Paradise regained – the conservative case for restoring English nature

Society is a contract between past, present, and future generations.

Kitty Thompson | Head of Campaigns

As conservatives, it is our duty to uphold this contract, to pass on our world to the next generation in a better state than we found it. We strive to do this because we care about the home that future generations will inherit.

Our instinctive love of home, or “oikophilia” as the late Sir Roger Scruton called it, is intertwined with a desire to improve it.

We are the stewards of England, our home.

This shared inheritance applies as much to our cultural and economic heritage as it does to our guardianship of the natural world. The English countryside lies at the heart of this collective natural inheritance. A source of great national pride and international recognition, this green and pleasant is at the core of our national identity.

But we are taking it for granted. Our natural inheritance is weak.

We have lost so many quintessentially English species, like red squirrels and hedgehogs, and degraded the many habitats for which England is the guardian of much of the world’s supply, like blanket bogs, temperate rainforests, and, most importantly of all, chalk streams.

For conservatives to care about the natural environment is not a new phenomenon. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “we must remember our duty to nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe.”

Her words are as true now as they were thirty five years ago. But, in recent years, some conservatives have been sceptical about the need to restore our natural environment. Worse still, some do not regard its protection as a ‘proper’ conservative priority. This is misguided.

That is why I have written ‘Paradise Regained: The conservative case for restoring English nature’ . Welcomed by conservatives spanning the breadth of our movement, this publication is the first step towards establishing a new and distinctly conservative case for restoring English nature. Sitting at the heart of this document, I outline five tenets of a conservative approach to restoring nature, which are as follows:

1. Placing national pride at the heart of natural environment policy

2. Empowering the stewards of our land to restore nature

3. Putting outcomes ahead of outputs in our regulatory environment

4. Ending our reliance on public money to solve all of our environmental problems by replacing the role of the market in financing nature recovery

5. Leveraging our newfound environmental sovereignty to tailor nature policies to English species and habitats

This distinctly conservative approach to environmentalism provides the Conservative Party with a blueprint with which to consider any future nature policies, including those that fall within the current policy renewal process. This approach puts the desire to restore English nature at the centre, but it is also one that is underpinned by a rich conservative philosophy.

This is because intergenerational fairness and stewardship are not just buzzwords to be thrown around to give the impression that we care. They are our principles. They must guide any conservative wanting to leave the environment in a better state than we found it. This requires us to first tell the truth about the current state of our natural world.

Our most valuable habitats are hanging on by a thread. England is home to 85 per cent of the world’s chalk streams, and yet just 17 per cent of them are currently in good ecological condition. Our globally rare temperate rainforests cling on in isolated fragments, now covering just 1 percent of the landscape.

Meanwhile, 87 per cent of England’s peatlands are degraded, damaged and dried out, emitting tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. In the last one hundred years alone, we have lost around 97 per cent of our wildflower meadows.

But alarming statistics rarely evoke an emotional response and the necessary action by themselves, especially among conservatives. For conservatives willing to look and listen, however, one ramble through our countryside is enough to realise that we run the risk of failing to meet the terms of our precious intergenerational contract, squandering the inheritance bestowed upon us and the better life we owe to our children and grandchildren.

There have been valiant attempts from some conservationists, farmers, and policymakers to reverse the fate of English nature and, as a result, some small pockets of hope certainly do exist. However, together they unfortunately still cover such a small proportion of land overall. Where these precious English habitats once stretched across entire landscapes, their depletion now paints a bleak picture of the scale of nature’s decline in our once wild isles, despite efforts to conserve nature across the country.

In order to reverse our environmental fortunes, references to our green and pleasant land must take on a new and substantive meaning. No longer can it harken back to the land that English poets, painters, and authors depicted.

By building biodiversity back into the natural environment of the present day, we can regain our paradise of abundant native flora and fauna within landscapes that future generations are able to look upon with pride.

First published by ConservativeHome. Kitty Thompson is CEN's Head of Campaigns.