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Roger Scruton
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Green Philosophy Hardcover – January 1, 2011

by Roger Scruton (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 86 ratings
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Roger Scruton was one of Britain's leading thinkers. In this book he offers a radically different approach to the planet's most urgent crisis. He demonstrates that international agendas have a natural tendency to exploit resources to tackle the present emergency and outlines policies of a new green conservatism.
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  1. Print length
    464 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Atlantic
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 2011
  5. Dimensions
    6.46 x 1.57 x 9.21 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1848870760
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1848870765
  8. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atlantic; Main edition (January 1, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1848870760
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1848870765
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.81 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.46 x 1.57 x 9.21 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 86 ratings

About the author

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Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton

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Roger Vernon Scruton, FBA, FRSL (/ˈskruːtən/; born 27 February 1944) is an English philosopher who specialises in aesthetics. He has written over thirty books, including Art and Imagination (1974), The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), Beauty (2009), How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012), Our Church (2012), and How to be a Conservative (2014). Scruton has also written several novels and a number of general textbooks on philosophy and culture, and he has composed two operas.

Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. Since 1992, he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the University of St Andrews. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years, and he founded the Claridge Press in 1987. Scruton sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Scruton has been called "the man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is" by British MEP Daniel Hannan and "England’s most accomplished conservative since Edmund Burke" by The Weekly Standard.

Outside his career as a philosopher and writer, Scruton was involved in the establishment of underground universities and academic networks in Soviet-controlled Central Europe during the Cold War, and he has received a number of awards for his work in this area.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Pete Helme (http://www.rogerscruton.com) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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4.7 out of 5 stars
86 global ratings

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JS
5.0 out of 5 stars Why has the environmentalist movement failed to establish sustainable societies ...
Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2014
Why has the environmentalist movement failed to establish sustainable societies? Why are the most successful environmental campaigns local instead of global? Why are "conservationist" and "conservative" different words in English? If any of these questions pique your interest, this is the book you are looking for.
4 people found this helpful
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Pepe
5.0 out of 5 stars Scruton's book is a game-changer for the environment
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2012
Scruton discusses many ecological issues: erosion of habitats, depletion of resources, accumulation of waste and, of course, climate change. He's not a catastrophist, but he's not a sceptic either, and he recognises that the future of our natural environment poses theoretical problems as well as practical ones.

What is difference is the originality of the solutions. The present methods have failed, and by the end of the book, you are sure his wisdom won't.
9 people found this helpful
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Sirin
4.0 out of 5 stars Attempts to reclaim the green agenda for the right
Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2013
Roger Scruton makes a compelling argument in this book. He coins a Greek phrase, 'Oikophilia', love of home, to underpin his thesis that big state solutions to environmental problems have failed, and a small scale approach centred around civic groups, clearly identified with a particular community, is more likely to succeed.

Scruton is a Burkean, approving of the 'little platoon' approach to society, with organisation coming from the bottom up rather than the top down. An ethos that the Conservatives tried to enshrine in their 'big society' 2010 election manifesto, not particularly convincingly.

With characteristic learning and clarity, Scruton invokes many references from culture, politics and philosophy to support his case. Big state solutions to environmental challenges fail as they are too remote from the causes of the problem and often invoke regulations that make it worse. For example, after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch offered the USA the use of ships that have the technology to extract oil from seawater and return nearly pure water to the oceans. But because the returned water did not meet the EPA's stringent purity guidelines, the technology was prohibited, therefore the problem worsened.

Another example which Scruton details is the role that agricultural subsidies play in favouring agribusiness over the small farmer. Many small farmers in Britain have been unable to survive in such a climate, and much responsible stewardship of the land, often down several generations, has been lost.

What is needed, argues Scruton, is for smaller scale organisations to reclaim control. People are less likely to spoil their village if they know they will be responsible for clearing up the mess.

It is probable that Scruton's argument works best for relatively isolated rural communities. How it can apply to the city, or the large industrial areas predominant in many developing countries, it is harder to see. To an extent, Scruton concedes this point, though does try and work through a tentative solution in an appendix which argues for a system of justice where polluters bear the cost of their output.

Realistically, the challenge of environmental degradation that frequently crosses borders is likely to remain a problem for the foreseeable future. Scruton argues for a flat rate carbon tax, the proceeds to go towards funding research into renewable energy sources, which is something David Cameron has recently turned in the other direction, saying he wants to cut green taxes to reduce energy bills. The world's population is growing, and people need to be fed, sheltered and heated. Little platoons may only get us so far, but they are a start, and their role in the fabric of civic associations should not be underestimated.
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Harald Bayer
5.0 out of 5 stars Umweltschutz - nicht nur ein Hauptanliegen der Grünen
Reviewed in Germany on February 27, 2020
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Sir Roger Scruton hat einen englischen Blick auf die Dinge. Er wird nicht müde zu betonen, dass viele Gesetze, die der Umweltbelastung entgegenwirken, ihren Ursprung im ältesten europäischen Parlament der Neuzeit haben. Allerdings ist er ein Gegner von Überregulierung von oben, wie sie vorzugsweise in Deutschland und der EU stattfindet, was seiner Ansicht nach auch zum Brexit geführt hat. Zu welchem Unsinn Gesetze führen, macht die Ölpest von 2011 im Golf von Mexiko deutlich. Holland hatte zwei Spezialschiffe angeboten, die das Öl von der Meeresoberfläche absaugen und zu 98% sauberes Wasser ins Meer zurückleiten. Da ein amerikanisches Gesetz fordert, nur zu 99,5% sauberes Wasser dürfe ins Meer geleitet werden, scheiterte der Versuch. Das Resultat ist bekannt. Scruton schreibt - typisch für gebildete Engländer - klar, verständlich und pointiert.
4 people found this helpful
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Mrs. J. PIRES-OBRIEN
5.0 out of 5 stars What the Planet Needs
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 24, 2012
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Joaquina Pires-O'Brien
Roger Scruton's Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet is an outstanding book on the environment that shows how moral philosophy can be translated into policy. It is a massively comprehensive book that leaves no stone unturned in relation to rationalities and approaches that have been proposed to protect the environment, analysing them from many angles. There are two expectations behind his meticulous inquiry into the physical and the moral aspects of choices. The first is that it will provide all the facts needed to understand environmental problems; the second is that such understanding will recreate the moral connection between individuals and their immediate environment. As Scruton points out, this moral connection is already latent in humans and is based on the need for nurture and safety. These two expectations lead to what Scruton calls oikophilia, which literally means the love of one's home, which is the key to unlock the moral connection that motivates people to look after their environmental resources in a spirit of stewardship.

Oikophilia works, Scruton explains, by promoting human resilience, autonomous associations, market solutions, effective tort law, aesthetic side-constraints which emerge from open discussions among citizens, biodiversity, natural beauty, local autonomy, serious research, and a regime of pricing and feedback that return the costs of environmental damage to those who create them. These are precisely the kind of things `which have a healthy environment as their effect'. This long list of things is, of course, part of the conservative morality which Scruton recommends. It comes with a huge problem: to overcome the hostile attitude of the left-wing mind set of the radical greens that tend to rebuff conservatism and to equate the market with attributes like consumerism, selfishness and greed.

There are arguments in favour of conservatism in most chapters of this book. In those arguments it is posited that the individualism at the core of conservatism, which combines freedom with responsibility, is complemented by other values such as respect for customs and traditions, namely those in the spheres of inherited affections, national sovereignty, free enterprises and civic initiatives. It is also argued that it is worth maintaining the things that were built into society at great cost, such as English common law, which has enabled society to cope with environmental problems long before the state began to legislate against them. The conclusion of the argument for conservatism is that tradition is precisely the source of practical knowledge that helps us know what to do in order to accomplish something successfully. Any suggestion that the author could be trying to appease the left-wing greens is dispelled completely by his summing up at the end of the book in the two appendices, where he posits some bold ideas that have the potential to attract other types of contrary reactions.

Green Philosophy examines a number of the most pertinent environmental problems, shows how such problems were tackled in the past, and reveals the mistakes that were made in the process. In Scruton's view, both the radical greens and governments have limited visions of environmental problems and their habit of imposing top-down prescriptions for the environment disrupts the social equilibrium necessary for people to act morally as temporary trustees of the environment. To Scruton, these top-down solutions often either exacerbate the problem or create new problems in the process. If environmental problems are to be taken seriously, he argues, they should be subjected to public debate and accountability. Scruton makes the point that, in the recent past, people had control of their environment and an awareness of the risks it faced through their use. Removing control of the local environmental away from individuals is disingenuous since they are precisely the ones who hold the key to solving the problems relating to it. According to Scruton in order for people to regain control of their environment they must first relearn how `to turn on the moral equipment' which will enable them to value what they have and to protect what they value.

Scruton's Green Philosophy is a solid starting point for all public discussions surrounding the environment. In it, the author accepts that some environmental problems are so large that they have no realistic solution and the best that can be done is to manage them with the aim of putting them on the path of equilibrium. Global warming and the dwindling fisheries of the oceans are perhaps the two most notorious examples of large-scale problems.

Scruton's solution for the problem of dwindling fisheries is to divide up the shoreline into plots and allocate property rights to each. He cites two examples of autonomous fisheries management that worked, the Lofoten fishery in Norway, which survived for centuries without outside regulation, and the system of `individual transferable quotas' (ITQs) adopted by Iceland and New Zealand. Scruton is a fierce critic of the Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union (EU). He reminisces about a time past when each country in the coastal waters of Europe had their customary sovereign rights. Scruton fails to acknowledge that in the case of Great Britain and Denmark, accepting the Common Fisheries Policy was a pre-requisite to joining the EU. Therefore, his suggestion of returning to a system of property rights which would bring the good stewardship needed to safeguard the fisheries resource is nigh on impossible for a country within a transnational organization such as the EU. Furthermore, Scruton's assessment of the problems of the oceans and the disappearance of fisheries and the stocks on which they depend, fails to take into account the existing body of scientific knowledge on the subject, omitting to suggest feasible ways of tackling the problems associated with the Common Fisheries Policy.

Scruton's coverage of global warming is much better than his account of the oceans and their dwindling fisheries, and includes the entire spectrum of informed opinions, both past and present. He accepts the trend of global warming, that to a greater extent it is anthropogenic, and that there is a need to reduce carbon emissions. He explains the basis of the international solution proposed under the Kyoto treaty, known as cap and trade solution, as an attempt to create a market that will assign a price to emissions based on the logic of supply and demand. Although he recognises the market oriented solution underpinning Kyoto, Scruton is sceptical about cap and trade schemes due to their lack of transparency, which, in his view, is an invitation to corruption. Another reason why he opposes Kyoto is that it targets producers and not consumers, who, he believes, are ultimately responsible for the problem of carbon emissions. He proposes an alternative solution to the problem of global warming, by the introduction of a flat-rate carbon tax on all products regardless of their origin and to use this tax to finance research on cleaner technologies.

An overview of Scruton's suggestions to manage environmental problems is provided in the last chapter of Green Philosophy, entitled Modest Proposals. Here, Scruton reiterates that the state should not undertake tasks that could be better undertaken by the citizens. In his view, what the state should do is to help citizens to act effectively, through deregulation for example. The first step of any environmental policy should be to devise a scheme for putting a price on pollution and waste that serves as a deterrent. The chapter, however, is followed by two appendices. Appendix I, Global Justice, is a philosophical examination of the problems of bringing justice to the environment, especially the so-called intergenerational justice, that seeks to save the environment for future generations. In the second Appendix, How Should We Live, Scruton delineates the difficulties of moral judgements and the tensions that exist between the pursuit of happiness and sense of duty. He also points out that in the modern era, when overpopulation became the greatest source of pressure on the environment, one of the greatest tensions is that between the virtue of charity towards the poor and the virtue of unburdening the planet. The starkest example is the campaign against DDT that took place after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, whose success led to an increase in the population of the malaria-transmitting mosquito, which in turn caused a huge increase in the number of African children who died of malaria.

One of the lessons of this book is that all actions designed to solve environmental problems in the present must be thought through to prevent a tragedy further down the line. For that, one must think seriously about the planet and reject top-down prescriptions and agendas about the environment. This, of course, requires the practice oikophilia, demonstrated by actions such as participation in civic associations, creation of sustainable neighbourhoods and respect for tradition. In the case of environmental justice, truth is not enough: only the whole truth will do. Many comprehensive books on the environment that have appeared before now have incurred errors due to incomplete visions. This is not the case of Scruton's Green Philosophy -- His polymath credentials have allowed him to uncover all the pertinent dimensions necessary for the care of our planet.
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Alexandra
5.0 out of 5 stars Driven by a Sense of Responsibility
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 26, 2021
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Conservatives and conservatism are often seen as the enemy in our struggle for a healthy planet. In this masterly work, Scruton argues that the opposite is true.

This conception is derived from a misunderstanding (caused by our muddled political climate) of the key differences between liberalism and conservatism. Liberals are focused on the individual and the freedom of markets. Conservatives (small ‘c’, very different from the capital ‘C’ Conservative Party) believe in preservation and stewardship. It is this desire to preserve, which makes conservatives a natural ally in the struggle to save our planet. In Scruton's own words: ‘For nobody seems to have identified a motive more likely to serve the environmentalist cause than this one, of the shared love of our home’.

On the cover Scruton claims to think seriously about the planet, and he does exactly that!
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Jan
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book
Reviewed in Germany on January 30, 2018
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Over last many years, I read many Roger Scruton's books and always found them amazing... This one resonates a very strong message: that green politics should be mainly done from right, not left side of political spectrum...
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PR Blacklock
5.0 out of 5 stars Why we should be Green: a right-wing view
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 30, 2016
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All Green-minded people should read Dr Scruton's contribution to the discussion about the future. I am not of his conservative turn of mind (with a small c) but we have a lot in common, especially about the shape that society should take. We agree that bigness is the root of the problem; we disagree about what bigness. He says Government, I say business. Please read him, particularly if you are a radical, like me.
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