A Righter Shade of Green

Roger Scruton, in an essay at The American Conservative asks why conservatives have been so slow to capture the environmental cause.

excerpt:

"There is a more interesting motive for the Left’s capture of the environmental cause: the cult of the victim. There has been a tradition on the Left, going back to the 19th century and to Marx in particular, of judging every form of human success in terms of its victims. It is assumed that when someone makes a profit, someone else must suffer a loss. This idea of human society as a kind of zero-sum game, in which every benefit is matched by someone else’s cost, is dear to a certain kind of left-wing thinking. And in the Earth, we have a wonderful victim - one bigger than any human being, who suffers the results of all of our profiteering."