If we have had red duchesses and worker priests, no one will be surprised that in Spain we also have right-wing environmentalists: it must show in some way that we are the most biodiverse country in Europe! It remains to be seen, however, whether the specimens of right-wing environmentalists are more or less numerous than the specimens —209, according to the latest census— of Cantabrian capercaillie. After all, environmentalism is one of those topics on which the right has come to be convinced of its own lack of legitimacy to speak out. On the one hand, the right has historically judged environmental policy as one of those soft policies that will always be ornamental compared to the major state ministries and the pure and hard management of the economy. On the other, it has assumed with astonishing ease the role that the left reserves for it in the matter: to represent the villains, the developer who makes a killing along the coast versus the gentleman who complains about the mineral water caps. This ecological guilt is striking, if only because no great conceptual leaps are needed to link political conservatism and environmental conservationism. Nor, for that matter, is a very long memory needed to recall the times when the image of progress, for the left, was the smoking chimney of a factory. If capitalism has done badly in the Amazon, we also know what collectivism left in the Aral Sea.
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It would be a shame if the sensationalism of the title reduced the readers of The Right-Wing Environmentalist. Blue Solutions for a Green Planet to the liberal-conservative crowd. One of the not few merits of the book by Toni Timoner and Luis Quiroga is to integrate the liberal and conservative branches into the genealogy of Spanish environmentalism. There is the pedagogy of a Delibes. Or the mass awareness of a Rodríguez de la Fuente who refused to be a UCD minister. But there are also decisions of political forcefulness such as the establishment of the Ministry of the Environment (1996) or an almost prophetic —year 2001— Spanish Office of Climate Change. Unfortunately, that genealogy also has something melancholic. Minister Isabel Tocino was received with an avalanche of condescension. And Alfonso Ussía needed only a title, Manual del ecologista coñazo, to condense the feelings of the traditional right around the environment. That ecological skepticism on the right has lasted until today. It appears, in its comic aspect, in the invectives against climate warming every time it rains or snows. And, with electoral significance, in the rural voting pockets of those who feel like losers of the Green Deal.
Environmentalism is a house with many doors: fascism, for example, always wanted to protect its snowy mountains. This serves at least to underline that sensitivities go beyond party lines: it may be as surprising that Reagan legalized abortion in California as that he promoted a very pioneering Clean Air Act. In the current scenario, distinctions are increasingly difficult. Take the example of a brilliant winemaker like the Friulian Fulvio Bressan. By agricultural practice or commercial policy, one would believe to be facing a model militant of the alternative left. By his statements on social media, it could be seen that he is quite the opposite. Attachment to the land and a certain Arcadian temptation, in fact, bring the utopian left and a rural chic right closer. Both are anti-capitalist. And even a great conservative writer like Roger Scruton allowed himself some flirtation with degrowth, that temptation of elites apparently unaware of the fact that human beings work because they expect work to improve their lives. It is possible that, like all millenarianism, Greta Thunberg’s has caused some opposite effect: let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. But the aestheticization of agriculture and rural lifestyles proposed by a certain rockrose and fishing rod right does not stop falling into the moral enchantment that this same right criticizes in the environmentalist left. It is good to cultivate organic raspberries and raise posh chicken breeds, but it is not the same as saving the world.
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Ecological policies usually end in coercion, since hunting bans were established or throwing cigarette butts out the window was prohibited. It is important, therefore, to gain the complicity of citizens with the moralization of the environmental cause: the left does it and so do Timoner and Quiroga from a certain “Christian worldview” of “temporary administrators” of the world for generations to come. After all, with our environmental policies we are not only paying for mistakes of generations we have not known, but we are sacrificing ourselves for generations we will not know. All in all, the important thing about these new right-wing environmentalists is that they talk less about harmony with the earth than about the electric mix, and more about decarbonization than about the gaze of calves. They even talk about what no one wants to talk about: “Preparing ourselves for a world that, even fulfilling the most ambitious environmental commitments, will be warmer, irregular, and extreme.”
The right-wing environmentalist happily comes to deny what he denounces: environmentalism is going to be more and more a usual political battle and less a cultural war. After all, no one can afford to stand aside anymore: environmental policy is in air conditioning bills, in your vacations in the north, and in the places where you can or cannot drive your car. It is good to remind the right that it stopped being ornamental a long time ago.
