Regular readers know that Maggie's Farm has a strong conservationist orientation, but if anyone tries to call us Greenies we will shoot you in both kneecaps with our Colt Python.
I know some readers are inclined to disagree with us about this, but we do believe in certain sorts of planning, and even certain sorts of government "taking," Kelo notwithstanding.
For two examples we like, JFK's Cape Cod National Seashore took the development rights to broad swaths of the Lower Cape (which is the upper Cape). This action not only preserved the feel and aesthetics of the Cape but preserved the unusual Cape environment - and ultimately raised land values through the roof. Without the National Seashore, there would no longer be anywhere on the Cape to hunt, the salt marshes would be filled in, and the place would look like the worst parts of the Jersey Shore. (Photo is a view of Wellfleet's Chequessett Neck).
Another example we like is Britain's Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. Without that act of Parliament, Britain would not be a tourist destination: it would look like Indianapolis. It protected the towns, and it protected their farmlands and open spaces. Yes, it essentially confiscated development rights - with the voters' approval. (Photo below: A view of English countryside, just outside of town.)
So, while our pure Libertarian readers grouse and grumble, let's get to the point. The good Prof. Pat Deneen recently hosted Roger Scruton at Georgetown, which speech is now Scruton's most recent published essay, A Righter Shade of Green, in The American Conservative. Scruton isn't so much in favor of government taking - he is in favor of a local sense of trusteeship. That's the right idea, but I haven't seen it work in practice too often: local politics are not the highest form of human civic evolution or future-orientation.
As Prof Deneen notes, and as we have frequently noted here, poor stewardship of our precious land in the US is made possible by the "externalization of costs" to other people and to future generations. Example: highways. Example: development of good farmland for 1/2 acre zoning.
Read Pat Deneen's piece here. He quotes Scruton's conclusion:
What then is the conservative solution, if there is one? A revival of trusteeship is the only hope for the future, and this attitude is natural to human beings. They enter the world through no choice of their own, to be greeted, as a rule, by the love of parents and the security of home. The trustee is the one who recognizes that his home, and all that it means, are inherited things, things to be safeguarded and passed on. This attitude exercises itself at the local level in the voluntary associations and small institutions of civil society. It is the core component in that associational genius that Tocqueville discerned in the American people. It is the legacy of a political order that regards people, not rulers, as the source of authority and the fount of responsible decision-making.
Environmental movements on the Left seldom pause to consider the question of human motivation. It is so clear to them that something must be done that they leap to the conclusion that it must be done by state power and imposed by law. The problem with that approach is that it makes mistakes into permanent legacies and provides no incentive to ordinary citizens to do what they are told. Conservatives, on the whole, are more respectful of human nature and will recognize in the attitude of trusteeship a feeling to which we automatically tend, when given the freedom to exercise it.
Read Scruton's whole essay at American Conservative.
