Environmentalism is a school of thought that displays great
concern regarding issues related to pollution, conservation, and climate change. Most of its
adherents mix these concerns with primitivist or socialist ideologies,
ideologies which I bitterly oppose for many good reasons. This does not mean,
however, that environmentalist concerns themselves are irrelevant or unsound,
it only means that environmentalism must be refined in a way that is consonant
with sound economic principles and a respect for individual liberty.
First,
though, we should attempt to isolate the ‘bad’ variants of environmentalism.
Primitivist environmentalism asserts that raw nature is necessarily better than
nature reshaped by humans for human purposes. For example, no matter how many
additional houses or medicinal products could be made through commercial
exploitation of a rainforest, the primitivist environmentalist will oppose it
because these actions will allegedly result in the ‘destruction’ of the said
rainforest. Primitivist environmentalists tend to admire the cultures that are
alleged to be more in tune with nature, such as aboriginal cultures of North
America. The problem with this ideology is that it is usually hypocritical and
always anti-human. Most of the people who claim to espouse this ideology do not
think it necessary for them to cease consuming products and using technologies
that were only made possible through the heavy transformation/exploitation of
nature that makes an industrial civilization possible. They admire pre-contact
aboriginal cultures but do not voluntarily reduce themselves to the standard of
living that was prevalent in these ‘nature-loving’ cultures. Such people
demonstrate that they want the benefits of industrialism, but at the same time
fanatically condemn the allegedly ‘anti-nature’ actions that industrialism
involves. This is the hypocritical aspect of this ideology. The anti-human
aspect is that strict adherents tend to put the interests of animals, plants,
and ‘ecosystems’, above the interests of humans.
Another
‘bad’ variant of environmentalism is the kind of environmentalism that is really
just an excuse for calling for more government control of business, in other
words, socialism. The impoverishment and collapse of communist regimes all
around the world as much as possible settled empirically what had long since
been settled theoretically in the minds of sound economists; that socialism
would result in economic impoverishment on a large scale. The
socialist-environmentalist does not argue that socialism will be more
productive than capitalism as the older socialists did, he instead changes the
indictment of capitalism, accusing it of producing too much, something that
will eventually result in a catastrophic degradation of the environment and the
collapse of civilization. Heavy government interventions into the free-market
order are allegedly necessary in order to strike a proper balance between
‘development’ and ‘conservation’, something that only an activist government is
alleged to be able to accomplish. The problem with this argument, as with all
other socialist arguments, is that it underestimates the ability of private
property, free-markets, and free prices to solve these problems and
overestimates the ability of government to do so. Just as free-market
mechanisms assure, to the greatest extent possible, that Frisbees are not overproduced
at the expense of Yo-Yos, so, given a conducive property rights and
institutional framework, could it assure that pollution and depletion of natural resources as a result of
production processes are not overproduced at the expense of environmental goods,
and vice versa. At the same time, just as the Soviet economic bureaucrats
failed to prevent serious overproduction of certain goods at the expense of
serious underproduction of other goods (evidenced by episodes such as the
distribution stores being filled with too many socks but not nearly enough
toilet paper and many others), so governments in general have no rational
standard to balance ‘development’ giving off pollution and depleting resources and environmental
‘conservation’ and would make similar mistakes in this field.
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