The Coleridge Lectures 2015: Roger Scruton

The Coleridge Lectures 2015: Roger Scruton
The Only True Conservationist is a Conservative
Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building, University of Bristol
Thu 5 March 2015, 18.00-19.30

Free, but booking required. Booking January 2015

The Left makes the running on environmental issues – seeing the threats to the earth being international capitalism, consumerism and the over-exploitation of natural resources. The truth is the only true conservationist and environmentalist is a Conservative. The environment is the most urgent political problem of our age; the problem is that most environmental problems are generated and resolved by ordinary people often ignored by the environmental movement. Conservatism is far better suited to tackle environmental problems than either liberalism or socialism; rather than entrusting the environment to unwieldy NGOs and international committees, Scruton argues that we must all assume personal responsibility and foster local sovereignty. People must be empowered to take charge of their environment, to care for it as a home, and to affirm themselves through the kind of local associations that have been the traditional goal of conservative politics. This is the right path to take to ensure the future safety of our planet and our species.

Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher. He has specialised in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well known as a powerful polemicist. He has written widely in the press on political and cultural issues. Among many other books he is the author of Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet.

This lecture is part of a new annual series inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s radical lectures in Bristol in 1795. The 2015 series is run in association with the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol and Bristol 2015. It is part of The Romantic Poets and Bristol programme, which celebrates the life of Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, William Wordsworth, Coleridge and others in the city, and Bristol as the place where Romanticism was born with the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads. The programme focuses especially on nature and the emotions, place and the environment, and also looks at Bristol as a city for science, philosophy, ideas and political debate at the time of Coleridge and today. The 2015 theme is Radical Green. Future themes are: Utopias (2016); Revolution (2017) and Peace (2018).

Please be ready to take your place by 17.50.

We have restricted the number of tickets that can be booked to one per transaction. This has been introduced in an effort to stop people automatically booking multiple tickets without confirming if they have guests to go with them. We hope this will help to limit the number of 'no shows' at the events, which currently run at around 35% of bookings. We will monitor the situation. If you need more than one ticket, you can click on the booking link again. The little extra effort involved will hopefully put off those who don’t really need more than one, but not those who do.

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