Howard Jacobson: Let the planet go to blazes, but not if it means forgoing the first daffodils of the year

It stands to reason that you can't love the earth if the only garden you know is a dump for rusted cars

Oliver Letwin, the Tory politician whose name it is impossible to resist anagrammatising - "evil Nile wort" immediately springs to mind, and very nearly "winter violet", and there are also "tree lovers", "newts", "voles" and "owlets" in there, as well there should be given that he is now shadow Environment Secretary - Oliver Letwin, anyway, made an interesting ecological intervention last week. Politics, he said, should aim for "nothing less than the achievement of beauty, both natural and man-made".

We like Oliver Letwin in this column and always thought him wasted on the trivia of the shadow Treasury. You could always tell there was poetry trying to get out, and now, thanks to whoever's brilliant idea it was to give him the shadow environment (which sounds like a job Peter Pan should have been offered as well), he is nothing if not mellifluous.

"If we talk of sunlight through trees and the first daffodils of spring," he told the Centre for Social Justice, "we talk the stuff of poetry. Our hearts are stirred and our spirits lifted." His point being that in the main our hearts are not stirred and our spirits not lifted either by our environment or the debate about the dangers which it faces.

Amen to that. While discussion of the environment has remained, in Letwin's words, "resolutely mechanical" - confined to recycling, bio-fuels, emissions trading systems, renewables, hybrid vehicles, waste management plans and the like - there is not the impetus that comes with human engagement. We worry when we see photographs of the polar ice caps melting, then we get back to worrying about what's burning on the stove.

My own suspicion is that talk of planetary disaster is counterproductive, because somewhere in our souls we rather fancy the idea. You don't have to belong to a suicidal sect to be drawn to the big bang of extinction. A world ultimately denuded of us is not such a shocking prospect, particularly if the "us" in question have already passed on anyway. There is shapeliness and even justice in it.

Charlton Heston on his knees before what's left of the Statue of Liberty in the final frame of Planet of the Apes, screaming "You finally did it! God damn you all to Hell!", satisfies apocalyptic yearnings. It took the human imagination to invent the concept of apocalypse, so we must assume that it answers to a psychological necessity.

Sunlight through trees, however, we are not yet ready to lose. Let the planet go to blazes, but not if that means forgoing the first daffodils of spring.

Oliver Letwin is right. Between the remote abstraction of the death of nature and the mundanity of separating our bottles from our newspapers for the eco-friendly dustmen lies that vast territory of torpor and expectancy in which we live our lives, not wanting to be bothered, and not wanting not to be bothered. And beauty - because it is what Edmund Burke said it was, "the promise of happiness" - might just be the means by which to reach it.

It is the continuum argument. First of all you get people on. Then, when they see that beauty is instrumental to their felicity, that the vileness of their street or neighbourhood is the reason why they are miserable, they might come at last to extend their understanding of this mutuality to the planet. If nothing lovely grows around you, why should you care when someone tells you that everything lovely is in peril?

Pie in the sky? Well, it was the agenda of radical socialists for a century or more. Cobbett rode on horseback round the country and understood the well-being of those he met as dependent on their industry and harmony.

If people were black-hearted in London - the "Great Wen", as he called it - that was because they had made a black hole of the city. By the time we get to William Morris, love of the English countryside, Utopianism, and firebrand socialism, have grown indistinguishable from one another. Morris believed you changed the world by beautifying it. Politics have never been so sensual. In his communistical fantasy, News From Nowhere, Morris wrote of taking "delight in the life of the world", of an "intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has for the fair flesh of the woman he loves".

It stands to reason that you can't possess an overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth if you never see it, if the only garden you know is appended to a graffiti'd tenement block, overgrown and unweeded, a dumping ground for rusted cars and rotten furniture, a site for shooting up and joyless sex and larceny. And if you loathe the skin and surface of your own corner of the world, why should you give a monkeys what happens to the rest of it?

Pie in the sky, in that Morris never got to see his dream world where every worker is a craftsman making things of beauty modelled from the earth, and Parliament, unnecessary any longer, serves as a store house for manure. Nor did he get to behold the "six counties overhung with smoke" transformed into a London "small, white and clean". But that we are cleaner than we might have been, that the first industrial slums were cleared - even if they were too often replaced by something worse - and that the tubercular poor are not all choking in Hell's Alley in piles as high as Babel, is down in no little measure to those radical socialisers who weren't embarrassed to invoke beauty.

Modern socialism has cut its own throat. You can't even call a slum a slum today for fear of thereby giving offence to those who dwell in it.

The Tories say they want a new agenda. Well here's a suggestion. If New Labour has no time for romantic socialism, you take it. Talking beauty is a good start.

Howard Jacobson's latest novel, 'The Making of Henry', is published in paperback by Vintage