Environmentalism and Economic Freedom

This paper shall attempt to reconcile environmentalism and economic freedom. Before making this seemingly quixotic endeavor, we must be sure we are clear on both concepts. Environmentalism may be non controversially defined as a philosophy which sees great benefit in clean air and water, and to a lowered rate of species extinction. Environmentalists are particularly concerned with the survival and enhancement of endangered species such as trees, elephants, rhinos and whales, and with noise and dust pollution, oil spills, greenhouse effects and the dissipation of the ozone layer. Note, this version of environmentalism is a very moderate one. Moreover, it is purely goal directed. It implies no means to these ends whatsoever. In this perspective, environmentalism is, in principle, as much compatible with free enterprise as it is with its polar opposite, centralized governmental command and control. Economic freedom also admits of a straightforward definition. It is the idea that people legitimately own themselves and the property they “capture” from nature by homesteading, as well as the additional property they attain, further, by trading either their labor or their legitimately owned possessions. Sometimes called libertarianism, in this view the only improper human activity is the initiation of threat or force against another or his property. This, too, is the only legitimate reason for law. To prevent murder, theft, rape, trespass, fraud, arson, etc., and all other such invasions is the only proper function of legal enactments. At first glance the relationship between environmentalism and freedom would appear direct and straightforward: an increase in the one leads to a decrease in the other, and vice versa. And, indeed, there is strong evidence for an inverse relationship between the two. For example, there is the Marxist and even communist background of some advocates of environmental concerns. People like these come to the ecological movement with an axe to grind. Their real interest is with power: running the lives of others, whether for their own good, for the good of society, or for the good of the unstoppable “forces of history.” They were doing pretty well on this score for decades in Russia and Eastern Europe. Thanks to them, this vast part of the globe was marching in lock step toward the Marxist vision of all power to the “proletarians.” But then, in 1989, thanks to the inner contradictions of communism (Mises, 1969), their world turned topsy turvy. Some shifted their allegiances to the only fully communist systems remaining: Cuba, North Korea. As for the others, nothing daunted, they just switched horses on the same old wagon: instead of formal socialism, these people adopted environmentalism as a better means toward their unchanged ends. They can best be characterized as “watermelons,” in that while they are green on the outside they are still red on the inside. Then, there are the real greens. They see environmentalism not as a means toward an end, but as the very goal itself. The most radical of them are very forthright. They see man as the enemy of nature, and would, if they could, destroy the former to save the latter. States Graber (1989, p. 9), who is a U.S. National Park Service research biologist: “Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to Environmentalism and Economic Freedom: The Case for Private Property Rights Walter Block