetic, with loyalties and bonds as fickle and transient as our jobs and homes. For many of us, there is no obvious way back to the fading ideal of the small village. How, in these circumstances, do we identify the first-person plural? How do we begin to look on our surroundings as something worth protecting?

Any solution must be highly personal, probably subjective. Yet on this point I find Scruton uninspiring. Despite the occasional example drawn from his life—which I am familiar with, and find very interesting—he is too avoidant or otherwise ignorant of the ways in which life has changed in the 20^th century. People just don’t live in little self-contained villages any more. Any notion of belonging today owes less to geography than to shared values, ascriptive identities, and voluntary association.

Our economic life is also very different. The (post)industrial economy has overseen an historically unparalleled division of (wage) labour, animated by the promise that rising wages will allow us to satisfy our desires. Our desires multiply faster than ever. To satisfy them, our exploitation and destruction of the environment has had to rise in lockstep. If we ever want to live in harmony with nature, we will probably have to break this cycle, and perhaps roll back some of the conveniences we currently take for granted. Yet in an appendix, Scruton briefly dismisses “living frugally” as unnecessary and puritanical. Our fundamental resistance to this idea—our inability to say “no”—is exactly why a system of voluntary self-restraint wouldn’t work today.

Scruton also fails to defend localisation against any of its obvious criticisms. A typical argument goes that it is better for all the countries to invest their efforts into producing different kinds of goods as efficiently as possible (which would entail minimising carbon emissions). What the countries lack they trade for on the global market using their comparative advantage. This is (in theory) better than re-inventing the same inefficient economies and markets the world over. There are many things one could say about this; Scruton doesn’t address it at all.

It is true that the environment affects everyone. Its good management should not be a matter of partisan politics. Yet while Scruton’s idea of oikophilia has a deep, instinctive appeal, his development of the idea leaves us wondering how, exactly, it might be cultivated, and what application it has to the practical efforts of conservation. Transfixed by visions of a bucolic past that never was, Green Philosophy never connects lost traditions with present realities. The question of how we are to summon the love of home in a homeless world remains.

1. Oikophilia is a play on words on homo oeconomicus, the “rational man” postulated in economic science, who acts purely out of self-interest. Oiko- and oeco- both mean “home” in Greek and Latin respectively; but unlike homo oeconomicus, homo oikophilius acts from a sense of love and belonging.