From Sustainability to Permanence: A Conservative Ecology of Endurance

For a book-length treatment of the subject, I highly recommend Sir Roger Scruton's How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.

From The European Conservative

By Alexandros Dolgov

A civilisation cannot endure, let alone preserve itself and nature, if its highest promise is to leave no trace of itself.

One of the core moral missions of the contemporary Left is that pursuit of ‘environmental sustainability.’ It is also one of the concepts the Right most often mocks or fails to take seriously. Yet, this dismissal on the Right is misguided. 

For one, I have yet to meet conservatives who hate nature: the environment, forests, lakes, and other natural places, not primarily as ecosystems, but as landscapes filled with memory, myth, and meaning.  One such example is the Broceliande Forest in Brittany, said to be the resting place of the wizard Merlin and the place where he met Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, who taught him her magic. Broceliande is also home to the fountain of Barenton, a spring that, according to legend, could cure madness and heal many other illnesses. In other versions of the legend, Lancelot and Gawain enter the forest in search of trials of virtue and spiritual purification. Another example is Mount Pelion in Greece, which, according to Greek mythology, together with its surrounding forests, is the home of the Centaurs and of Chiron, who mentored heroes such as Achilles, Heracles, Jason, and Theseus. Conservatives, when they encounter such places, often behave as if they have entered a holy landscape of myth and story, and they instinctively want to preserve it for future generations together with the tales that give it meaning. For conservatives, these places are not merely carbon sinks or biodiversity assets but sacred inheritances that link the living to their ancestors and descendants.

By contrast, the contemporary Left tends to approach the protection of nature primarily through the reduction of carbon emissions and individual ‘carbon footprints.’ To protect the natural world, one is told to minimise one’s footprint within it. In the case of environmentalism, this becomes visible when a forest is reduced to a carbon value rather than understood as a place of memory, myth, and inherited meaning. As Ludwig Klages argued, modernity replaces lived, organic life with abstraction and quantification.

This habit of abstraction and quantification leads Europeans, who, although they live in largely secular societies, nonetheless hunger for meaning, to adopt a new moral and metaphysical framework: a secular quasi-religion of environmentalism. In this framework, self-erasure becomes the highest virtue, a system of impermanence that tells the individual that he is not important enough to leave a footprint in the material world before departing it. One is encouraged to be forgotten as quickly as possible and to leave behind nothing that might be deemed worthy of preservation. Thus, the Left’s ‘sustainability’ becomes not what it claims—a call to stewardship—but a metaphysics of self-hatred and permanent erasure: the idea that one should strive to leave as little trace as possible, to build nothing lasting, to avoid imposing oneself on the world. The human presence is treated less as a custodian of creation than as a problem to be minimised in order to preserve a supposedly purer nature. This mentality is particularly pronounced in Europe.

Other powers do not operate under a morality of self-hatred and degradation. China, for example, continues to expand its industrial base; the United States pursues efficiency, power, and economic dynamism; and Russia’s geopolitical and economic model depends on energy exports. Only Europe treats self-limitation as a civilisational duty and a virtue.

The conservative answer to this should not be mockery or a wholesale rejection of environmental concern. Instead, it should be to replace ‘environmental sustainability’ and its metaphysics of impermanence with permanence and a metaphysics of continuity, a worldview rooted in memory and oriented toward transcendence. The Right should respond to the demand to ‘reduce one’s footprint’ by insisting instead on leaving something worthy of inheritance, works that last for decades and centuries, not a humanity shrunk and degraded to the point of erasure, but one elevated. Edmund Burke, one of the monumental thinkers of British conservatism, wrote that society is in fact a contract between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Thus each generation inherits—or builds—a cultural legacy that it must preserve, improve, and pass on to the next. This philosophy stands in stark contrast to the Left’s sustainability-focused ethic of merely reducing harm in the here and now. 

It reframes our task as leaving something worthy behind, future-oriented and transcending individualism in order to achieve something larger than oneself—works that can endure for centuries, long after we are gone and even our names are forgotten. Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West, argued that cultures pass through cycles. Vigorous cultures that still believe in their own future build monuments, cathedrals, and structures meant to endure for centuries. Civilisations in decline, by contrast, build temporary, soulless, purely functional architecture; glass and steel structures with disposable aesthetics. One need only look at the European Union’s main buildings, the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank, to see where Europe currently stands in terms of civilisational confidence. The architecture of these institutions, with its glass-and-steel aesthetic, reflects a civilisational mood of impermanence and shallowness. These are buildings designed not to inspire awe and endure for generations, but to exude a mood of evanescence. Instead of inspiring reverence like the Parthenon, Hagia Sophia, or the Colosseum, they simply house bureaucrats, technocrats, and their committees and are spiritually empty. They are structures that subordinate the living soul of Europe’s peoples to a sterile technocracy, architecture that embodies administration, not aspiration.

By contrast, architecture that speaks to the soul through its beauty and meaning, and that is designed to endure as something worthy to pass on to the next generation, can be seen in buildings such as the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, built in 161 AD in memory of his wife, Aspasia Regilla. Almost two thousand years later, it still stands, and after its renovation in 1950, it continues to serve as an amphitheatre for performances. Its builders chose materials and forms intended to last, and the fact that it remains in active use today is itself a testament to a civilisational will to permanence.

An even more enduring example is the Parthenon in Athens, completed in 432 BC under Pericles. It was first a temple dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of the city. During the Christianisation of the Roman world, it became a church. Under Ottoman rule it was converted into a mosque, and later it was used as a gunpowder magazine. In 1687, during a Venetian attack, a shell struck the building and ignited the gunpowder inside, causing the damage visible today. Even so, it stands as one of the central symbols of Greek and European identity and civilisation. It has survived two and a half millennia of religious change, imperial conquest, and war, and would likely still be almost intact had that shell not hit it.

Colosseum, Rome. Photo: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5 , via Wikimedia Commons

Another “eternal” structure is the Colosseum in Rome. There are countless amphitheatres across Italy, but this one is the most iconic. Completed around 80 AD, it spans nearly two thousand years of history. It was built using limestone and Roman concrete, made distinct by the volcanic ash called pozzolana, which allowed the structure to “heal” itself when damaged within reasonable limits. Throughout its history it was used for gladiatorial games, executions, and naval battle reenactments. In the Middle Ages it became a fortress, and today it is a major archaeological site and one of the principal symbols of Italian and Roman identity. 

Finally, Neuschwanstein Castle can be seen as a more recent example of an “eternal” building that inspires awe. Built in 1886 by King Ludwig II of Bavaria and itself inspired by Wagnerian operas and Germanic myths, it was planned as the king’s personal refuge and later became a major influence on the Disney castle that appears at the beginning of each Disney film. After Ludwig’s death it was opened to the public and has since become a major symbol of Bavarian identity and one of the most visited castles in the world. 

All of the above buildings embody both what Spengler saw as structures built to last and Edmund Burke’s idea of an intergenerational contract, in which each generation inherits a cultural and structural legacy that is preserved and improved through stories, use, and integration into local identity, and then passed on to the next. They stand in stark contrast to the soulless buildings of the EU institutions. Moreover, just as places like Broceliande or Pelion became sacred through myth, these buildings became sacred through continuity and history, adding both a mythic and a material identity that is built upon, preserved, and passed on from one generation to the next.

One of the common pitfalls of conservatism is its tendency toward nostalgia, for a better time, for ancestors, and for lost traditions. Yet this nostalgia is a self-limiting viewpoint. If conservatives wish to play a catalytic role in government and leave their mark, looking only to the past will not be enough. They must also look forward into the future, and, quite frankly, there has never been a better time to do so, given the technological developments now unfolding. Conservatives value rootedness, beauty, depth, soul, permanence, and meaning; they seek to understand where each thing belongs in a culture and why, and to conserve our common humanity. This stands in sharp contrast to figures such as Yuval Noah Harari, who explicitly denies the existence of the soul and adopts a hyper-materialist vision in which machines will replace human beings and render them useless within a few decades. 

These conservative values will be indispensable for navigating the coming technological revolution and ordering new inventions according to Europe’s true values, rather than those merely claimed by the EU. The French philosopher Guillaume Faye, in his theory of Archeofuturism, argued that a living civilisation renews itself by fusing its most ancient and authentic values with the most advanced technologies available. He insisted that conservatives must move beyond simple nostalgia. The aim is not to imitate or recreate the past, but to take the most fundamental values of one’s culture, fuse them with today’s technologies, and, armed with both, build the future through new structures, institutions, and ways of life that speak of permanence, stability, and transcendence.

In practical terms, permanence would mean looking to the architectures of the past, perhaps even those mentioned earlier in this essay, for inspiration. It would mean looking to a people’s stories and myths while using the latest construction materials and techniques, combining ancient and modern methods to produce something new and enduring for the generations to come over the next thousand years. Thus, permanence, in an archeofuturist sense, is not the negation of innovation but its proper direction. The past supplies the archetypes, structures, inspiration, stories, beauty, hierarchy, and sacrality; the present supplies the tools, the latest technologies, new materials, and engineering techniques. Through the fusion of the two, the task of conservatives is not to replicate the structures of the past but, using the memories of yesterday and the tools of today, to build something new that endures for ages and, as a by-product, protects the Broceliande Forest, the forests of Pelion, and every similar natural habitat across Europe for the generations to come. What is needed is something timeless in form, technologically advanced for our time, and spiritually grounded in Europe’s ancestral mythic memory: something truly perennial that can rival the buildings of the past in depth, scope, and awe.

If Europe is to endure, it has to abandon the philosophy and metaphysics of shrinking, minimising, and dissolving itself into abstractions. A civilisation cannot endure, let alone preserve itself and nature, if its highest promise is to leave no trace of itself. Thus ‘sustainability,’ as currently defined and practised, forces Europeans to measure themselves in units of guilt rather than in acts of creation. But no culture in history has survived through the worship and practice of its own disappearance. The answer must therefore be permanence, which, when contrasted with ‘sustainability,’ invites a civilisational reawakening by calling Europeans once again to be builders, founders, and inheritors instead of caretakers of their own slow decline. It asks Europeans to return to the same logic used by their ancestors to build the cathedral, the amphitheatre, the castle, and to preserve the mythic landscapes of their own time.

The mission ahead should not be nostalgia but creation: archeofuturism—fusing ancient identity with today’s latest technology to create the buildings of the future that protect the environment from a conservative perspective. If Europe is to be renewed, it must stop trying to erase its footprint and instead put technology in the service of its heritage, beauty, transcendence, and continuation. Thus, the conservatives of this century should aim to build structures—physical, spiritual, and even political—that deserve to be inherited from generation to generation for hundreds of years. Replacing sustainability with permanence is not a vow to erase oneself and leave no trace, but a declaration that says, ‘We were here a thousand years ago. We loved this place, our home, and we built something worthy of our ancestors and our descendants.’