Roger Scruton is a political philosopher who continues a tradition of common law conservatism going back to Edmund Burke. His A Political Philosophy is a short sketch of that philosophy on various issues of the day - with the bioethical and social thought foregrounded and economic consequences a side effect. It is a book for mainline conservatives, old countryside Tories, a book where settled law and cultural convention carries weight.

It is also an environmentalist book. Scruton has recast the old arguments for conservatism in the language of twenty first century biology. Conservatism, here, is the process of preserving and enriching the social ecology; of defending it from entropy and death; from generation to generation.

With ecology at the heart of his political philosophy, it is now easier for him to break with political capitalism.

[C]onservatism is an exercise in social ecology. Individual freedom is a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms can not adapt. But freedom is not the sole or even the central goal of politics, even if it is the attribute that, at a deep level, makes politics both necessary and possible. Convervatism and conservation are in fact two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free, but law-governed, economy. The purpose of politics, on this view, is not to rearrange society in the interests of some overarching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that erode our social and ecological inheritance. The goal is to pass on to future generations - and if possible to enhance - the order and equilibrium of which we are the temporary trustees.

There's plenty of room to disagree with Scruton on policy, but that small-c conservative regard for due process and preservation is something that underlies civilised society, and cuts across political lines. Indeed films - favourites of the left - like Twelve Angry Men or Good Night And Good Luck are basically odes to cautious preservation of the social ecology from those that would rashly attack it.

And this civilised multi-party consensus is environmentalism needs if we are to solve the problems of this century, global warming most of all. Nowadays, we are having the right environmental arguments in the public space; arguing about how best to solve the problems we have, like water, rather than denying they exist. But my sense is, regrettably, the hard heads on the right who should well know the foolishness of running up a big fiscal debt do not yet take seriously the foolishness of running up a big environmental debt.

Common law conservatism rarely appeals to philosophers, and pundits. It is inelegant. You can't understand it all. But I think it is something most Australian and British voters understand quite instinctively, when voting for John Howard or for Kevin Rudd.

This is why Scruton's approach is valuable. It links environmental duty to the civic routines of real people in working democracies.