My own hope is that environmentalists will grow out of the witch-hunting mentality that has alienated conservatives, and that conservatives will cease to be defensive about their true agenda, which is the one implied in their name. I would like to see an Ecologist magazine that makes room, in its scheme of things, for old Tory values of loyalty and allegiance. For it seems to me that the dominance of international decision-making by unaccountable bureaucracies, unaccountable NGOs and corporations accountable only to their shareholders (who may have no attachment to the environment which the corporations threaten) has made it more than ever necessary for us to follow the conservative path. We need to retreat from the global back to the local, so as to address the problems that we can collectively identify as ours, with means that we can control, from motives that we all feel. And that means being clear as to who we are, and why we are in it together and committed to our common survival. I respect George Monbiot's attempt to identify this first-person plural in planetary terms, just as I respect the Enlightenment conception of the human being as a rational agent motivated by universal principles. As a conservative, however, I bow to the evidence of history, which tells me that human beings are creatures of limited and local affections, the best of which is the territorial loyalty that leads them to live at peace with strangers, to honour their dead and to make provision for those who will one day replace them in their earthly tenancy.
(Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy [London and New York: Continuum, 2006], 46 [italics in original])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 