Greta: read a book. Travel in your mind with Scruton’s ‘Green Philosophy’

"In his 2012 book Green Philosophy, Scruton argues that the proper way to conceptualise the planet is not to think we own it, nor that we should be in thrall to it (that’s idolatry), but rather to think of our relationship to it being one of stewardship. It is a charge to keep, not a resource to be squandered: it is a version of unquantifiable capital.

We are, he argues, custodians of something bigger than us, and that involves acknowledgment of Edmund Burke’s idea that our obligations to others include not just the living but also the dead and the yet to be born. Which is, or should be, the founding principle of any conservative worldview. The ‘green agenda’ in its current iteration acts as an imposition of a timeless secular orthodoxy; one which has no sensitivity to history, nor any imagination about the future.

The obligation of stewardship requires a recognition of the importance of localism. We cannot steward the globe, but we can practise habits of care for our part of it: our home. This is where conservatism – properly described – and environmentalism coincide: in the idea of a love of place (Roger called this oikophilia). Love of place is a primary condition of attachment and that attachment is a necessary condition of love.

The globalist idea – that environmentalism should be a one-size-fits-all imposition of a global carbon-emission calculus ignores the subtleties of real life.

Which brings us to Scruton’s Aristotelian side. He didn’t just write this stuff, he lived it, having resigned his tenure as a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck to gamble as a writer and maintain a working farm in Wiltshire. The farm was also a factory of ideas . . . the Platonic and Aristotelian came together in the annual seminars and apple-picking days.

Scruton’s attachments were not merely in the abstract. He recognised that there are obligations of thought. The Greta Thunbergs of the world see only one side of that. When you go around the world, lecturing its residents on how they should feel, you are at the same time robbing yourself of the potential love of place that comes with staying home and reading a book."

https://www.conservativewoman.....co.uk/read-scruton-g