A few weeks ago, a project that I’d been working on for about a year finally moved from “Under Review” to “Forthcoming” at the Annual Review of Sociology. A link to the current preprint version can be found HERE, and it will be constantly updated as we get proofs from the publishers at Annual Reviews.
The purpose of the piece is to consolidate a huge array of social science and historical writing about conservative politics and the environment and to put it in some format that is useful for professional sociologists. My general takeaways from the project are threefold.
First, environmental or ecological politics are fundamentally ambivalent. That is, they can fall to the left or right of the common-sense political spectrum we all purport to agree exists.
Second, within a particular sort of macro-philosophical era—for us, we’re still sort of in the post-Enlightenment world—political logics do not evolve but instead accumulate. The absence of fascism in its original, institutionalized form in 1920s Italy doesn't mean that the fundamental principles and logics of fascism have disappeared in contemporary times. And yet, fascism is much more with us today than the political logics that held together a medieval fiefdom in the pre-Enlightenment era. Although Italy is not actually fascist today, it retains the potential to become fascist.
In the broadest sense, what this review made me think about is what it means to take seriously what impeding resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, and sea level rise mean for our politics. Carbon is a left-wing issue; the environment is not. Pollution is a right-wing issue; the environment is not. Biodiversity is neither.
Ultimately, we find that sociology doesn’t really have a good theory for making sense of the role of nature and the environment in social life, nor does sociology have a good sense for what conservatism is. Read it to find out!