Despotic ideologies invariably venerate one aspect of human nature over another, perhaps the local over the universal or just as likely the other way around. Hitler worshipped blood and soil, race and tribe – the local, in other words. Marxist-Leninists travelled in the opposite direction, trammelling over tradition, religion and the time-honoured customs of village life, all in the name of the international proletariat. The Greens, argues Roger Scruton in Green Philosophy: How to think seriously about the Planet (2012), have also been unable to strike a balance between the local and the global, which would account for the modern-day environmental movement’s departure from the path of reason, and with it a sense of proportion or even humanity. In Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (2011), the science journalist Emma Marris details how enviro-purists have managed to get everything so wrong. She and Scruton pursue the politics of environmentalism from different directions but nevertheless arrive at a similar destination.
This article can be read in full at the following link:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2013/5/how-to-save-the-environment-from-green-ideologues
