Daily Inspiration Quote by Christopher Lasch

Environmentalism, for Lasch, isn’t a mood or a taste; it’s a brake pedal. The line is built around a deliberately provocative framing: “innovation” is not inherently heroic, and the kind he’s targeting is “reckless” by default in a culture that treats disruption as a moral good. By casting environmentalism as opposition, he rejects the feel-good story where green politics simply modernizes capitalism with better gadgets. The point is antagonistic: if the dominant order worships growth, then any serious environmental ethic has to be an insurgency against that religion.

The subtext is classic Lasch: suspicion of elite optimism, technocratic promises, and the notion that human problems can be engineered away without changing desires, habits, or power. “Makes conservation the central order of business” borrows the language of institutions and management; he’s signaling that environmentalism is a challenge to what businesses, governments, and even households think their job is. Not maximizing output. Not accelerating novelty. Guarding limits.

Context matters. Writing in the late 20th century, Lasch watched postwar affluence harden into consumerist identity, while policy elites pitched technological progress as destiny. Environmentalism emerges here as a counter-tradition that re-centers dependency: on land, on ecosystems, on the future. It’s a moral argument disguised as an administrative one.

The phrasing also carries a warning to environmentalists themselves. If the movement settles for “responsible innovation,” it risks becoming a consultant to the very system it should restrain. Lasch is arguing for conservation not as nostalgia, but as an organizing principle with teeth.