The problems of the environment seem so far beyond our reach that we lurch from opinion to opinion and policy to policy with nothing to cling to save the thread of our shared concern. We believe the scaremongers, since nobody can be as gloomy as that without a reason. We believe the sceptics, since they offer hope, and remind us that the scaremongers have made an emotional investment in their gloom. And we watch as governments both exploit our anxieties and offer to assuage them. More windmills, more recycling, more carbon trading, more global treaties: huge solutions for huge problems, and all of them involving a vast increase in government power and a rough way with dissenters.

We are not reassured by this. History tells us that large-scale projects in the hands of bureaucrats soon cease to be accountable. And the same people who promise vast schemes for clean energy and reduced pollution promise vast schemes to expand airports, build roads and subsidise the motor industry. The fact is, when problems pass to governments, they pass out of our grasp. Our understanding was shaped by local needs, not global uncertainties: it is the product of day-to-day emergencies and conflicts, and its wisdom is the wisdom of survival. But there is a lesson in this for the environmentalists. No large-scale project will succeed if it is not rooted in our small-scale emotions. For it is we in the end who have to act, who have to accept and co-operate with decisions made in our name, and who have to make whatever sacrifices will be required for the sake of future generations.

The truth of this has been brought home to me by living half the year in rural Virginia. When I walk along the road past our house in England, my heart sinks at the sight of the litter-strewn verges, the ditches clogged with plastic bottles, the carrier bags flapping in the hedgerows. I wonder what has happened to my country that people no longer care for it. In the England in which I grew up, someone who dropped a sweet bag or a newspaper would be condemned as a “litterbug”, and every now and then, to renew our concern for the world we shared, we’d get together as neighbours to clear up any mess that fluttered across our lanes.

No longer, alas. Litter is now the concern of the council, and councils have bigger problems than litter: there is that big hole in their pension funds, for a start. Worse, public spirit has been confiscated by government, national and local, and those volunteer groups have disappeared. An environmental problem that once was solved by the small-scale wisdom of the human heart now stands unsolved, and will soon be insoluble.

When I take a walk along Hawlin Road in Rappahannock County, Virginia, I also find rubbish. But it is sparse and accidental, and a notice informs me that the road has been “adopted by the children of Hawlin”, who clean it twice a year. Every lane and highway in Rappahannock has been similarly adopted by volunteers. In a county with only a tiny local government, the environment is the concern of the citizens themselves. They don’t manage it perfectly; but they manage it very much better than our local council in Wiltshire. Rubbish is not collected, but must be taken to the recycling centre and sorted, with functioning items set aside for anyone who might have a use for them. The clothes that you see me wearing on this page are the anonymous gift of my Virginian neighbours. If I look so comfortable in them, it’s because they didn’t cost me a cent.

Those examples suggest certain principles. The first is that there is, in all of us, a desire that those responsible for pollution should bear the cost of it. The single most important cause of environmental degradation is that people can externalise the costs of what they do, in the manner of the person who throws his cola bottle from the window of his car. This principle is ignored by our governments. Those businesses that thrive by passing on their costs to the environment — the motor industry, the aircraft industry, the supermarkets, to name but three — are the ones that receive the most from government in hidden subsidies and the last ones to be called to account.

The second principle is that, left to themselves, people will try to rectify the damage, provided they believe that it’s not “they” who are responsible, but “we”. This is the lesson of America. The solution to the environmental problems will always elude us if we cast away the one human motive that has ever done any good, which is that of public spirit. But whence comes public spirit? It comes from patriotism, from love of country, from a sense of belonging and of a shared and inherited home. Think how many political orthodoxies have been flouted in that one sentence!

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