Political Ideology and Conflicting Environmental Paradigms

Bowers, C. A. 2003. Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Sunderlin, William D. 2003. Ideology, Social Theory, and the Environment. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

One thing becomes obvious with even a cursory glance at the mountain of books and papers written about the environment, and that is that people come to very different policy conclusions looking at the same set of conditions. Do the trends and current state of our air, water, soil and energy resources call for radical change in how we organize society? Can we instead get by with just some moderate tweaking of our legal code? Do we need to reign in the profit-motive or do we need to unleash our entrepreneurial energies to seek new ways of conserving valuable resources, saving money and increasing profits? If we do need radical change, do we need more or less government or none at all? Do people have inalienable rights to a clean environment, to a satisfying and secure livelihood? How should the costs and benefits of exploiting natural resources be distributed? Who gets to speak for the animals? Is democracy compatible with environmental protection? It quickly becomes clear that the so-called environmental debate is very much about our deeply held beliefs on what is good and right behavior toward the Earth and each other and how we can encourage it widely. What's just and how do we measure justice? Are we as human beings inherently good, smart and loving and need only to be freed from oppression, or are we innately destructive, needing harsh rules and strong rulers to keep our dark impulses in check?

Environmental analysts, all of us, are guided by how we think about these issues as much as we are by the data. Our ideas about how the world should work is part of an ideology, our understanding about how the world does work is part of a social theory. To date, although many (if not all) books about the environment are steeped in ideology and social theory, there have been very few writers who have taken a deliberate and systematic approach to understanding ideological and social theoretical underpinnings of the environmental debate. The two books under review, William Sunderlin's Ideology, Social Theory and theEnvironment, and C. A. Bowers' Mindful Conservatism: Rethinking the Ideological and Educational Basis of an Ecologically Sustainable Future are worthy entries into the literature of environmental studies. Both authors suggest that an enhanced understanding of environmental issues, perhaps even wisdom, is the reward forstudying the different ideological perspectives apparent in competing environmental analyses. Both suggest that creative cross-pollination between apparently irreconcilable positions can only lead to a richer, more nuanced and practical approach to what Bowers calls "an ecologically sustainable future."

Despite this shared mission, the two writers are quite different. Sunderlin is the more analytical, Bowers the more polemical. Mindful Conservatism seeks converts to what he calls an ecologically informed conservatism. In what is in essence an extended essay he rails against neo-liberalism, an ideology known in the awkward language of US politics as neo-conservatism. In modern US practice Liberals tend to support environmental regulation and wilderness conservation while Conservatives protect the free market against those who would impede progress in order to conserve ecosystems that have little or no market value. Surely the time is ripe for looking to social theory for some good explanations as to how and why this weird reversal of common sense definitions of liberalism and conservatism has occurred.

Bowers takes up the task of reclaiming conservatism for those who would conserve, rather than destroy, the earth. He calls upon the conservative tradition of Edmund Burke whose two guiding principles for political and social change Bowers describes thusly: "first, change must be evaluated in terms of whether it contributes to the further well-being of the community; second, decisions about what needs to be conserved, renewed through modifications or rejected need to be based on the 'partnership between those...