You Can’t Conserve What You Hate
Stewardship requires belonging.
Conservation begins with affection. The late Roger Scruton referred to this as oikophilia, or love of home. This moral attachment to place is the essential foundation that makes stewardship possible.
Long before environmentalism became a political identity or a set of policy prescriptions, it was more innate: a commitment to care for what had been entrusted to you. A river you fished as a child. A landscape that signaled you were close to home. A piece of acreage passed down, tended carefully, not because it was perfect, but because it was yours.
oikophilia (n) love of home
This attachment does not grow out of guilt or resentment. And thank God for that. You cannot tend what you do not care for. Detachment breeds neglect. Contempt breeds abandonment. What is treated as illegitimate is rarely tended with patience or humility. Likewise, you cannot conserve what you are taught to despise.
Somewhere along the way, much of the modern environmental movement lost sight of this truth. In its effort to sound urgent, righteous, or globally minded, it drifted away from the moral language that once made conservation possible: pride in place, gratitude for inheritance, and responsibility to those who come next. In its place, too often, came a posture of scolding — toward Americans, toward industry, toward rural communities, and increasingly toward the nation itself.
This shift was not driven by bad intentions. Many on the Left care deeply about the environment and are motivated by a sincere desire to protect it. But good intentions cannot compensate for a philosophy that undermines its own foundation. Conservation cannot be sustained by contempt for the very people whose care it requires.
Guilt may change behavior temporarily, but it does not cultivate long-term responsibility. Shame may compel compliance. It does not inspire sacrifice.
Conservation works best when it is rooted in love of people and place — when it is about this river, this forest, this town, this land. It is local before it is global, personal before it is abstract. People protect what they know, and they know what they belong to. A movement that speaks almost exclusively in sweeping global terms, while treating attachment to nation or tradition with suspicion, should not be surprised when its message fails to resonate beyond elite circles.
This is where the modern Left has lost its way.
Too often, America itself is framed as the villain: uniquely destructive, morally suspect, something to apologize for rather than care for. Industry is portrayed as inherently corrupt. Rural life is caricatured as backward. Patriotism is treated as a liability. In this worldview, the land is worth saving, but the people who live on it are something to be managed, coerced, or corrected.
Stewardship requires belonging. You cannot ask people to care for a country they are told is irredeemable. You cannot build a conservation ethic on resentment toward the very communities most directly connected to the land.
If the environmental movement wants to succeed, it must recover a language of affection and once more make room for pride in America, respect for its people, and gratitude for our shared history. This does not require denying environmental challenges or abandoning policy debates. It requires remembering that conservation cannot be sustained as atonement for a country we are told is unworthy of love.
The path forward is not less love of country, but more. Not detachment, but deeper attachment. You cannot conserve what you hate. But you can protect what you love, and America is well worth loving.
Danielle Franz is the CEO of the American Conservation Coalition. Follow her on X @DanielleBFranz.
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There is no moral high ground on the right or the left. If the goal is conservation as opposed to “being right”, then it should be an all hands on deck approach. Otherwise, all you have is yet another organization that has “a better way”. We all have something to contribute, whether we call ourselves “conservative “ or “progressive”, left, right or center. Supporting good public policy is obviously important, but be careful not to support one side against another. We need to find useful ways to come together. I would caution you to not lean to hard one way or the other and not to spend time criticizing others approaches to conservation. The fact that you are reaching out to those that have previously felt left out of the conservation movement is admirable. They are needed as much as the rest of us, not more or less.
I both sincerely agree with the point that conservation stems from love of place and community, and respectfully disagree with the application that the place and community to be loved is intrinsically tired to a national/political entity. The land we love was home to nations long before America, and , if the Lord wills, will be home to nations long after America is gone. Politically or nationally motivation conservation is both short sighted and narrow minded. The need to steward the land we call home has existed since the day man was created and placed in it. The community we love has far less to do with political entities and should rather be rooted deeper in a love for our neighbors. Political systems come and go, they succeed and fail, they are not not above criticism and sometimes they do become irredeemable. But we always have our neighbors and our communities, and these are worth loving. This nationally/patriotically driven conservation falls apart under the weight of its own demands. If we can only conserve the home of a nation we feel is not irredeemable, what do we do when it is irredeemable? What can be said about conservation in failed states, crumbling socialist dictatorships, truly fascist and oppressive nations? Can people not conserve under these rules? Unless we are specifically speaking of public policy (which falls by the wayside in these kind of governments), people can and should still care and come together successfully, not because they love their oppressive nations, but because they love their neighbors, know their land will out live them, and are grateful for the divine gift they have been given in a good and beautiful world.