What the Dickens is Sustainability?

It would be remiss of me to let the bicentennial of Charles Dickens pass without a mention as one of history's great progressive voices. When I say progressive, I mean one who sees the role of public policy as being to tackle the needs of the have-nots, rather than to protect the privileges of the haves. It's also significant, in our evidence-obsessed age, that he made his point through the medium of fiction, full of caricatures and dramatic licence, rather than through a dry, factual presentation of the dismal, unfair and unhealthy society he saw around him.

At the "How to Plan for Nature" workshop in Hamburg recently, I was describing the move from a "conservative" approach to a "restorative" approach in nature policy. The conservative approach involves preserving the best of our natural assets, which is fine insofar as it goes, but results in those best bits becoming isolated and fragmented, and eventually declining, and any less-valued assets are allowed to decline anyway. The restorative approach attempts to reverse decline by enabling valued assets to grow, and also tackling deficit in other areas so that, over time, the net worth of our natural environment increases and degraded environments are renewed and nurtured.

It seems both inevitable and desirable that this paradigm shift takes place: it has been a long time coming, but is now increasingly enshrined in international policy on nature. Perhaps the terms "nature conservation" and "conservationist" will gradually be replaced in the lexicon by "restoration" and "restorationist", clunky though they may sound at present. Or perhaps, to we should try out the word "progressive"? Should we push the language of "progressive" environmental policies, in the sense of promoting the needs of degraded environments as a higher priority than protecting what is already well-protected?

Against this backdrop I was intriged to hear several discussions in the media this week about "Conservatism" in the sense of the ideological context of Conservative politics. I admit to a patchy historical knowledge here, but the underlying principle is that "not all change is good, and so some things should be conserved". A particularly interesting take on this came in Start the Week, where the outspoken writer Peter Hitchens identified Margaret Thatcher as distinctly non-Conservative and more extreme-liberal, and took the view that the UK's Conservative Party is no longer anything of the sort. Deregulation of the market certain seems liberal, or even neo-liberal, in that it simply favours those who can make money and sell things, regardless of their social class, education or connections.

What really interests me here is not the machinations of the UK Conservative Party, but what "conservatism" means in a bigger sense. If Thatcherism was not Conservative, but liberal, then are Liberals liberal, or progressive? Someone said, "If you want to see who has the power in a society, look who has the tallest buildings". The truth in this is self-evident and pithy: before the 19th century it was invariably churches that dominated city skylines, then these were dwarfed by the tall chimneys of factories, and more recently by skyscrapers consecrated to the banking gods. As an aside, in many UK cities the tallest buildings of the moment are hotels and apartment blocks, suggesting that sleeping is about the most powerful thing we've done since 1990. But more to the point, if "Conservatism" means conserving power in society for those who currently have it (the breaking of which is the driving force behind the Labour movement), then Thatcherism was about moving power away from left-wing trade unions. In Sheffield the former (empty) headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers may not be especially tall but it is certainly domineering. Thatcherism didn't really have a view on whom power would move towards, and to give the Iron Lady some credit she may have intended to move it towards 'liberals' like herself - but that's not how it turned out, because the free market took over. One way of looking at it is that the market saw a power vacuum and jumped in, and then established a new status quo that "conservatism" was all too ready and willing to protect.

So here are some challenging questions:

If economic downturn results in no tall buildings being built, does this mean there is also a power vacuum inherent in downturn?

If so, why does downturn seem to be a catalyst for "radical overhauls" rather than "improving things, but not throwing out the baby with the bathwater"?

Is a period of economic gloom therefore actually the perfect time to be articulating and pursuing environmentally progressive policy and not, as many would have us believe, a time when environment takes a back seat?

AW.