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| Montréal, 17 février 2001 / No 77 |
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by
Pierre Desrochers
Most self-proclaimed environmentalists indict free-market economies as unsustainable aberrations embedded in wasteful practices that result in major ecological strains. The Worldwatch Institute's 1998 State of the World Report (but it could as well have been the 1990 or 2005 edition) tells us once again that the trend in environmental indicators was downward: |
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Yet, as Stephen Moore and Julian Simon report in It's
Getting Better All the Time, over the last one hundred years data
on such important indices as life expectancy, income, health care, infant
mortality and literacy have all shown positive trends. Most Some environmentalists will acknowledge these trends, but explain them by what they call Yet, if things are getting better, why are we always bombarded with bad news? One answer is that is a good way for environmental activists, bureaucrats and politicians to increase their power base, as is argued by John Baden, Jonathan Adler and their collaborators in Environmental Gore and Ecology, Liberty and Property. In his last book, Hoodwinking the Nation, Julian Simon also notes that journalists know little about statistics and science and thus gather data in ways that lead to inaccurate conclusions. Some of them, however, sometimes allow their once negative pessimistic views on environmental matters to be changed by facts, such as Gregg Easterbrook in his A Moment on the Earth.
Despite these positive trends, nobody will deny that many problems still remain to be solved. For example, hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money are still annually diverted to promote inefficient and unproductive material and energy use in a wide range of economic sectors. But these are not caused by market failures (i.e. the inability of free-markets to address environmental concern), but are rather the result of the absence of market forces. As Terry Anderson, Donald Leal, Richard Stroup, Roger Meiners and their collaborators in Free-Market Environmentalism, Breaking the Environmental Policy Gridlock and Cutting Green Tape illustrate, well-defined private property rights are a much simpler, cheaper and effective way to fight pollution and waste than the complex environmental law statutes that have been implemented in recent decades. If somebody dumps pollution on property, just sue them! Is a common property being overgrazed? Privatize it! Are people wasting too much water because it is subsidized? Cut the subsidies! Is a species going extinct? Make sure that local people, and not government officials, own it. As Ike Sugg and Michael't Sas-Rolfes remind us in the Elephants/Rhinos set, privately-owned cows, sheep, goats and chickens are consumed in huge numbers, yet their populations thrive because self-interest leads owners to maintain their value. This book presents a compelling case that African big game animals and other species can be saved only by harnessing the self-interest of local people, which means letting them own the animals. Then, the authors explain, wilderness will generate enough revenue from tourists and hunters, making land worth more as game habitat than as potential farmland. And, of course, what is true for Africa is just as valid for U.S. national parks. Despite all the good news and the scientific evidence, your kids will likely be subjected to doom and gloom predictions in their assigned textbooks. A good way to introduce them to another perspective is to give them a copy of Facts, Not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment by Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw. As counterintuitive as this may sound after years of misanthropic environmentalist propaganda, the best way to solve our environmental problems is to get rid of government restrictions and subsidies that prevent the efficient use of resources and to tear down the socialist institutions that regulate many economic sectors, from transportation to urban growth (on this topic, see A Guide to Smarth Growth by Jane Shaw and Ronald Utt). In the end, the free-market is the only system that is truly sustainable. *This article was first published on LaissezFaireBooks.com and is reproduced with their permission.
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