Conservatism Means Conservation

This is an interesting article.  There are certain things I don't get about conservatives.  One of them is that they often have a knee jerk response to environmentalism.  I have often thought:  guys, it is right in the word 'conservation' (just like the title of the article).  The best instincts of conservatism (there are not so good instincts too) is to want to preserve what is good, true and beautiful from the past and not be iconoclasts that try to 'liberate' us from every thing that went before us.  So why isn't there a stronger conservation movement among conservatives?  I blame the stupid Republican party and hate-mongering talk radio.  I mean there is a whole subsection of conservatives who revere the pioneers and country life and decentralized power.  These are the ones who love Wendell Berry and call themselves crunchy cons.  And yet they never seem to be represented in any truly cohesive way.  You just find little strands here and there at Front Porch Republic and the like.

(Btw, something that really shifted my views on this was the book Climate of Crisis.)

I can't say I agree with everything Roger Scruton says in his article and I need to reread it to get things fully, but I found the part about how the suburbs developed really interesting.  And I have come to dislike zoning ever since I realized that the rise in homelessness was, in part, due to boarding houses being zoned out of existence.  I used to always wonder: whatever happened to boarding houses?  So many novels or movies have boarding houses in them, yet they don't seem to exist anymore.  Well there's a reason for that!  Now people who don't have enough money to rent an apartment, can't just rent a little room somewhere anymore.  I looked up my county's rules one time and all the regs have made it very difficult for poor people.  Both the people who would like a little bit of income from renting out a room to those people who can't afford to live anywhere else.