Chapter 3. Natural Resources and the Environment

CHAPTER 3

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT

PART A

NATURAL RESOURCES

1. The Limitless Potential of Natural Resources The potential for economic progress is in no way limited by any fundamental lack of natural resources. Despite the claims so often made that we are in danger of running out of natural resources, the fact is that the world is made out of natural resources—out of solidly packed natural resources, extending from the upper limits of its atmosphere to its very center, four thousand miles down. This is so because the entire mass of the earth is made of nothing but chemical elements, all of which are natural resources. For example, the earth’s core is composed mainly of iron and nickel—millions of cubic miles of iron and nickel. Its oceans and atmosphere are composed of millions of cubic miles of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, and of lesser, but still enormous, quantities of practically every other element. Even the sands of the Sahara desert are composed of nothing but various compounds of silicon, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, aluminum, iron, and so on, all of them having who knows what potential uses that science may someday unlock. Nor is there a single element that does not exist in the earth in millions of times larger quantities than has ever been mined. Aluminum is found in some quantity practically everywhere. There are immense quantities even of the very rarest elements, such as gold and platinum, to be found floating in trace amounts throughout the oceans, for example.

What is true of the earth is equally true of every other planetary body in the universe. Insofar as the universe consists of matter, it consists of nothing but chemical elements, and thus of nothing but natural resources. world. Nor More is there energy any fundamental is discharged scarcity in a single of energy hurricane in the than mankind produces in an entire year. Nor is the supply of energy in the world reduced in any way by virtue of the energy man captures from nature. Heat from the sun provides a constantly renewed supply that is many millions of times greater than the energy consumed by man. The total quantity of energy in the world remains a constant, for all practical purposes incalculably in excess of what mankind consumes, and will remain so until the sun begins to cool.

The problem of natural resources is in no sense one of intrinsic scarcity. From a strictly physical-chemical point of view, natural resources are one and the same with the supply of matter and energy that exists in the world and, indeed, in the universe. Technically, this supply may be described as finite, but for all practical purposes it is infinite. It does not constitute the slightest obstacle to economic activity—there is nothing we are prevented from doing because the earth (let alone the universe) is in danger of running out of some chemical element or other, or of energy.

The problem of natural resources is strictly one of useability, accessibility, and economy. That is, man needs to know what the different elements and combinations of

elements nature provides are good for, and then to be able actually to get at them and direct them to the satisfaction of his needs without having to expend an inordinate amount of labor to do so. Clearly, the only effective limit on the supply of such economically useable natural resources—that is, natural resources in the sense in which they constitute wealth—is the state of scientific and technological knowledge and the quantity and quality of capital equipment available.

Because the supply of resources provided by nature is one and the same with the supply of matter and energy, the supply of economically useable natural resources is capable of virtually limitless increase. It increases as man expands his knowledge of and physical power over the world and universe.

For example, petroleum, which had been present in the ground for millions of years, did not become an economically useable natural resource until the second half of the nineteenth century, when uses for it were discovered. Aluminum, radium, and uranium also became economically useable natural resources only within the last century or so. The economic useability of coal and, more recently, silicon, has been enormously increased by the discovery of new and additional uses for them.

The supply of economically useable natural resources is increased not only by the discovery of uses for things previously thought to have no uses, or new and additional uses for things already known to have uses, but also by advances that enable man to improve his access to things— for example, to mine at greater depths with less effort, to move greater masses of earth with less effort, to break down compounds previously beyond his power, or to do so with less effort, to gain access to regions of the earth previously inaccessible or to improve his access to regions already accessible. All of these increase the supply of economically useable natural resources. All of them, of course, at the same time bestow the character of goods and wealth on what had before been mere things. 1

Today, as the result of such advances, the supply of economically useable natural resources is enormously greater than it was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or even just one or two generations ago. Today, man can more easily mine at a depth of a thousand feet than he could in the past at a depth of ten feet, thanks to such advances as mechanical-powered drilling equipment, high explosives, steel structural supports for mine shafts, and modern pumps and engines. Today, a single worker operating a bulldozer or steam shovel can move far more earth than hundreds of workers in the past using hand shovels. Advances in reduction methods have made it possible to obtain pure ores from compounds previously either altogether impossible to work with or at least too costly to work with. Improvements in shipping, railroad building, and highway construction have made possible lowcost access to high-grade mineral deposits in regions previously inaccessible or too costly to exploit.

In the light of such facts, one should consider how foolish it is to complain, for example, that today copper ores are being mined which contain only 1 percent pure copper, whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century the ores mined often contained 10 percent pure copper. With a worker in the cab of a steam shovel able to move hundreds or thousands of times more earth in the same time as a worker with a hand shovel, the volume of pure copper moved in the same time is now enormously greater, even with ores only one-tenth as pure. The resort to such ores is evidence not that we are running out of supplies, but that we have been able to create vastly greater sources of supply than ever before. The very fact that we exploit such deposits is evidence of the advances that have been made. For we would not exploit them in the absence of vast improvements in the productivity of labor.

Similarly, the development of chemical fertilizers and lowcost methods of irrigation have enabled man not only radically to improve the productivity of arable land, but actually to make more arable land. Today, land previously desert or semidesert has been made vastly more productive than the very best lands available to previous generations. Israel and California provide leading examples.

There is no limit to the further advances that are possible. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, may turn out to be an economical source of fuel in the future. Atomic and hydrogen explosives, lasers, satellite detection systems, and, indeed, even space travel itself, open up limitless new possibilities for increasing the supply of economically useable mineral supplies. Advances in mining technology that would make it possible to mine economically at a depth of, say, ten thousand feet, instead of the present much more limited depths, or to mine beneath the oceans, would so increase the portion of the earth’s mass accessible to man that all previous supplies of accessible minerals would appear insignificant in comparison. And even at ten thousand feet, man would still, quite literally, just be scratching the surface, because the radius of the earth extends to a depth of four thousand miles.

As just indicated, equally dramatic advances are possible in the field of energy. These may occur through the use of atomic energy, hydrogen fusion, solar power, tidal power, or thermal power from the earth’s core, or still other processes as yet unknown. Reductions in the cost of extracting petroleum from shale and tar sands have the

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 65 potential for expanding the supply of economically useable petroleum by a vast multiple of what it is today. The physical volume of petroleum present in such formations in our own Rocky Mountain states and in Canada far exceeds the liquid petroleum deposits of the Arab countries. All that is required is ways to reduce the costs of extraction. 2 Similarly, there are also vast known coal fields in the United States containing enough coal to supply present rates of coal consumption for many centuries, and already capable of doing so economically. Since most petroleum products can be made from coal, reductions in the cost of using coal for this purpose would represent the equivalent of a further enormous increase in the supply of economically useable petroleum deposits.

Because the earth is literally nothing but an immense solid ball of chemical elements and because man’s intelligence and initiative in the last two centuries were relatively free to operate and had the incentive to operate, it should not be surprising that the supply of useable, accessible minerals today vastly exceeds the supply that man is economically capable of exploiting. In virtually every case, there are vast known deposits of minerals which are not worked, because it is not necessary to work them. Indeed, if they were worked, there would be a relative overproduction of minerals and a relative underproduction of other goods—that is, a waste of capital and labor. In virtually every case, it is necessary to choose which deposits to exploit—namely, those which, by virtue of their location, the amount of digging required, the degree of concentration and purity of the ore, and so forth, can be exploited at the lowest costs. Today, enormous mineral deposits lie untouched which could be exploited with far less labor per unit of output than was true of the very best deposits exploited as recently as a few decades ago—thanks to advances in the state of mining technology and in the quantity and quality of mining equipment available.

So long as men preserve a division-of-labor, capitalist society and are free and motivated to think and to build for the future, the body of scientific and technological knowledge at the disposal of mankind will grow from generation to generation, as will the supply of capital equipment. 3 On this basis, man can steadily expand his physical power over the world and thus enjoy an ever greater supply of economically useable natural resources. There is no reason why, under the continued existence of a free and rational society, the supply of such natural resources should not go on growing as rapidly as in the past or even more rapidly.

The ultimate key to the economic availability of natural resources is motivated human intelligence, which means: a capitalist society. In such a society, large numbers of the most intelligent people devote their lives to science, technology, and business. All are highly motivated to increase the supply of economically useable natural resources by the prospect of earning a personal fortune for every significant success they achieve in this regard. No greater guarantee of mankind’s ability to enjoy a growing supply of natural resources could be found.

The essential principles pertaining to natural resources can be summarized as follows. What nature provides is a supply of matter and energy that for all practical purposes is infinite. Yet at the same time, nature does not provide a single particle of natural resources in the form of wealth. The bestowal of the character of economic goods and wealth on what nature provides is the work of human intelligence. An essential economic task of man is progressively to apply his intelligence to achieve a growing understanding of nature and to build progressively more powerful forms of capital equipment that give him growing physical mastery over nature.

In this process, advances both in knowledge and in capital equipment themselves set the stage for further advances in knowledge and in capital equipment, thereby operating to give man both ever greater understanding and ever greater physical power over nature—provided, of course, that he continues to be rational, that is, continues to think and to act long range. For example, learning arithmetic sets the stage for learning algebra, which in turn sets the stage for learning calculus, and so on. Being able to build the first primitive railroads and steel mills provides the physical capacity for being able to build more and better railroads and steel mills later on. Developing a metallurgical industry sets the stage for developing an electrical industry and appliance industry, which sets the stage for developing an electronics and computer industry, which in turn sets the stage for developing a capacity to launch spaceships, and so on. The combination of increasing knowledge and increasing physical capacities brings a growing fraction of the physical mass of the earth and, indeed, the universe more and more within man’s power to serve his ends and thus continually enlarges the fraction of nature that represents economically useable natural resources and thus wealth.

Thus the portion of nature that represents wealth should be understood as a tiny fraction that began as virtually zero and even though it has since been multiplied by several hundredfold, is still virtually zero when one considers how small is the portion of the mass of the earth, let alone of the universe, that is subject to man’s control, and how far man is from understanding all aspects and potential uses of what has become subject to his control. To borrow and expand upon Ayn Rand’s statement that the good is an aspect of reality in relation

to man: For all practical purposes, nature in its infinity will forever remain something far more of whose good in relation to man remains to be discovered and achieved than ever has been discovered and achieved, with the essential requirements of the ongoing process being reason and capitalism. 4 Reason and capitalism achieve a progressive enlargement of the goods-and wealth-character of nature and thus a continually increasing supply of economically useable natural resources. Not only can no greater guarantee of mankind’s ability to enjoy a growing supply of natural resources be found, but the underlying metaphysics of a virtually infinite nature that is confronted by motivated human intelligence, which steadily expands both man’s knowledge and his physical capacities, ensures that no greater guarantee of mankind’s success is necessary.

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The growing threat to the supply of natural resources that people are beginning to complain of is not the result of anything physical—no more than it was when these terrible words of despair were written:

You must know that the world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigour. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the sun’s warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields, the sailor on the seas, the soldier in the camp, honesty in the market, justice in the courts, concord in friendships, skill in the arts, discipline in morals. This is the sentence passed upon the world, that everything which has a beginning should perish, that things which have reached maturity should grow old, the strong weak, the great small, and that after weakness and shrinkage should come dissolution. 5

That passage is not a quotation from some contemporary ecologist or conservationist. It was written in the third century—long before the first chunk of coal, drop of oil, ounce of aluminum, or any significant quantity of any mineral whatever had been taken from the earth. Then as now, the problem was not physical, but philosophical and political. Then as now, men were turning away from reason and toward mysticism. Then as now, they were growing less free and falling ever more under the rule of physical force. That is why they believed, and that is why people in our culture are beginning to believe, that man is helpless before physical nature. There is no helplessness in fact. To men who use reason and are free to act, nature gives more and more. To those who turn away from reason or are not free, it gives less and less. Nothing else is involved.

The Energy Crisis

There has been much talk about an energy shortage. There is obviously no shortage of energy in nature and no inherent reason why mankind should not be able to continue the progress of the last two centuries and gain economical access to more and more of nature’s virtually infinite supply of energy.

Even if liquid petroleum deposits were to run out in the next fifty years or so, there is no reason why, before they did, men should not be able to produce petroleum products from shale, tar sands, or coal with less labor than they presently produce them from liquid petroleum— just as they presently produce iron and copper from relatively low-grade ores with far less labor than they used to produce them from higher-grade ores. Indeed, petroleum products today can already be produced from these sources with far less labor than they could be produced from liquid petroleum deposits in the past. The power of man’s mind, operating in the context of a division-of-labor, capitalist society is clearly such as to leave no doubt that comparable beneficial results could be accomplished with respect to petroleum products in the years ahead.

The energy crisis of the 1970s was purely political. In essence, it was the result of making it largely illegal to produce energy. In almost every foreign country, the ownership of oil and natural gas deposits, and thus the production of oil and natural gas, has been made a monopoly of the government. It is simply illegal for private citizens to produce these goods and thus their production has been restricted by all the inefficiencies of government ownership. 6 In the United States, the federal government claims ownership of the continental shelf and the majority of the land area of the Western states. On the basis of these claims, and under the guise of “concern for the environment,” it has closed off many of the most promising areas for oil and gas discoveries. It has set them aside as “wildlife preserves” and “wilderness areas,” and thus prohibited their development. In these ways and others, to be explained later in this book, the government made it illegal to produce energy. This is the only reason that there was an energy crisis. 7 The substantial reduction in government interference that took place in the early 1980s, above all, the repeal of price controls on oil, made the energy crisis disappear. The achievement of a fully free market in energy would ensure a resumption of the growing abundance and declining real cost of energy that characterized the Western world in the two hundred years prior to the 1970s.

Regrettably, however, the government’s policy of restricting the supply of energy continues. It continues to withdraw ever more territory from exploration and development: virtually the entire continental shelf of the United States is now closed to new oil drilling and further development of Alaskan fields is in doubt. The government even prohibits the use of already existing facilities for producing energy, the two best-known cases being

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 67 the Shoreham atomic power plant on Long Island, in New York State, and the Gaviota Oil and Gas Plant near Santa Barbara, California. The Shoreham plant, completed in 1984 at a cost of $5.5 billion, had the capacity to supply one-third of the power needs of the 900,000-plus homes on Long Island. Nevertheless, it was never allowed to operate beyond the test level, and as of October 1994, its nuclear reactor was actually dismantled. 8 The Gaviota plant, completed in 1987 at a cost of $2.5 billion, has the capacity to refine 100,000 barrels of oil per day. But it too has never been allowed to operate, because of environmentalist policies on the part of the State of California and the County of Santa Barbara. 9

2. The Law of Diminishing Returns

The production of any product requires the use of at least two factors of production, for example, labor and land, or labor, a land site, a factory building, and machinery and material. 10 The combinations of factors of production, of course, can be far more complex, entailing such things as a variety of machines, materials, means of transportation, and fuels both to power the means of transportation and to provide power and light to the factories involved.

Now if all of the factors necessary to the production of a product are increased in the same proportion, such as all of them being doubled, then it is to be expected that the quantity of product produced will also be increased in that proportion, that is, in the present instance, doubled. Usually, however, it is also possible to increase the production of a product by means of increasing the quantity just of some of the necessary factors of production. For example, the quantity of output produced on a farm might be increased by increasing only the quantity of labor, or labor and equipment together, without increasing the quantity of land employed. In manufacturing, it is almost always possible to increase production within existing factories, simply by increasing the quantity of labor, materials, and fuel employed, and thus without increasing either the number or size of the factory buildings or even the quantity of machinery employed.

All such cases constitute the domain of the law of diminishing returns, or, as it sometimes called, the law of nonproportional returns. The law of diminishing returns states that under a given state of technological knowledge, the use of successively larger quantities of any factor of production or combination of factors of production in conjunction with a fixed quantity of any other necessary factor or factors of production eventually results in less than proportionate increases in output. For example, a repeated doubling of the labor and capital applied to a given piece of land must soon result in less than double the output being obtained from that piece of land.

If such were not the case, then the entire world’s supply of food could be grown on this one piece of ground. Similarly, the entire world’s supply of any given good could be produced within a single factory building. The fact that sooner or later more land and more factory buildings, more of all the necessary factors of production, are required for the production of more of anything, is evidence of the existence of diminishing returns. The point is reached where the application merely of more of the factors of production initially allowed to increase— the socalled variable factors of production—results in an amount of additional output that is less than proportional to the additional quantity of the variable factors of production, and, ultimately, in no additional output whatever. Sooner or later, to increase output in the same proportion as the increase in the variable factors of production, or, indeed, to increase it at all, it becomes necessary to increase the quantity of the factors of production that were initially held fixed (the socalled fixed factors of production).

This necessity results from the existence of what von Mises has called ”quantitative definiteness.” Everything physical has only a definite, delimited capacity to produce effects. That capacity may be exhausted at one fell swoop, or it may be approached more or less gradually. For example, the capacity of a given quantity of flour of a definite quality to produce bread is thoroughly exhausted in the production of a definite quantity of bread of a definite type. It is not possible to produce more such bread without the availability of more such flour. The application of additional labor alone in this case would not result in any additional product.

In other cases, such as loading a flatbed truck higher and higher, it is possible to increase the quantity of labor expended disproportionally and succeed in producing more of the product, in this case more cargo loaded onto a given truck. But again, sooner or later, the carrying of more cargo requires another truck, and before another truck becomes absolutely essential, the carrying of more cargo relative to the employment of a given amount of labor requires another truck. This last reflects the fact that disproportionate increases in the quantity of labor are required to accomplish additional increases in the amount of cargo loaded onto a given truck. In both cases, that of the flour and that of the truck, the capacity of the fixed factor of production to render service is limited and sooner or later more of the fixed factor is required for the production of more of the product and/or to maintain the productivity of the variable factor(s) of production. 11

Table 3-1 provides a quantitative illustration of the

Table 3–1

Diminishing Returns

Quantity of Labor

Employed on a Farm of 100 Output (in bushels)

Acres (in man-years)

1 100

2 190

3 270

4 340 operation of diminishing returns in the context of the application of varying amounts of labor to a farm of a given number of acres. It makes clear how more of the fixed factor of production is required to maintain the productivity of the variable factor(s) of production long before it is absolutely required for the production of any more of the product whatever. Thus, in Table 3-1, while more output can be produced simply by employing more labor, the use of more land is necessary to stop the productivity of labor from falling. For example, the table shows 85 units as the average output per worker resulting from the employment of 4 man-years of labor on a farm of 100 acres. At the same time, the table implies that with four such 100-acre farms, the average output per worker would be 100 units rather than only 85 units.

The only context in which the law of diminishing returns does not apply is that of technological formulas or recipes, that is, ideas. The same identical idea can be applied over and over, ad infinitum, with absolutely no loss in its ability to render service and thus no decline in the productivity of the other factors of production. 12

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Closely related to the law of diminishing returns is a parallel phenomenon which was identified by the great classical economist David Ricardo, and which operates on the basis of the pursuit of rational self-interest. This is the fact that as far as people have knowledge and the power of choice, they will choose to exploit land and mineral deposits where the productivity of their labor is greatest. As Ricardo put it, they will begin by cultivating land of the first quality and by exploiting mineral deposits of the first quality. Only when population reaches the point where all the land and mineral deposits of the first quality have been brought into production, will they resort to land and mineral deposits of the second quality, which now represents the most productive land and

Average Output

Increase in Output per Worker

100 100

90 95

80 90

70 85 mineral deposits available to them. In comparison with land of the first quality, land of the second quality will tend to be farther away from the market it serves, to be higher up on the hillsides, and to have rockier soil; mines of the second quality will also tend to lie farther away from the market they serve, and to have less pure ores and require deeper digging.

Further increases in population and the bringing into production of more and more of the land and mineral deposits of the second quality ultimately results in the need to exploit land and mineral deposits of the third quality, which at that point are rendered the most productive still available, and, after that, land and mineral deposits of the fourth, and still lower qualities. Thus, a man-year of labor performed on land of the first quality may result in an output of 100 units, while an identical man-year of labor performed on land of the second quality results in an output of 90 units, and on land of the third quality, 80 units, and, finally, on land of the fourth quality, only 70 units. 13

The necessity of progressively resorting to land of inferior degrees of productivity operates in just the same way as the diminution of returns accompanying the employment of more and more labor on any given piece of land. Indeed, the two processes go on side by side. In the examples presented here, when it became necessary to cultivate land of the second quality, land of the first quality would be cultivated more intensively, and the additional output gained by the employment of the second man-year on land of the first quality would equal the output produced by the first man-year on land of the second quality, namely, 90. Similarly, when it became necessary to cultivate land of the third quality, land of the second quality would be cultivated more intensively, and the cultivation of land of the first quality would be further intensified. In our examples, the output of the first man-year

on land of the third quality is equal to that of the second man-year on land of the second quality and to that of the third man-year on land of the first quality, that is, 80.

The Law of Diminishing Returns and the Limitless

Potential of Natural Resources

The law of diminishing returns in no way contradicts the previously established proposition that there is no practical limit to the potential supply of economically useable natural resources. This is because the law of diminishing returns in application to agriculture and mining applies only at any given time, in the context of a given state of technology and capital equipment. Over time, economic progress can occur. Indeed, in a division-of-labor, capitalist society, with its rationality and its incentives both monetary and cultural for the continuous application of reason to the problems of human life, economic progress is the norm. 14

The advancing technology and improving capital equipment which such a society makes possible can easily offset the effects of the law of diminishing returns, and by a wide margin. Quantitative definiteness continues to exist and it continues to be true that, for example, one can bake just so much bread of a given quality from a given quantity of flour, or generate just so much heat from a pound of coal. However, ways are found for the same quantity of human labor, using improved machinery and equipment, to produce and process larger quantities of flour, coal, and all other goods. Similarly, ways are found for the same quantity of human labor to farm or mine larger quantities of land, and to render larger quantities of land suitable for farming or mining. In farming, this occurs through such means as the use of tractors and harvesters and the development of improved methods of irrigation. In mining, it occurs through such means as the use of steam shovels, bulldozers, improved drills, and high explosives. In addition, as scientific and technological knowledge increases, ways are found radically to increase the productive power of each acre of farmland or mineral deposit. In farming, this occurs by such means as improving the chemical composition of the soil, the use of insecticides and herbicides, developing improved strains of seed, and, of course, once again, irrigation. In mining, it occurs by such means as finding ways to process ores previously impossible to process or too costly to process—for example, acquiring the ability to move multiton loads of ore with less effort than was previously required to move a single shovelful of ore, and learning to break elements out of different compounds or to do so at a lower cost, such as learning to break iron out of sulfide compounds as well as oxide compounds and to do so at a lower cost.

Thus, in a division-of-labor, capitalist society, a more intensive or more extensive use of land encounters diminishing returns whether in 1894 or in 1994. But in such a society, by 1994 economic progress has so improved the powers of human labor that the very poorest lands and mines currently in use are a hundred times more productive than the very best lands and mines in use in 1894, and the point to which the productivity of labor diminishes in agriculture and mining in 1994 is more than a hundred times higher than the point to which it diminished in 1894. Indeed, thanks to economic progress, it is possible today to take even extremely submarginal land—actual desert—and by piping in water and adding various chemicals to the soil, make such land vastly more productive than were the very best lands of a few generations ago, as has been accomplished in Israel and in the Imperial Valley in California. Similar examples can be found in the case of mining. Indeed, so great has been the access to better lands and the increase in yields per acre on all grades of land, that extensive acreages farmed in the past have been thrown out of cultivation and returned to forest or pasture. This was the case in large portions of the eastern United States as better lands opened up in the Midwest, and in Great Britain, as American lands became a source of supply.

With still further economic progress, such results will continue to be achieved in the future. For example, in recent years, it has been demonstrated that it is even possible to grow many crops in scientifically controlled soils and solutions in multistory buildings, in virtual factory conditions. This, of course, is a development potentially equivalent to a practically limitless increase in the supply of agricultural land. The art of genetic engineering, presently in its infancy, also holds out enormous potential. In the case of mining, it will probably one day be possible with the aid of controlled atomic and hydrogen explosions to move the most enormous masses of earth at a minimum of cost. And it will probably come within man’s power someday to conduct mining and even farming operations not only under the sea, but elsewhere in the solar system, and beyond.

Thus, the leading principle continues to be that as man increases his knowledge of and physical power over the world—indeed, the universe—the supply of accessible and economically useable natural resources continues to increase, and to increase per unit of labor expended.

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The discussion of the law of diminishing returns confirms the fact that the only limiting factor in production— the only fundamentally scarce agent of production—is human labor, never land or natural resources. There is always uncultivated land that could be cultivated, or already cultivated land that could be cultivated more intensively, and mineral deposits that are known but

70 CAPITALISM presently unexploited, or that are exploited, but which could be exploited more intensively. For example, there is all the land left as natural forest or pasture, which could easily be used to grow crops, and the enormous quantities of desert-type land which potentially could also be used for crops. As an example from the case of minerals, there are, as previously mentioned, enormous deposits of oil in the form of shale and tar sands that have never been touched. And roughly two-thirds of the oil in conventional oil fields has typically been left in the ground.

The reason for leaving such useable land and mineral deposits alone is that the labor that would be required to work them would have to be withdrawn either from better land and mineral deposits, where its productivity is higher, or from the production of other goods that are more important than the production of additional agricultural commodities or minerals. For example, to farm land that we now leave alone, we would have to withdraw labor either from better farmland, where its productivity is higher, or from the production of other goods having greater importance to buyers than the additional agricultural commodities.

For exactly the same reasons, we do not exploit each piece of land or mine to the maximum possible extent. The additional labor that would be required would have to come either from other land or mines where the operation of diminishing returns had not been carried as far, and thus where the productivity of labor is greater, or from the production of other goods having a greater importance to buyers than additional agricultural commodities or minerals. For example, to get all the remaining two-thirds of the oil out of a conventional oil field, we might have to give up the one-third normally extracted from a dozen other oil fields, because we would need so much additional labor. Or we would have to give up other goods in quantities that we judged to be more important than the additional oil.

Nevertheless, it should be clear that if we do need more agricultural commodities or minerals, we can obtain them by withdrawing labor from other lines and applying it to existing farms or mines, or to land or mineral deposits which we know to be capable of production but which we have up to now left idle because their exploitation did not pay. Thus, even in the short run, that is, without waiting for any new technological advances or discoveries, production need never be restricted by a lack of raw materials.

Of course, with economic progress, which is to be expected under capitalism, we can have more and more raw materials, not only without withdrawing labor from other lines, but along with actually making labor available for other lines. The economic history of the last two centuries, for example, shows not only a radical increase in the supply of raw materials of all types, but also a radical decrease in the proportion of labor devoted to agriculture and mining, and a corresponding increase in the proportion of labor devoted to manufacturing and the various service industries. These results can be understood simply by imagining a hundredfold increase in the productivity of labor in the production of raw materials, accompanied by a willingness to consume only a ten-times greater quantity of raw materials before giving preference to larger quantities of more highly processed goods and to larger quantities of services. In such circumstances, instead of using 100 workers in agriculture and mining to produce 100 times the output of raw materials, 10 such workers will now be used to produce 10 times the output of such goods, and 90 workers previously used to produce such goods will be released to produce more of other things.

Diminishing Returns and the Need for

Economic Progress

The existence of the law of diminishing returns implies that economic progress is necessary not only for improvement in the standard of living, but also to maintain the standard of living at any given level. In the absence of economic progress, a rising population would result in diminishing returns in both agriculture and mining, because the larger supply of foodstuffs and minerals that would be required for the larger population would necessitate resorting to land and mines too poor to have been exploited before, and to the more intensive exploitation of the land and mines already in use. Even if the population did not grow, diminishing returns would still be encountered in mining, as the ores closest to the surface and otherwise easiest to work gave out. (In the case of mining, diminishing returns actually accompany the repetition of the same amount of labor over time, not just the application of additional labor at the same time.)

Thus, even with a constant population, in the absence of economic progress, the standard of living falls rather than remains stationary. When it does remain stationary, it does so as the result of at least enough economic progress taking place to offset the operation of the law of diminishing returns in mining.

These facts should be of significance in judging the proposals of those who desire an end to economic progress, notably the ever increasing numbers within the environmental or ecology movement who subscribe to the goal of zero economic growth. What they are asking for is not the maintenance of our present level of wellbeing, but growing impoverishment. 15 Furthermore, it should be realized that such impoverishment cannot be made gradual and gentle, as year-to-year diminishing returns in mining might suggest. Nor is it possible some—

how to arrange for just enough economic progress to offset diminishing returns in mining.

Economic progress is not something that can be controlled or regulated in amount. If the conditions are right for it, there is no fixed limit to how much of it there can be at any time. If the conditions are wrong for it, there will be not only no economic progress, but radical economic decline.

The essential precondition of economic progress is the existence of individuals who are motivated to think and to apply the results of their thinking to the economic world. But this is also an essential precondition of the maintenance of any modern economic system as well. To maintain such a system, new problems must constantly be solved. Even if essentially the same problems have been solved before, in previous generations, they are new to those who must solve them in the present generation. And almost always, they will differ in at least some important respects from the problems solved in the past. All machinery and equipment eventually wear out and must be replaced. All buildings, roads, bridges, and tunnels sooner or later need total replacement or such extensive maintenance and repair as to be tantamount to total replacement. All of this requires a fresh process of thought. And this requires the existence of a large body of individuals willing and able to think.

The attempt to stifle the fresh thinking that results in economic progress must, if successful, also stop the fresh thinking that is necessary to maintain the economic system at its present level. This is because it must operate against fresh thinking as such. One cannot tell a self-activating intelligence that it can be driven by its curiosity up to the point of repeating what happens to be the old, but must not undertake the new. If the attempt is made to stifle the curiosity and discovery associated with the new, it must serve to stifle the curiosity and discovery required to replicate the old. The effect of prohibiting economic progress must be to make eager intelligence give way to passive stupidity throughout the economic system, and thus radically to undermine the economic system, not merely prevent its improvement.

3. Conservationism: A Critique

The preceding discussions imply that the doctrine of conservationism is incorrect. Conservationism regards the existing supply of economically useable natural resources as nature-given, rather than as the product of human intelligence and its corollary, capital accumulation. It does not see that what nature provides is, for all practical purposes, an infinite supply of matter and energy, which human intelligence can progressively master, in the process creating a steadily increasing supply of economically useable natural resources. It does not see that the supply of economically useable natural resources increases as man gains understanding of the world and the universe and correspondingly improves his means of production, thereby progressively enlarging the fraction of nature over which he holds physical power. It does not see that as the fraction of nature within man’s knowledge and control grows, so too does his supply of economically useable natural resources. In a word, conservationism does not see that the increase in the supply of economically useable natural resources is part of the very same process by which the ability to produce as such and in general is increased.

Having no conception of the role of human intelligence in the creation of economically useable natural resources, and confusing the present supply with all the natural resources present in nature, the conservationists naïvely believe that every act of production that consumes natural resources is an act of impoverishment, using up an allegedly priceless, irreplaceable treasure of nature. On this basis, they conclude that the pursuit of self-interest by individuals under economic freedom leads to the wanton consumption of mankind’s irreplaceable natural heritage, with no regard for the needs of future generations.

Once having arrived at the existence of this altogether illusory problem, the product of nothing more than their own ignorance of the productive process, the conservationists further conclude that what is necessary to solve this alleged problem is government intervention designed to “conserve” natural resources by restricting or prohibiting in various ways mankind’s use of them.

Ironically, the consequence of all such restrictions and prohibitions is waste—the waste of the one truly scarce factor of production, namely, human labor. It is our labor and our time that are fundamentally scarce, not land or natural resources. It is our labor and our time that we fundamentally need to save, not land or natural resources. For the most part, we need to economize on land and natural resources only insofar as doing so represents a saving of our labor or time. We need to be concerned with those land sites and mineral deposits whose existence saves us labor as compared with having to produce by using inferior land or mineral deposits. For example, we value farmland in the Midwest and an oil field because their existence saves us labor in producing food and oil. Without that midwestern farmland, we would have to produce to a greater extent on less productive East Coast farmland, or cultivate other midwestern land more intensively and thus produce with a lower productivity of labor. Similarly, without that oil field, we would have to resort to more intensive, less efficient methods of extracting oil from other such fields or perhaps bring into

72 CAPITALISM production a less productive source of oil, such as tar sands, or even shale deposits. In both cases, the effect would be that it would take more labor to produce the same amount of goods. The existence of the midwestern land and of the oil field saves us that labor, and that is why we value both.

Sometimes, it is true, particular land sites are unique in what they enable us to produce. Their product cannot be perfectly duplicated by using a larger quantity of labor elsewhere. For example, real estate in downtown Manhattan, sturgeon beds providing fine caviar, vineyards serving in the production of grapes, and thus wines, of a unique flavor. At other times, no amount of labor can provide more of a good—for example, agricultural commodities between harvests. In these categories of cases, we may speak of a problem of conservation apart from the saving of labor.

But even in these cases, conservationism is thoroughly mistaken in thinking that some kind of political action is required to avoid misuse of the goods in question. This is because the market price of such goods reserves them to their most important uses and limits the rate of their consumption in conformity with the limited supply of them available. The freemarket price of real estate regularly ensures that it is devoted to its most important uses. The freemarket price of every agricultural commodity acts to conserve an adequate supply of it until the next harvest comes in. In exactly the same way, the freemarket price of minerals operates to limit their rate of consumption between the discovery of new deposits or improved methods of extraction, to whatever extent that may be necessary. In such cases, the prospect of higher prices in the future operates to bring about higher prices immediately, which higher prices automatically limit the rate of consumption. 16 No limitation of the rate of consumption by the government is required. All the necessary limitation is effected by the freemarket price, which makes all due allowance for the needs of the future. Any limitation of the rate of consumption over and above that accomplished by the freemarket price merely serves needlessly to sacrifice the present to the future, which does not require such sacrifice, and thus simply to render human labor less productive.

The mistaken philosophy of conservationism currently plays a major role in the opposition to atomic power, the strip mining of coal, and the opening of new landfill areas for garbage disposal. It also underlies the many proposals for “recycling” and even the fifty-five mile an hour speed limit.

It is argued, for example, that the disposal of radioactive material from atomic power plants constitutes a major problem because the dump sites in which the material is placed will remain radioactive and therefore unuseable for other purposes for tens of thousands of years. Similarly, it is argued that the strip mining of coal should not be undertaken because once the coal is removed, the land will no longer be useable for farming or ranching, unless, at great expense, the soil layer is restored.

The supporters of these arguments simply do not realize that we do not need every last piece of land that we possess. In the United States, we have hundreds of thousands of square miles of land—deserts and mountains, for example—that as far as their contribution to human life and wellbeing is concerned might as well be covered with sea water. The marginal utility or importance of such land is simply zero. Even if some of it were totally lost to use forever, it would make absolutely no difference to human life and wellbeing. In insisting on the sacredness of every square mile of land, we place ourselves in the position of a kind of irrational miser— not a miser of money, but, if it is possible to imagine it, a miser of water in a country that is filled with lakes, rivers, and streams. It is as though we were a farmer needing, say, a thousand gallons of water a day for every purpose that water can serve, and having ten thousand gallons a day available, and yet losing sleep at night over the loss of a cupful somewhere.

Even if, out of the 3.5 million square miles of territory of the United States, atomic dump sites and surface coal mines totally and forever destroyed the usefulness of a few hundred or even a few thousand square miles for other purposes, there would be no loss to us. Even if some of the land to be used for these purposes presently has other uses, like serving as farmland or ranch land, these uses would be given up only because of the land’s greater value as a dump site or mine. And its loss as farm or ranch land would be made good either by bringing other, presently unused land into production or by producing more intensively on other land. The net effect would simply be that we could have some of the additional energy that we so urgently need.

To make all this concrete and as clear as possible, let us assume that a coal-mining company wants to buy land in Wyoming that is presently a cattle ranch. It is willing to pay a price that is far higher than corresponds to the income its present owner can make from ranching. Neither the coal-mining company nor the rancher nor the great majority of other people may realize it, but this higher offer reflects the fact that this piece of land is more urgently needed for coal mining than for cattle ranching. The buyers of coal are willing to allow more in the price of coal for the use of this piece of land than the buyers of cattle products are willing to allow for it in the price of cattle products. That is why it is worth more to the coal mining company than it is to the cattle rancher. Even if

the piece of land is lost forever to cattle ranching or any other use thereafter, the effect is that we can obtain urgently needed coal and energy, while the cattle the land previously supported can be fed on other land. Furthermore, because of the greater availability and therefore lower price of energy that would result from allowing the all-out development of energy sources, it is almost certain that the cattle would soon be able to be raised at a lower cost on other land than they could be if they continued to remain on the coal-bearing land.

The same principles, of course, apply to atomic dump sites. It should go without saying that, in a capitalist society, the owner of such a dump site would not be able to expose the property of his neighbors to harmful doses of radiation. He would have to own a large enough site to ensure that radiation levels at its perimeter were well within the zone of safety. (It should also go without saying that a landowner’s neighbors, let alone people living at the opposite end of the country, have no right to the preservation of any special aesthetic qualities of a piece of land. Even if it were true, for example, that strip mining left the land horrendously ugly, rather than bestowing its own kind of grandeur, no one could legitimately claim that he is thereby denied the use and enjoyment of his own property, or, therefore, that he has a right to interfere. 17 )

Of course, it is probably the case that in the future technology will find ways of eliminating radioactivity and restoring land at far less cost than is presently possible. Whether it does or not, however, is irrelevant. For nothing of significance depends on our having the land in question.

As matters now stand, the kind of mistaken ideas about the waste of land that have been discussed are threatening us with an enormous waste of our labor. This is because the only alternative to the energy that manmade fuels such as atomic power and strip-mined coal can provide is the minuscule amounts that human muscles can provide. Thus if we prevent the development of such manmade fuels, our ability to produce is correspondingly impaired.

As indicated, a further consequence of the conservation mentality has been a sharp reduction in the number of government permits issued for the opening of landfill areas for garbage disposal. 18 The conservationists’ rationale is that the use of land for this purpose represents a “waste” of the land. The effect has been that as the existing landfill areas approach their planned capacity, a shortage of space for garbage disposal has begun to develop. In response to this shortage, citizens are denounced for a profligate lifestyle, which allegedly generates an excessive amount of garbage, and as part of the solution, parents are urged to sacrifice both their own

convenience and even the comfort and health of their infants by giving up the use of disposable diapers and going back to the use of diaper services. In addition, homeowners and apartment dwellers are urged to turn a portion of their dwelling space into minirecycling centers, carefully separating newspapers, metal cans, and glass containers from ordinary refuse, to make possible the convenient collection and recycling of these items.

As the shortage of landfill space has developed, such facts as the government’s restrictions on the opening of new landfill areas have been conveniently ignored in the press, which has led the public to believe that the problem is one of an actual lack of space for garbage disposal. Also ignored is the fact that the average American, with his modern, prosperous lifestyle actually generates substantially less garbage today than in the past, and less than the average contemporary Mexican with his much less advanced and highly impoverished lifestyle. 19 This is the result of such facts as that in modern society the twelve hundred pounds or more of coal ash that the average American family used to generate is no longer generated, thanks to the use of electricity, natural gas, and heating oil to heat homes; nor, thanks to such things as canning and freezing and modern meat packing, is there nearly as much garbage for the average family to dispose of in the form of animal and vegetable matter, such as chicken feathers, fish scales, and potato peels. And of the garbage that is generated, it turns out that the contribution made by disposable diapers is on the order of a mere 1 percent, while that of fast-food containers (another leading target of today’s conservationists and “environmentalists”) is closer to a tenth of 1 percent and that of all plastics combined (yet another leading target) is less than 5 percent. 20

Confusions about waste are present in much of the concern expressed about the need for “recycling.” When it is possible for a comparative handful of workers using giant steam shovels and other such machinery to move and process ores in multiton loads and thus to produce things like new tin cans and glass jars easily and cheaply, it makes little sense for the average person to spend his time ferreting through his garbage to find a few cans or jars to bring to his neighborhood “recycling center” or to set aside for pickup by a special garbage truck. It is not his throwing away the cans or jars that is wasteful, but his spending time to retrieve and deliver them, or the garbage disposal company’s having to make a separate collection of them. For he certainly has better things to do with that time, and the garbage company should not be put to the needless expense of having a second truck and crew to collect items of insignificant value.

Of course, not all recycling is wasteful. Whether it is or not is indicated by the relationship between the market

price of the recycled material and the cost of recycling it. If the market price of the recycled material is high enough to allow compensation for the labor involved and for a competitive rate of profit on the capital that must be invested, then the recycled material is important enough to justify the recycling. For example, the price of gold and silver is high enough to make it pay dentists to retrieve the shavings drilled from fillings, which would otherwise simply be washed down the drain. On the other hand, it normally would not pay people to save their steel or aluminum cans, because the productivity of labor in mining and processing fresh iron and aluminum ore is so high, and the price of steel and aluminum cans accordingly so low, as to make their efforts in this regard highly inefficient and unnecessary.

In this connection, it should be realized that there is nothing “wasteful” or uneconomic in the fact that we use so many cans or so many paper wrappings. As pointed out a few paragraphs back, they actually serve considerably to reduce the volume of the more unpleasant forms of garbage. 21 Furthermore, as I wrote elsewhere, if we consider how little labor it costs us—in terms of the time it takes us to earn the money we spend for it—to have things brought to us clean and fresh and new, in new containers and new packaging, and what the alternatives are for the spending of that money or the use of that time, it becomes clear that the expenditure is well made. 22

For consider the alternatives. We could have our food and other goods wrapped in old newspapers and put in jars, bags, or boxes that we would have to carry along with us whenever we went shopping, or which we would have to make a special trip to go and fetch whenever we came on something unexpectedly that we wanted to buy. We could then use the money we saved in that way to buy a handful of other goods. Conceivably, we could use the money we saved to work a few minutes less at our jobs each day, and earn correspondingly less. But these alternatives would simply be bizarre, because neither a handful of extra goods nor working a few minutes less at our jobs each day would compensate us for the loss of cleanliness, convenience, aesthetic satisfaction, and also time saved in shopping that is provided by modern packaging.

Of course, people are free to adopt a poverty-stricken personal lifestyle if they choose. They may go about like old Russian grandmothers in Moscow, with an ever present shopping bag and herring jar, if that is what they like. They may pick through garbage pails while pretending that they live in a spaceship—“spaceship Earth,” they call it—rather than in the richest country of the planet Earth. But there is absolutely no sane reason why anyone should, or needs to, live this way, and certainly not in modern America. Above all, no one should be forced by law to comply with such peculiar values.

Not surprisingly, the attempt to force people to accept such irrational values has begun to introduce what must be described as a measure of totalitarian interference into their lives. Where recycling has become mandatory, as in New York City, there are now garbage police, whose job is to snoop into people’s garbage to make sure that they are complying with the recycling requirements. Such coercion and spying are unavoidable when people are required to do something nonsensical and which they would thus not do voluntarily. It can be expected that school children indoctrinated with environmentalism will be encouraged to report neighbors and even their own parents to the garbage police.

The fifty-five mile-an-hour speed limit is also inspired by conservationism. It is supposed to avoid the waste of oil. As a conservation measure, the fifty-five mile an hour speed limit turns out to be wasteful in the same way that the compulsory recycling measures are wasteful. Namely, in a misguided effort to save oil, it wastes labor, equipment, and people’s time, the loss of which is more important than the oil it saves.

The proof of this wastefulness is that all the trucking companies and most automobile owners know that by driving at fifty-five miles an hour, rather than at seventy miles an hour, say, they can reduce the amount of fuel consumed per mile and thus reduce their fuel costs. Nevertheless, despite this cost saving, they do not voluntarily choose to drive at the lower speed. The reason the trucking companies do not is that the value of the fuel saved is less than the additional wages that must be paid to truck drivers, who must spend more hours driving at the lower speed to haul the same amount of freight the same distance; in addition, a larger number of trucks may be required to haul the same amount of freight within the same period of time. The owners of automobiles do not voluntarily drive at the lower speed, because the importance they attach to the money they would save by doing so is less than the importance they attach to the time they save by driving faster.

The comparison of the money saved with the money lost, or of the importance of the money saved with the importance of the personal time lost, is the only rational criterion of waste, because it weighs all the relevant factors involved (such as the truckers’ labor as well as the fuel), not just one factor in isolation. Furthermore, if it is kept in mind that additional oil can always be produced if necessary, by withdrawing labor from the production of other things, then it should come as no surprise that the use of this criterion leads to goods being produced with the lowest overall amount of labor, or with labor of the least value.

The fact, for example, that the fuel trucking compa—

nies can save by driving more slowly is less valuable than the extra truck drivers’ labor they need at the lower speeds is an indication that the labor needed to produce the additional fuel is less than the labor needed to save fuel by driving more slowly. For example, saving five dollars’ worth of fuel by virtue of having to pay ten dollars more in wages to truck drivers is an indication that at least twice as much labor is required to make possible the saving of the fuel than is required to produce an equivalent amount of the fuel. Indeed, since the wages paid in the production of fuel worth five dollars are less than five dollars, the saving of labor through the use of the fuel in question turns out to be even greater. The fact that a given amount of fuel can be made available by less labor if we produce more fuel than if we consume less fuel means that conservationism’s forcing us to consume less fuel simply makes us waste our labor. 23

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Ironically, in previous decades, mistaken ideas about waste led to demands for government-sponsored development of natural resources, above all, irrigation and flood control projects. At that time, it was naïvely assumed that the mere fact that a piece of land was capable of being used productively meant that it should be used productively; otherwise, it was held, the land was “wasted.” It was not realized that in view of the fundamental scarcity of labor, it is simply not possible to use all the land that is potentially useable. It was not seen that the effect of compelling the development of land that the market judges to be submarginal is to cause the waste of labor and capital—that is, the withdrawal of labor and capital from better, more productive land or from the production of other goods more urgently desired. On the basis of such ignorance, the U.S. government, under the New Deal, squandered billions of dollars on such projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority.

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Conservationism has spawned the popular misconception, now taken up by the ecology movement, that the individual’s freedom to pursue his self-interest is responsible for such phenomena as senseless deforestation and the wanton destruction of species. The improper, uneconomic deforestation practiced in various portions of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the near disappearance of the buffalo, which once roamed the Great Plains of the United States in large numbers, are presented as leading examples.

These examples do not prove what the conservationists believe they prove. It was not the pursuit of self-interest under freedom that was responsible for such deforestation, but the government’s violation of the individual’s freedom to establish private property. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. government has claimed ownership of most of the territory of the Western states, including, of course, forests and mineral deposits, and refused to allow this territory to become private property.

When, in contrast, forests are privately owned, self-interest does not normally lead their owners to cut them down without bothering to replant, which is what the logging companies were denounced for in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, a self-interested owner does not normally cut trees down without bothering to replant, any more than he cuts down wheat or corn without bothering to replant. Trees are simply a longer-term crop than wheat or corn. They are commercially grown wherever land is private property and the prospective price of trees covers the costs of planting and an allowance for a compound competitive rate of return over their growing life.

However, the fact that the western forests of the United States were owned by the government meant that the logging companies which worked them could not expect to receive the benefits of replanting. As a result, they had no incentive to go to the trouble and expense of replanting. Had the government owned the farmland, and deprived farmers of the prospect of owning the next crop of wheat or corn, no incentive would have existed for replanting those crops either. The obvious solution was to make forest lands private property. Private owners, whether logging companies or others, would have had the incentive to replant.

The near extermination of the buffalo resulted from the fact that their value to man was simply not great enough to justify the expense of the labor of preserving them. The buffalo certainly could have been raised commercially, on ranches, just as cattle are raised. But no one found it profitable to do so, because the consumers were simply unwilling to allow prices for buffalo meat and buffalo hides high enough to cover the costs of such operations. They much preferred beef and cowhides instead. Buffalo were valuable to man only so long as they were free for the taking on the open range.

In the light of such facts, their near extermination was not an act of wanton destruction, but perfectly reasonable. The only alternative would have been to compel the domestication of the buffalo and, to that extent, to force the consuming public to accept buffalo meat and buffalo hides in preference to beef and cowhides. Or else the alternative would have been to close the Great Plains, or some large part of them, to settlement, in order to maintain the open range for the sake of the buffalo. Either way, the preservation of the buffalo as a significant species would have entailed enormous waste: the waste of ranch land, labor, and capital in supporting buffalo herds instead of cattle herds, or the waste of the whole Great

Plains or some huge portion of them in being closed to development altogether. Either way, there would have been an enormous loss in terms of the ability of the Great Plains to contribute to human life and wellbeing.

PART B

THE ECOLOGICAL ASSAULT ON

ECONOMIC PROGRESS

1. The Hostility to Economic Progress

A longstanding hostility has existed to economic progress. Prior to the 1960s, this hostility was based on the doctrines of asceticism, conspicuous consumption, cultural relativism, and on a cluster of economic fallacies to which I have given the name consumptionism. (This last is represented by such beliefs as that machinery causes unemployment and that war and destruction cause prosperity. According to consumptionism, the fundamental problem of economic life is not the creation of wealth but of the need or desire for wealth, which is thought to be naturally limited, and which allegedly has been or is about to be surpassed by the production of wealth, thereby resulting in a problem of “overproduction,” depression, and unemployment.)

The doctrines of conspicuous consumption and cultural relativism have already been dealt with in Chapter 2. Consumptionism is dealt with below, in Part A of Chapter 13. As for asceticism, which claims to find value in self-denial for its own sake, there is nothing to say except that wealth is the means to better health and longer life, as well as to greater enjoyment of life. Thus, its value is logically implied in the very concept of human values, which presupposes the existence of living human beings who value their lives. 24 Moreover, as was shown in Chapter 2, wealth without practical limit is necessary for the achievement of values in the physical world on the scale made possible and required by man’s possession of reason. 25 Asceticism is thus simply a doctrine of the negation of human values and human life.

In the last three decades, a powerful new opposition to economic progress has developed. This opposition emanates from the socalled ecology or environmental movement. (In what follows, I use the expressions “ecology doctrine” and “environmentalism,” and “ecologists” and “environmentalists,” interchangeably.) This movement has achieved such a degree of influence that it presently seems on the verge of actually being able to stop further economic progress by means of the enactment of its program into law.

Such a threat cannot be ignored. Indeed, there is no point in explaining how the division of labor makes possible economic progress, and the dependency of the division of labor on capitalism, when the value of economic progress itself has been called into question in this way. Thus, even though it is in the nature of a digression, the doctrines of the environmental movement, and their refutation, must be the subject of the remainder of this chapter.

2. The Claims of the Environmental Movement and Its Pathology of Fear and Hatred

The essential, all-encompassing doctrine of the environmental movement is that the continuation of economic progress is both impossible and dangerous. Insofar as it claims the impossibility of the continuation of economic progress, the movement offers nothing more than a repetition of the claims of conservationism. Indeed, it can be considered as having fully absorbed the conservation movement, with conservationism now standing merely as an aspect of environmentalism.

The argument against the possibility of economic progress continuing is, of course, based on the failure to grasp the physical nature of the world and the progressive nature of man. It should not be necessary to dwell further on this aspect of the ecology doctrine, because it has already been thoroughly refuted in Part A of this chapter. There it was shown that the problem of natural resources is strictly one of making a greater fraction of nature’s virtually infinite endowment accessible and economically useable. This in turn was shown to be accomplished to the degree that man gains understanding of and power over nature through scientific and technological progress and correspondingly improved capital equipment. 26

The Actual Nature of Industrial Civilization

Before considering the specific claims the environmental movement makes concerning the alleged dangers of economic progress, it is vital to recognize the enormous contribution that the essential vehicle of economic progress, namely, industrial civilization, has made to human life and wellbeing since its birth over two centuries ago in the Industrial Revolution.

Industrial civilization has radically increased human life expectancy: from about thirty years in the mid-eighteenth century to about seventy-five years today. In the twentieth century, in the United States, it has increased life expectancy from about forty-six years in 1900 to the present seventy-five years. The enormous contribution of industrial civilization to human life is further illustrated by the fact that the average newborn American child has a greater chance of living to age sixty-five than the

average newborn child of a nonindustrial society has of living to age five. These marvelous results have come about because of an ever improving supply of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and all the conveniences of life, and the progressive reduction in human fatigue and exhaustion. All of this has taken place on a foundation of science, technology, and capitalism, which have made possible the continuous development and introduction of new and improved products and more efficient methods of production.

In the last two centuries, loyalty to the values of science, technology, and capitalism has enabled man in the industrialized countries of the Western world to put an end to famines and plagues, and to eliminate the once dread diseases of cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever, among others. Famine has been ended, because industrial civilization has produced the greatest abundance and variety of food in the history of the world, and has created the storage and transportation systems required to bring it to everyone. This same industrial civilization has produced the greatest abundance of clothing and shoes, and of housing, in the history of the world. And while some people in the industrialized countries may be hungry or homeless (almost always as the result of destructive government policies), it is certain that no one in the industrialized countries needs to be hungry or homeless. 27 Industrial civilization has also produced the iron and steel pipe, the chemical purification and pumping systems, and the boilers, that enable everyone to have instant access to safe drinking water, hot or cold, every minute of the day. It has produced the sewage systems and the automobiles that have removed the filth of human and animal waste from the streets of cities and towns. It has produced the vaccines, anesthesias, antibiotics, and all the other “wonder drugs” of modern times, along with all kinds of new and improved diagnostic and surgical equipment. It is such accomplishments in the foundations of public health and in medicine, along with improved nutrition, clothing, and shelter, that have put an end to plagues and radically reduced the incidence of almost every type of disease.

As the result of industrial civilization, not only do billions more people survive, but in the advanced countries they do so on a level far exceeding that of kings and emperors in all previous ages—on a level that just a few generations ago would have been regarded as possible only in a world of science fiction. With the turn of a key, the push of a pedal, and the touch of a steering wheel, they drive along highways in wondrous machines at sixty miles an hour. With the flick of a switch, they light a room in the middle of darkness. With the touch of a button, they watch events taking place ten thousand miles away. With the touch of a few other buttons, they talk to other people across town or across the world. They even fly through the air at six hundred miles per hour, forty thousand feet up, watching movies and sipping martinis in airconditioned comfort as they do so. In the United States, most people can have all this, and spacious homes or apartments, carpeted and fully furnished, with indoor plumbing, central heating, air conditioning, refrigerators, freezers, and gas or electric stoves, and also personal libraries of hundreds of books, records, compact disks, and tape recordings; they can have all this, as well as long life and good health—as the result of working forty hours a week.

The achievement of this marvelous state of affairs has been made possible by the use of ever improved machinery and equipment, which has been the focal point of scientific and technological progress. 28 The use of this ever improved machinery and equipment is what has enabled human beings to accomplish ever greater results with the application of less and less muscular exertion.

Now inseparably connected with the use of ever improved machinery and equipment has been the increasing use of manmade power, which is the distinguishing characteristic of industrial civilization and of the Industrial Revolution, which marked its beginning. To the relatively feeble muscles of draft animals and the still more feeble muscles of human beings, and to the relatively small amounts of useable power available from nature in the form of wind and falling water, industrial civilization has added manmade power. It did so first in the form of steam generated from the combustion of coal, and later in the form of internal combustion based on petroleum, and electric power based on the burning of any fossil fuel or on atomic energy.

This manmade power, and the energy released by its use, is an equally essential basis of all of the economic improvements achieved over the last two hundred years. It is what enables us to use the improved machines and equipment and is indispensable to our ability to produce the improved machines and equipment in the first place. Its application is what enables us human beings to accomplish with our arms and hands, in merely pushing the buttons and pulling the levers of machines, the amazing productive results we do accomplish. To the feeble powers of our arms and hands is added the enormously greater power released by energy in the form of steam, internal combustion, electricity, or radiation. In this way, energy use, the productivity of labor, and the standard of living are inseparably connected, with the two last entirely dependent on the first.

Thus, it is not surprising, for example, that the United States enjoys the world’s highest standard of living. This is a direct result of the fact that the United States has the world’s highest energy consumption per capita. The United States, more than any other country, is the country where

intelligent human beings have arranged for motor-driven machinery to accomplish results for them. All further substantial increases in the productivity of labor and standard of living, both here in the United States and across the world, will be equally dependent on manmade power and the growing use of energy it makes possible. Our ability to accomplish more and more with the same limited muscular powers of our limbs will depend entirely on our ability to augment them further and further with the aid of still more such energy.

So little are these elementary facts understood that a thoroughly perverted concept of economic efficiency has come into vogue, a concept whose actual meaning is the precise opposite of economic efficiency. Economic efficiency centers on the ability of human beings to reduce the quantity of labor they need to expend per unit of output and thus to be able to produce more and more while expending the same or a smaller amount of labor. This, of course, requires the growing use of energy per capita, as I have just explained. Nevertheless, increasingly the practice today is to view economic efficiency as centering on how little energy can be consumed per unit of output, which, of course, necessarily implies an increasing need for human labor per unit of output. For example, a front-page article in The New York Times, of February 9, 1991, was headlined “Bush’s Energy Plan Emphasizes Gains in Output over Efficiency.” Although the headline meant to refer specifically to the output of energy, the article’s actual position reduces to the absurdity the headline suggests, namely, that increases in the overall output of goods produced by the same amount of human labor are a contradiction of efficiency, for any such increase in production requires the greater production and use of energy per capita, which the article characterizes as inefficient. Along the same lines, a later headline in the same newspaper read “Bad News: Fuel Is Cheap.” 29 Later discussion will make clear that the perversion of the concept of efficiency is philosophically consistent with the environmental movement’s most fundamental values.

Now not only does the environmental or ecology movement respond to the marvelous accomplishments of industrial civilization with all of the sensibilities one might expect from a dead log, but in virtually every respect, it represents an attack on industrial civilization, on the values of science, technology, and capitalism on which that civilization rests, and on all of its material fruits, from air conditioners and automobiles to television sets and X-ray machines. The environmental movement is, as Ayn Rand so aptly characterized it, “the Anti-Industrial Revolution.” 30

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Consistent with what I said earlier in connection with the values of capitalism, none of the preceding is to say that life in the modern world is without serious problems, especially in many of today’s large cities. 31 It is to say, however, that the problems are not the result of economic progress, capitalism, technology, science, or human reason. On the contrary, they are the result precisely of the absence of these values. The solution to every problem, from crime to unemployment is a combination of one or more of these essential attributes of industrial civilization. Thus, for example, if rent control destroys the quality of housing in cities, if minimum-wage and prounion legislation cause unemployment, if inflation and confiscatory taxation cause capital decumulation and economic decline, if acceptance of the doctrine of determinism stops the punishment of criminals—on the grounds that they could not help it—and the crime rate soars, if people are sick and seek health, if they are poor and seek to be richer, the solution is not the destruction of industrial civilization. The solution is more of what industrial civilization rests upon. It is economic freedom—capitalism. It is recognition of the power of reason and thus the power of the individual to improve himself. And it is science, technology, and economic progress.

What the solution is not, is environmentalism.

The Environmental Movement’s Dread of

Industrial Civilization

The environmental movement is characterized by pathological fear of industrial civilization and of science and technology. It fears the “pollution” of water and air as the result of industrial production and the emission of its by-products. It fears the poisoning of fish, the destruction of rivers and lakes, the “pollution” of entire oceans. It fears “acid rain,” the destruction of the ozone layer, the onset of a new ice age, the contrary onset of global warming and the melting of the polar icecaps and rise of sea levels. It fears the use of pesticides and herbicides out of fear of the food chain being poisoned. It fears the use of chemical preservatives and countless other alleged causes of cancer stemming from the “chemicals” produced by industrial civilization. It fears radiation not only from atomic power plants but also from color television sets, microwave ovens, toasters, electric blankets, and electric power lines. It fears the disposal of atomic wastes, all other toxic wastes, and all nonbiodegradable wastes. It fears landfills and the destruction of wetlands. It fears the destruction of animal and vegetable species that are useless or even hostile to man, and demands the preservation of each and every one. It demands the preservation or recreation of everything as it is or was, before the arrival of man on the scene, from “old-growth” forests, stretches of prairie, and Arctic and Antarctic wastes to the reintroduction of wolves and bears into

areas from which they had been eliminated. 32

As I wrote elsewhere, as a result of the influence of the environmental movement, increasing numbers of present-day Americans and West Europeans “view science and technology in reality as they used to be humorously depicted in Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi movies, namely, as frightening ‘experiments’ going on in Frankenstein’s castle. And casting themselves in a real-life role of terrified and angry Transylvanian peasants, they seek to smash such science and technology.” 33 For all practical purposes, the effect of environmentalism has been the creation of a horde of hysterical bumpkins in the midst of modern civilization.

As a leading manifestation of this phenomenon, a growing number of our contemporaries view atomic power as a terrifying death ray, beyond man’s power to use safely. Their fear is such that they refuse to sanction even the establishment of dump sites for atomic wastes. Indeed, as previously mentioned, the government of the state of New York, itself having been overcome by the fears inculcated by the ecology movement, has dismantled the brand-new, fully constructed Shoreham atomic power plant on Long Island, a plant whose power output would have prevented the overloads and brownouts and blackouts that are now a much more real possibility in the New York City area in the years to come. It and the environmentalists seem to be totally unaware of or unconcerned with such likely consequences of the plant’s dismantling as people being trapped in elevators and subways, massive food spoilage, deaths from heat stroke because of lack of air conditioning, and so on, because that plant and its power output will not exist. All that the state government and the environmentalists seem to have been aware of is their imagining of a largescale radiation leak.

In indulging their fear of atomic power, the environmentalists simply disregard all the scientific and engineering safeguards built into atomic power plants in the United States, such as backup systems, automatic shutdown in the event of coolant loss, and containment buildings capable of withstanding the direct crash of a jet liner. 34 They ignore such facts as that the worst nuclear accident in American history—that of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant—actually confirmed the safety of atomic power plants in the United States. Totally unlike the more recent case of Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union, there was not a single death, not a single case of radiation overdose to any member of the public in that accident. In addition, according to studies reported in The New York Times, the cancer rate among residents in the area around Three Mile Island is no higher than normal and has not risen. 35

To be sure, the case of Chernobyl was a genuine disaster. But this fact is not an indictment of atomic power, still less of modern science and technology in general. It is an indictment only of the incompetence, and indifference to human life, inherent in communism. Under communism (socialism), there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety. 36 In addition, under communism (socialism), the ability of the government to prosecute wrongdoing in connection with the use of means of production is necessarily compromised by the very nature of the case, inasmuch as the state itself is the owner of the means of production and therefore is itself the party responsible for any misuse in connection with them. Indeed, any prosecution by the state would have to be a prosecution of its own officials, logically entailing the prosecution of its very highest officials. This is because under the central planning that is an essential characteristic of socialism the highest officials have responsibility for every detail of economic activity. The implicit need to challenge the top leaders, of course, greatly diminishes the likelihood of such prosecutions. Thus under communism, as the result of the lack both of economic and legal incentives to provide safety, industrial accidents of all kinds are commonplace, including airplane and train crashes. This is a good reason for rejecting communism, but certainly not a rational basis for rejecting atomic power and an industrial society.

As indicated, as a result of the influence of the environmental movement, the fears of a growing number of our contemporaries are such that they refuse to sanction not only atomic dump sites but also new dump sites for the disposal of all kinds of more mundane chemicals that result as a by-product of industrial processes, such as sulfuric, hydrochloric, or nitric acid, dioxin, PCBs, and even ordinary lead or mercury. They refuse to do so out of fear of being poisoned by “toxic wastes.” In addition, they stop eating one thing after another, in terror that it too is poisoned—with preservatives, pesticides, “chemicals.” Increasingly, they view every manmade chemical additive to food as though it were a cause of cancer or other dread disease. More and more they turn to “natural” foods, as though millions of years of blind evolution in the selection of food were to be trusted, but the application of science and human intelligence to the improvement of food were not. The fear of “chemicals” is such that a major and once proud chemical company has felt obliged to change its slogan from “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry” to, simply, “Better Things for Better Living,” because the very word chemistry has become controversial and a source of fear. Increasingly, our contemporaries also fear ordinary mechanical devices, from automobiles and washing machines on down to stepladders, and demand absolute

80 CAPITALISM guarantees of safety in connection with their use. All of these fears are supposedly in response to the allegedly self-destructive tendencies of an industrial society.

Yet in virtually no case has any actual proof of danger ever been offered. Indeed, some of the claims immediately show themselves to be absurd on simple logical grounds. For example, it is a contradiction to fear both a new ice age and a global warming. Since everything physical in the world is a chemical, it is absurd to fear chemical preservatives. Such a fear is tantamount to the fear of preservatives as such and thus fear of the very fact that food does not spoil as rapidly.

Not only is there no proof of danger from industrial civilization and science and technology, but all the proof runs entirely the other way. As I have shown, the actual effect of industrial civilization, science, and technology has been to increase life expectancy by two and a half times since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and radically to improve human health and wellbeing. The environmentalists simply ignore all this. In their view, it is outweighed by “air pollution.” This belief is clearly present in the words of Carl Sagan, a leading environmentalist:

The “satanic mills” of England in the early years of the industrial revolution polluted the air and caused an epidemic of respiratory disease. The “pea soup” fogs of London, which provided haunting backdrops to the Sherlock

Holmes stories, were deadly domestic and industrial pollution. Today, automobiles add their exhaust fumes, and our cities are plagued by smog—which affects the health, happiness and productivity of the very people generating the pollutants. We’ve also known about acid rain, the pollution of lakes and forests, and the ecological turmoil caused by oil spills. But the prevailing opinion has been— erroneously, in my view—that these penalties to health and environment were more than balanced by the benefits that fossil fuels bring. 37

Thus, Sagan has declared that in his view it is erroneous to believe that the progressive and radical increase in life expectancy and in human health and wellbeing outweigh the ill effects of air pollution. For it is precisely these which are the benefits which fossil fuels have brought. The avoidance of air pollution is allegedly more important.

Interestingly, in presenting the Industrial Revolution as the cause of respiratory disease, Sagan somehow manages to forget the virtually total elimination of tuberculosis and the radical reduction in the frequency of, and mortality resulting from, pneumonia, which has been achieved by industrial civilization. Tuberculosis and pneumonia, of course, were traditionally the leading respiratory diseases. In virtually totally eliminating the one and radically reducing the other, the positive contribution of industrial civilization specifically to respiratory health overwhelmingly surpasses the negative of any respiratory diseases resulting from industrial civilization. Sagan, of course, does not even bother to specify the nature and extent of such alleged diseases. In his view, in developing industrial civilization, we have gotten ourselves into a “mess.” 38

The fear the environmental movement has of industrial civilization leads it to want to destroy industrial civilization. Thus, an essential goal of environmentalism is to block the increase in one source of manmade power after another and ultimately to roll back the production of manmade power to the point of virtual nonexistence, thereby undoing the Industrial Revolution and returning the world to the economic Dark Ages. There is to be no atomic power. According to the environmentalists, it represents the death ray. There is also to be no power based on fossil fuels. According to the environmentalists, it causes “air pollution,” and now global warming, and must therefore be given up. There is not even to be significant hydropower. According to the environmentalists, the building of the necessary dams destroys intrinsically valuable wildlife habitat.

Only three things are to be permitted as sources of energy, according to the environmentalists. Two of them, “solar power” and power from windmills, are, as far as can be seen, utterly impracticable as significant sources of energy. (If, somehow, they became practicable, the environmentalists would undoubtedly find grounds for attacking them: they would denounce them for such things as the massive reflection of light from thousands or tens of thousands of acres filled with solar panels, or for maiming and killing birds with their propellers.) The third allowable source of energy, “conservation,” is a contradiction in terms. Conservation is not a source of energy. Its actual meaning is simply using less. Conservation is a source of energy for one use only at the price of deprivation of energy use somewhere else. 39

The environmentalists’ campaign against energy calls to mind the image of a boa constrictor entwining itself about the body of its victim and slowly squeezing the life out of him. There can be no other result for the economic system of the industrialized world but enfeeblement and ultimately death if its supplies of energy are progressively choked off.

The Toxicity of Environmentalism and the

Alleged Intrinsic Value of Nature

The environmental movement’s blindness to the value of industrial civilization is matched only by the blindness of the general public toward the nature of the environmental movement’s own actual values. Those values explain the movement’s hostility to industrial civilization, including its perversion of the concept of efficiency.

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 81

They are not known to most people, because the environmental movement has succeeded in focusing the public’s attention on absolutely trivial, indeed, nonexistent dangers, and away from the enormous actual danger it itself represents.

Thus, not so long ago, as a result of the influence of the environmental movement, a popular imported mineral water was removed from the market because tests showed that samples of it contained thirtyfive parts per billion of benzene. Although this was an amount so small that not many years ago it would have been impossible even to detect, it was assumed that considerations of public health required withdrawal of the product.

Such a case, of course, is not unusual nowadays. The presence of parts per billion of a toxic substance is routinely extrapolated into being regarded as a cause of human deaths. And whenever the number of projected deaths exceeds one in a million (or less), environmentalists demand that the government remove the offending pesticide, preservative, or other alleged bearer of toxic pollution from the market. They do so, even though a level of risk of one in a million is one-third as great as that of an airplane falling from the sky on one’s home.

While it is not necessary to question the good intentions and sincerity of the overwhelming majority of the rank-and-file members of the environmental or ecology movement, it is vital that the public realize that in this movement itself, which is so widely regarded as noble and lofty, can be found more than a little evidence of the most profound toxicity—evidence provided by leaders of the movement themselves, and in the clearest possible terms. Consider, for example, the following quotation from David M. Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, in his prominently featured Los Angeles Times book review of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature:

This [man’s “remaking the earth by degrees”] makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota a tame planet, be it monstrous or—however unlikely—benign. McKibben is a biocentrist, and so am I. We are not interested in the utility of a particular species or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me— than another human body, or a billion of them.

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.

It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape.

Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. 40

While Mr. Graber openly wishes for the death of a billion people, Mr. McKibben, the author he reviewed, quotes with approval John Muir’s benediction to alligators, describing it as a “good epigram” for his own, “humble approach”: “‘Honorable representatives of the great saurians of older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty!’” 41

Such statements represent pure, unadulterated poison. They express ideas and wishes that, if acted upon, would mean terror and death for enormous numbers of human beings.

These statements, and others like them, are made by prominent members of the environmental movement. 42 The significance of such statements cannot be diminished by ascribing them only to a small fringe of the environmental movement. Indeed, even if such views were indicative of the thinking only of 5 or 10 percent of the members of the environmental movement—the “deep ecology,” Earth First! wing—they would represent toxicity in the environmental movement as a whole not at the level of parts per billion or even parts per million, but at the level of parts per hundred, which, of course, is an enormously higher level of toxicity than what is deemed to constitute a danger to human life in virtually every other case in which deadly poison is present.

But the toxicity level of the environmental movement as a whole is much greater even than parts per hundred. It is certainly at least at the level of several parts per ten. This is obvious from the fact that the mainstream of the environmental movement makes no fundamental or significant criticisms of the likes of Messrs. Graber and McKibben. Indeed, John Muir, whose wish for alligators to “be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty” McKibben approvingly quotes, was the founder of the Sierra Club, which is proud to acknowledge that fact. The Sierra Club, of course, is the leading environmental organization and is supposedly the most respectable of them.

There is something much more important than the Sierra Club’s genealogy, however—something which provides an explanation in terms of basic principle of why the mainstream of the ecology movement does not attack what might be thought to be merely its fringe. This is a fundamental philosophical premise which the mainstream of the movement shares with the alleged fringe and which logically implies hatred for man and his achievements. Namely, the premise that nature possesses intrinsic value—that is, that nature is valuable in and of

82 CAPITALISM itself, apart from all contribution to human life and wellbeing.

The antihuman premise of nature’s intrinsic value goes back, in the Western world, as far as St. Francis of Assisi, who believed in the equality of all living creatures: man, cattle, birds, fish, and reptiles. Indeed, precisely on the basis of this philosophical affinity, and at the wish of the mainstream of the ecology movement, St. Francis of Assisi has been officially declared the patron saint of ecology by the Roman Catholic church.

The premise of nature’s intrinsic value extends to an alleged intrinsic value of forests, rivers, canyons, and hillsides—to everything and anything that is not man. Its influence is present in the Congress of the United States, in such statements as that made by Representative Morris Udall of Arizona: to wit, that a frozen, barren desert in Northern Alaska, where substantial oil deposits appear to exist, is “a sacred place” that should never be given over to oil rigs and pipelines. It is present in the supporting statement of a representative of the Wilderness Society that “There is a need to protect the land not just for wildlife and human recreation, but just to have it there.” 43 It has, of course, also been present in the sacrifice of the interests of human beings for the sake of snail darters and spotted owls.

The idea of nature’s intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he values as sources of food and clothing, so on the premise of nature’s intrinsic value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the pursuit of his wellbeing, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles, and rock formations that the environmentalists hold to be intrinsically valuable. Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic values of nature, the degree of man’s alleged destructiveness and evil is directly in proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature. Man is the rational being. It is his application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does. Thus, it is his possession and use of reason—manifested in his technology and industry—for which he is hated.

Indeed, the doctrine of intrinsic value implies that man is to regard himself as profaning the sacredness of nature by virtue of his very existence, because with every breath he draws and every step he takes he cannot help but disturb something or other of alleged intrinsic value. Thus, if man is not to extinguish his existence altogether, he is obliged by the doctrine of intrinsic value to minimize his existence by minimizing his impact on the rest of the world, and to feel guilty for every action he takes in support of his existence.

The doctrine of intrinsic value is itself, of course, only a rationalization for a preexisting hatred of man. It is invoked not because one attaches any actual value to what is alleged to have intrinsic value, but simply to serve as a pretext for denying values to man. For example, caribou feed upon vegetation, wolves eat caribou, and microbes attack wolves. Each of these, the vegetation, the caribou, the wolves, and the microbes, is alleged by the environmentalists to possess intrinsic value. Yet absolutely no course of action is indicated for man. Should man act to protect the intrinsic value of the vegetation from destruction by the caribou? Should he act to protect the intrinsic value of the caribou from destruction by the wolves? Should he act to protect the intrinsic value of the wolves from destruction by the microbes? Even though each of these alleged intrinsic values is at stake, man is not called upon to do anything. When does the doctrine of intrinsic value serve as a guide to what man should do? Only when man comes to attach value to something. Then it is invoked to deny him the value he seeks. For example, the intrinsic value of the vegetation et al. is invoked as a guide to man’s action only when there is something man wants, such as oil, and then, as in the case of Northern Alaska, its invocation serves to stop him from having it. In other words, the doctrine of intrinsic value is nothing but a doctrine of the negation of human values. It is pure nihilism.

It should be realized that it is logically implicit in what has just been said that to establish a public office such as that proposed in California, of “Environmental Advocate,” would be tantamount to establishing an office of Negator of Human Valuation. The work of such an office would be to stop man from achieving his values for no other reason than that he was man and wanted to achieve them.

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Of course, the environmental movement is not pure poison. Very few people would listen to it if it were. As I have said, it is poisonous only at the level of several parts per ten. Mixed in with the poison and overlaying it as a kind of sugarcoating is the advocacy of many measures which have the avowed purpose of promoting human life and wellbeing, and among these, some that, considered in isolation, might even achieve that purpose. The problem is that the mixture is poisonous. And thus, when one swallows environmentalism, one inescapably swallows poison.

Given the underlying nihilism of the movement, it is certainly not possible to accept at face value any of the claims it makes of seeking to improve human life and

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 83 wellbeing, especially when following its recommendations would impose on people great deprivation or cost. Indeed, nothing could be more absurd or dangerous than to take advice on how to improve one’s life and wellbeing from those who wish one dead and whose satisfaction comes from human terror, which, of course, as I have shown, is precisely what is wished in the environmental movement—openly and on principle. This conclusion, it must be stressed, applies irrespective of the scientific or academic credentials of an individual. If an alleged scientific expert believes in the intrinsic value of nature, then to seek his advice is equivalent to seeking the advice of a medical doctor who was on the side of the germs rather than the patient, if such a thing can be imagined. Obviously, congressional committees taking testimony from alleged expert witnesses on the subject of proposed environmental legislation need to be aware of this fact and never to forget it.

Not surprisingly, in virtually every significant case, the claims made by the environmentalists have turned out to be false or simply absurd.

The Alleged Pollution of Water and Air and Destruction of Species

The ecologists claim that economic progress and the industrial civilization that underlies it have been responsible for polluting the water and air and wantonly destroying animal and vegetable species, thereby endangering human life. To answer the ecologists’ claims in these areas, it is only necessary to recall a few facts that are known to everyone.

First, as concerns the relationship between industrialization and water quality: it is obvious that the actual safety of drinking water is in direct proportion to a country’s degree of economic advancement. One can safely drink the water virtually everywhere in the United States. One can do so in the major cities of Western Europe. But in travelling to poorer areas, such as Mexico, most of the rest of Latin America, and most of Asia and Africa, it is necessary to take precautions. (The recent cholera epidemic in Peru, with its chemically untreated, “natural” water supply provides a tragic testimony to the truth of the preceding statements.) Certainly, if one travels in the African or Vietnamese jungles, or even in the Canadian wilderness, one had better boil the water or use purification tablets. Even in a beautiful blue Canadian lake—the kind for which environmentalist posters used to depict an American Indian shedding a tear—there can be dead, decaying animals emitting morbific germs into the water one may happen to drink. The safety of water supplies obviously depends on chemical purification plants, pipelines, and pumping stations—in a word, on modern industry. While some rivers, lakes, and streams in the industrialized countries may be dirtier today than in the past, supplies of safe drinking water have never been greater, thanks to modern industry. (And, no doubt, many or most of the presently dirty bodies of water too would be clean and safe, if they were made subject to private property rights. In that case, individuals would have the incentive to make them clean and safe by being able to charge for water and such benefits as fishing rights.)

Second, as concerns the relationship between industrialization and air quality, the obvious fact is that although air quality in large towns and cities is poorer than that in the open country, and always has been, it is far better today than in the past—precisely because of economic progress. Before the advent of modern industry, the open streets served as sewers. In addition, in any large town or city, a heavy concentration of horses created an enormous pollution problem from the dropping of vast quantities of manure and urine. The development of the modern iron and steel industry eliminated the sewage problem with lowcost iron and steel pipe; the development of the automobile industry eliminated the pollution from horses. Central heating, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and modern methods of ventilation have made further major contributions to improving the quality of the air in which people live and work.

And although in the earlier years of the Industrial Revolution the process of economic improvement was accompanied by coal dust in towns and cities (which people willingly accepted as the by-product of not having to freeze and of being able to have all the other advantages of an industrial society), subsequent advances, in the form of electricity and natural gas, have radically reduced this problem. The substitution of atomic power plants for coal and oil-fired plants would make a further major contribution to air quality, because they emit no particulate matter of any kind into the atmosphere. Atomic power, however, is the form of power most hated by the environmentalists. 44 As shown previously, the virtual elimination of tuberculosis and the radical reduction in the frequency of, and mortality rate resulting from, other respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia, provide further eloquent testimony to the actual contribution of industrial civilization to air quality.

Third, as concerns man’s alleged wanton destruction of other species: man is responsible for the existence of many species of animals and plants in their present numbers and varieties. For example, man is responsible for the existence of the overwhelming majority of the cattle, sheep, hogs, chickens, goats, horses, and cats and dogs that are alive, and for the existence of most of the specific breeds in which they exist. There would certainly be no such things as Holstein cattle, thoroughbred racehorses, miniature schnauzers, toy poodles, or Persian

cats, in the absence of man. The population of all varieties of domestic animals would be radically reduced without the existence of man to feed them, promote their health, and protect them from their natural enemies. In the same way, man is responsible for the fact that grain, vegetables, flowers, and grass grow where otherwise there would be only weeds. Man is responsible for the existence of all manner of specific strains of plant life, from American Beauty roses to varieties of zucchini.

Furthermore, as we have seen, despite the misconceptions spawned by conservationism and the ecology doctrine, where forest land is privately owned, man is also responsible for the existence of many trees and forests, which the profit motive leads him to regard as a longterm crop. 45 In addition, of course, man also plants trees as objects of beauty to enhance his surroundings. Practically all of the trees in many portions of Southern California and other arid areas were planted and are maintained by man for just this reason.

Man is clearly not the destroyer of species. He enormously promotes the existence of those species that are of benefit to him. He seeks to destroy only those species that are harmful to him, including those that are harmful to the species whose existence he tries to promote. Thus, he seeks to extirpate such species as the smallpox virus, rats, fleas, rattlesnakes, coyotes, wolves, and mountain lions.

Sometimes, of course, cases arise in which his activity threatens the existence of species that are not hostile and that have been useful to him, such as the American buffalo and, nowadays, certain varieties of whales. In these cases, the species are not domesticated and raised commercially because the usefulness of the animal is not great enough to justify the expense involved. 46

It might be of some value if a few members of every species could be preserved as objects of study or curiosity and perhaps as a future source of genes for use in genetic engineering. From this point of view, it would be a welcome event if the story line of some low-budget films became a reality and a scientific expedition were to come upon a preserve of dinosaurs somewhere. Those who consider such objectives important, and there certainly appears to be no lack of such people, are free to raise money to establish wildlife preserves. Nevertheless, from a practical point of view, it is obvious that man’s life would simply not be significantly affected by the passing of such species as the buffalo or the endangered whales. The mere fact that the loss of a species may be irreplaceable from a genetic point of view, and that at some point in the future it might conceivably be regretted for this reason, is not a logical basis for arguing that it must not be allowed to occur. If this line of argument were accepted, people could never clean their garages or throw anything away, for who knows, the clutter might contain a letter from George Washington or a winning lottery ticket. Furthermore, the ecology movement, ironically enough, strongly opposes any human use to which such an enlarged future gene pool might be put: it is totally opposed to genetic engineering. The sense of moral imperative it projects in seeking not to permit the loss of any species derives from its mistaken notion that species possess intrinsic value.

The disappearance of species has been going on since the beginning of life on earth. It appears to be no more rapid now than at any other time. Furthermore, to whatever extent it occurs as the result of human activity, it is still simply part of the process of nature. Man himself is part of nature. Any species that he may destroy in the course of his activities cannot in reason be regarded any differently from the countless species destroyed by any other natural process.

If one wishes to judge matters from an ethical perspective, the only valid perspective is that of man himself— that is, a perspective which takes for granted the supreme value of human life and wellbeing and man’s right to do everything in his power to promote his life and wellbeing. From this point of view, one cannot regard man’s activities in relation to nature with anything but awe and admiration. In the territories embraced by modern Western civilization, he has not only succeeded in these activities, but succeeded with surpassing brilliance. For he has transformed his environment to promote his survival and wellbeing. He has transformed enormous areas that were originally hostile or at best indifferent to his survival into virtual gardens—into thriving areas of agriculture, industry, and commerce. In so doing, he has changed the balance of nature radically in his favor.

In view of these facts, the environmentalists’ claims that the effect of man’s productive activities in an industrial society on water, air, and species represents any kind of danger to human life and wellbeing are patently absurd. All of the isolated negatives the environmentalists point to, such as smog in some cities, or dirty rivers, lakes, or beaches in various places, have occurred in the context of the most radical improvements in human life, health, and wellbeing, including the most radical improvements in the quality of the water people drink and otherwise use, in the quality of the air they live and work in, and in the whole balance of nature. Nevertheless, the environmentalists proceed as though problems of filth emanated from industrial civilization, as though filth were not the all-pervasive condition of human life in preindustrial societies, and as though industrial civilization represented a decline from more healthful conditions of the past. If it is filth and squalor one wants to complain about, one should go to virtually any of the

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 85 countries of the socalled third world, which are not industrialized. There one will find filth and squalor— “pollution”—of the worst kind: human excrement and, indeed, human corpses floating downstream and contaminating the rivers through which they pass.

Moreover, as previously indicated, what would overcome most of the isolated negatives in the industrial societies, apart from the wider use of atomic power, would be the extension of private ownership of the means of production, especially of land and natural resources. The incentive of private owners is to use their property in ways that maximize its longrun value and wherever possible, to improve their property. Consistent with this fact, ways should be sought for extending the principle of private ownership to lakes, rivers, beaches, and even to portions of the ocean. Privately owned lakes, rivers, and beaches, would almost certainly be clean lakes, rivers, and beaches. Privately owned, electronically fenced ocean ranches would guarantee abundant supplies of almost everything useful that is found in or beneath the sea. Certainly, the vast landholdings of the U.S. government in the Western states and in Alaska should be privatized.

Of course, what leads the environmentalists to make their claims concerning water and air pollution and the destruction of species is not any actual concern with human life and wellbeing. Human life and wellbeing, it cannot be repeated too often, are not their standard of what is good; instead, it is the alleged intrinsic values found in nature.

The Alleged Threat from Toxic Chemicals, Including Acid Rain and Ozone Depletion

Almost all of the other claims of the environmentalists, which for the most part are more recent, do not fare any better than their claims concerning water and air pollution and the destruction of species. In virtually every case, they too have turned out to be false or simply absurd.

Consider, for example, the recent case of Alar, a chemical spray used for many years on apples in order to preserve their color and freshness. Here, it turned out that even if the environmentalists’ claims had actually been true, that the use of Alar would result in 4.2 deaths per million over a 70-year lifetime, all that would have been signified was that eating apples sprayed with Alar would then have been less dangerous than driving to the supermarket to buy the apples!

Consider: 4.2 deaths per million over a 70-year period means that in any one year in the United States, with its population of roughly 250 million people, approximately 15 deaths would be attributable to Alar! This is the result obtained by multiplying 4.2 per million times 250 million and then dividing by 70. In the same one-year period, approximately 50,000 deaths occur in motor vehicle accidents in the United States, most of them within a few miles of the victims’ homes, and undoubtedly far more than 15 of them on trips to or from supermarkets. Nevertheless, because of irresponsible, sensationalist newspaper and television reporting of the ecologists’ claims concerning Alar, a panic ensued, followed by a plunge in the sale of apples, the financial ruin of an untold number of apple growers, and the virtual disappearance of Alar.

Before the panic over Alar, there was the panic over asbestos. According to Forbes magazine, it turns out that in the forms in which it is normally used in the United States, asbestos is one-third as likely to be the cause of death as being struck by lightning. 47

Then there is the alleged damage to lakes and forests caused by acid rain. While the phenomenon of acid rain certainly exists (largely as the result of governmental insistence on the construction of smokestacks two hundred feet or more tall), it turns out, according to Policy Review, that the acidification of the lakes and surrounding forests has been the result not of acid rain, but of the cessation of logging operations in the affected areas and thus the absence of the alkaline runoff produced by such operations. This runoff had made naturally acidic lakes and forests nonacidic for a few generations. 48 Furthermore, according to the final report of the U.S. government’s National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, the direct major cause of acidification appears to be simply one hundred fifty million tons a year of bird droppings. 49

Besides these cases, there were the respective hysterias over dioxin in the ground at Times Beach, Missouri; TCE in the drinking water of Woburn, Massachusetts; the chemicals in Love Canal, in New York; and radiation at Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania. (The last has already been shown to be groundless.) According to Professor Bruce Ames, one of the world’s leading experts on cancer, the amount of dioxin that anyone would have absorbed in Times Beach was far less than the amount required to do any harm and, indeed, the actual harm to Times Beach residents from dioxin was less than that of drinking a glass of beer. 50 (The Environmental Protection Agency itself subsequently reduced its estimate of the danger from dioxin by a factor of fifteen-sixteenths. 51 ) In the case of Woburn, according to Ames, it turned out that the cluster of leukemia cases which occurred there was statistically random and that the drinking water there was actually above the national average in safety, and not, as had been claimed, the cause of the leukemia cases. 52 In the case of Love Canal, Ames reports, it turned out upon investigation that the cancer rate among the former residents was no higher than average. 53 (It is necessary to use the phrase “former residents” because

the town lost most of its population in the panic and forced evacuation caused by the environmentalists’ claims.) Overall, Ames writes, “There is no convincing evidence from epidemiology or toxicology that pollution is a significant source of birth defects and cancer. . . . the epidemiologic studies of Love Canal, dioxin in Agent Orange, Contra Costa County refineries, Silicon Valley, Woburn, and the use of DDT provide no convincing evidence that pollution was the cause of human harm in any of these well-publicized exposures.” 54 The reason is that the amount of actual exposure was simply far too small to be harmful.

Before these hysterias, there were allegations about the death of Lake Erie and mercury poisoning in tuna fish. All along, Lake Erie has been very much alive and was even producing near record quantities of fish at the very time its death was being announced. The mercury in the tuna fish was the result of the natural presence of mercury in sea water; and evidence provided by museums showed that similar levels of mercury had been present in tuna fish since prehistoric times.

And now, in yet another overthrow of the environmentalists’ claims, a noted climatologist, Professor Robert Pease, has shown that it is impossible for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to destroy large quantities of ozone in the stratosphere because relatively few of them are even capable of reaching the stratosphere in the first place. He also shows that the celebrated ozone “hole” over Antarctica every fall is a phenomenon of nature, probably in existence since long before CFCs were invented, and results largely from the fact that during the long Antarctic night ultraviolet sunlight is not present to create fresh ozone. 55

The Dishonesty of the Environmentalists’ Claims

The reason that one after another of the environmentalists’ claims turn out to be proven wrong is that they are made without any regard for truth in the first place. In making their claims, the environmentalists reach for whatever is at hand that will serve to frighten people, make them lose confidence in science and technology, and, ultimately, lead them to deliver themselves up to the environmentalists’ tender mercies. The claims rest on unsupported conjectures and wild leaps of imagination from scintillas of fact to arbitrary conclusions, by means of evasion and the drawing of invalid inferences. It is out and out evasion and invalid inference to leap from findings about the effects of feeding rats or mice dosages the equivalent of a hundred or more times what any human being would ever ingest, and then draw inferences about the effects on people of consuming normal quantities. Fears of parts per billion of this or that chemical causing single-digit deaths per million do not rest on science, but on imagination. Such claims are based neither on experiments nor on the concept of causality.

No one ever has observed, or can or will observe, such a thing as two groups of a million people identical in all respects except that over a 70-year period the members of one of the groups consume apples sprayed with Alar, while the members of the other group do not, and then 4.2 members of the first group die. The process by which such a conclusion is reached, and its degree of actual scientific seriousness, is essentially the same as that of a college students’ bull session, which consists of practically nothing but arbitrary assumptions, manipulations, guesses, and plain hot air. In such a session, one might start with the known consequences of a quarter-ton safe falling ten stories onto the head of an unfortunate passerby below, and from there go on to speculate about the conceivable effects in a million cases of other passersby happening to drop from their hand or mouth an M&M or a peanut on their shoe, and come to the conclusion that 4.2 of them will die.

Furthermore, as indicated, in contrast to the procedures of a bull session, reason and actual science establish causes, which, in their nature, are universal. When, for example, genuine causes of death, such as arsenic, strychnine, or bullets, attack vital organs of the human body, death is absolutely certain to result in all but a handful of cases per million. When something is in fact the cause of some effect, it is so in each and every case in which specified conditions prevail, and fails to be so only in cases in which the specified conditions are not present, such as a person’s having built up a tolerance to poison or wearing a bulletproof vest. Such claims as a thousand different things each causing cancer in a handful of cases are proof of nothing but that the actual causes are not yet known—and, beyond that, an indication of the breakdown of the epistemology of contemporary science. (This epistemological breakdown, I might add, has radically accelerated since the 1960s, when the government took over most of the scientific research in the United States and began the largescale financing of statistical studies as a substitute for the discovery of causes.)

In making their claims, the environmentalists willfully ignore such facts as that carcinogens, poisons, and radiation exist in nature. Fully half of the chemicals found in nature are carcinogenic when fed to animals in massive quantities—the same proportion as applies to manmade chemicals when fed in massive quantities. (The cause of the resulting cancers, according to Professor Ames, is actually not the chemicals, either natural or manmade, but the repeated destruction of tissue caused by the massively excessive doses in which the chemicals are fed, such as saccharin being fed to rats in a quantity comparable to humans drinking eight hundred cans of

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 87 diet soda a day. 56 ) Arsenic, one of the deadliest poisons, is a naturally occurring chemical element. Oleander, one of the most beautiful plants, is also a deadly poison, as are many other plants and herbs. Radium and uranium, with all their radioactivity, are found in nature. Indeed, all of nature is radioactive to some degree. If the environmentalists did not close their eyes to what exists in nature, if they did not associate every negative exclusively with man, if they applied to nature the standards of safety they claim to be necessary in the case of man’s activities, they would have to run in terror from nature. They would have to use one-half of the world to construct protective containers or barriers against all the allegedly deadly carcinogens, toxins, and radioactive material that constitute the other half of the world.

It would be a profound mistake to dismiss the repeatedly false claims of the environmentalists merely as a case of the little boy who cried wolf. They are a case of the wolf crying again and again about alleged dangers to the little boy. The only real danger, of course, is to listen to the wolf.

Direct evidence of the willful dishonesty of the environmental movement comes from one of its leading representatives, Stephen Schneider, who is wellknown for his predictions of global catastrophe. In the October 1989 issue of Discover magazine, he is quoted (with approval) as follows:

“. . . To do this, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. This

‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Thus, in the absence of verification by sources totally independent of the environmental movement and free of its taint, all of its claims of seeking to improve human life and wellbeing in this or that specific way must be regarded simply as lies, having the actual purpose of inflicting needless deprivation or suffering. In the category of malicious lies fall all of the environmental movement’s claims about our having to abandon industrial civilization or any significant part of it in order to cope with the dangers of alleged global warming, ozone depletion, exhaustion of natural resources, or any other alleged danger. Indeed, all claims constituting denunciations of science, technology, or industrial civilization which are advanced in the name of service to human life and wellbeing are tantamount to claiming that our survival and wellbeing depend on our abandonment of reason. (Science, technology, and industry are leading products of reason and are inseparable from it.) All such claims should be taken as nothing but further proof of the environmental movement’s hatred of man’s nature and man’s life, certainly not of any actual significant danger to human life and wellbeing.

The Alleged Threat of “Global Warming”

Currently, the leading claim of the environmentalists is that of “global warming.” It is alleged that man’s economic activities, above all the burning of fossil fuels, are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This will supposedly raise the average mean temperature of the world by several degrees over the next century and will cause a rise in sea levels because of melting ice.

It should be realized that despite the sensationalist claims of James Hansen of NASA, made during the heat wave of the summer of 1988, that global warming was at hand, weather satellites showed no evidence of global warming in the 1980s. 57 According to The New York Times, “Few scientists believe that greenhouse warming can now be detected amid the normal swings of climate.” 58

If one did not understand its underlying motivation, the environmental movement’s resort to the fear of global warming might appear astonishing in view of all the previous fears the movement has professed. These fears, in case anyone has forgotten, have concerned the alleged onset of a new ice age as the result of the same industrial development that is now supposed to result in global warming, and the alleged creation of a “nuclear winter” as the result of man’s use of atomic explosives.

The words of Paul Ehrlich and his incredible claims in connection with the “greenhouse effect” should be recalled. In the first wave of ecological hysteria, that “scientist” declared:

At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump. We do know that very small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the Earth could be very serious. With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperate regions. With a few degrees of heating, the polar ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet. Gondola to the

Empire State Building, anyone? 59

The 250-foot rise in the sea level projected by Ehrlich as the result of global warming has been scaled back somewhat. According even to McKibben, the “worst case scenario” is now supposed to be 11 feet, by the year 2100, with something less than 7 feet considered more likely. 60 According to a United Nations panel, it is supposed to be 25.6 inches. 61 (Even this still more limited projected rise did not stop the U.N. panel, allegedly composed of scientists, from calling for an immediate 60

percent reduction in worldwide carbon dioxide emissions to try to prevent it. 62 )

Perhaps of even greater significance is the continuous and profound distrust of science and technology that the environmental movement displays. The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one—not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology—had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather—for the next one hundred years!

It is, after all, supposedly on the basis of a weather forecast that we are being asked to abandon the Industrial Revolution or, as it is euphemistically put, “to radically and profoundly change the way in which we live”—to our enormous material detriment. We are being asked to begin with a curtailment of energy consumption sufficient to achieve a global limitation on carbon dioxide emissions, indeed, a curtailment sufficient to achieve an immediate 60 percent reduction in such emissions. (It is significant, of course, that any global limitation on carbon dioxide emissions, let alone a 60 percent reduction, implies that the economic development, and hence increased energy consumption, of the vast presently backward regions of the world would have to be accomplished at the expense of the equivalently reduced energy consumption of the more advanced countries.)

Very closely connected with the demand for reduced carbon-dioxide emissions and energy consumption is something else that might appear amazing. This concerns prudence and caution. As we have seen, no matter what the assurances of scientists and engineers, based in every detail on the best established laws of physics—about backup systems, fail-safe systems, containment buildings as strong as U-boat pens, defenses in depth, and so on—when it comes to atomic power, the environmental movement is unwilling to gamble on the unborn children of fifty generations hence being exposed to harmful radiation. But on the strength of a weather forecast, it is willing to wreck the economic system of the modern world—to literally throw away industrial civilization. (Any significant limitation on carbon dioxide emissions would be utterly devastating, let alone the enormous immediate reduction urged by that U.N. panel.)

The meaning of this insanity is that industrial civilization is to be wrecked because this is what must be done to avoid bad weather. All right, very bad weather. If we destroy the energy base needed to produce and operate the construction equipment required to build strong, well-made, comfortable houses for hundreds of millions of people, we shall be safer from the wind and rain, the environmental movement alleges, than if we retain and enlarge that energy base. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate refrigerators and air conditioners, we shall be better protected from hot weather than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement claims. If we destroy our capacity to produce and operate tractors and harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and produce medicines, we shall secure our food supply and our health better than if we retain and enlarge that capacity, the environmental movement asserts.

There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning how man can cope with his environment. Instead of our taking action upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our inaction. Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of nature will arise! The threatening forces of nature are not the product of nature, but of us! Thus speaks the environmental movement.

In answer to this insanity, it must be stressed that even if global warming turned out to be a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization would have no great difficulty in coping with it—that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired. The seeming difficulties of coping with global warming, or any other largescale change, arise only when the problem is viewed from the perspective of government central planners.

It would be too great a problem for government bureaucrats to handle (as is the production even of an adequate supply of wheat or nails, as the experience of the whole socialist world has so eloquently shown). But it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve. It would be solved by means of each individual being free to decide how best to cope with the particular aspects of global warming that affected him.

Individuals would decide, on the basis of profit-and-loss calculations, what changes they needed to make in their businesses and in their personal lives, in order best to adjust to the situation. They would decide where it was now relatively more desirable to own land, locate farms and businesses, and live and work, and where it was

relatively less desirable, and what new comparative advantages each location had for the production of which goods. Factories, stores, and houses all need replacement sooner or later. In the face of a change in the relative desirability of different locations, the pattern of replacement would be different. Perhaps some replacements would have to be made sooner than otherwise. To be sure, some land values would fall and others would rise. Whatever happened, individuals would respond in a way that minimized their losses and maximized their possible gains. 63 The essential thing they would require is the freedom to serve their self-interests by buying land and moving their businesses to the areas rendered relatively more attractive, and the freedom to seek employment and buy or rent housing in those areas.

Given this freedom, the totality of the problem would be overcome. This is because, under capitalism, the actions of the individuals, and the thinking and planning behind those actions, are coordinated and harmonized by the price system (as many former central planners of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have come to learn). 64 As a result, the problem would be solved in exactly the same way that tens and hundreds of millions of free individuals have solved much greater problems, such as redesigning the economic system to deal with the replacement of the horse by the automobile, the settlement of the American West, and the release of the far greater part of the labor of the economic system from agriculture to industry.

This is not to deny that important problems of adjustment would exist if global warming did in fact come to pass. But whatever they would be, they would all have perfectly workable solutions. The most extreme case would be that of the Maldive Islanders, in the Indian Ocean, all of whose land might disappear under water. The population of the Maldive Islands is less than two hundred thousand people. In 1940, in a period of a few days, Great Britain was able to evacuate its army of more than three hundred thousand soldiers from the port of Dunkirk, under the threat of enemy gunfire. Surely, over a period of decades, the opportunity for comfortable resettlement could be arranged for the people of the Maldives.

Even the prospective destruction of much of Holland, if it could not be averted by the construction of greater sea walls, could be dealt with by the very simple means of the rest of Europe, and the United States and Canada, extending the freedom of immigration to Dutch citizens. If this were done, then in a relatively short time, the economic losses suffered as the result of physical destruction in Holland would hardly be noticed, and least of all by most of the former Dutchmen.

For densely populated, impoverished countries with lowlying coastal areas, like Bangladesh and Egypt, the obvious solution is for those countries to sweep away all of the government corruption and underlying irrational laws and customs that stand in the way of largescale foreign investment and thus of industrialization. This is precisely what needs to be done in these countries in any case, with or without global warming, if their terrible poverty and enormous mortality rates are to be overcome. If they do this, then the physical loss of a portion of their territory will not entail the death of anyone, and, indeed, their standard of living will rapidly improve. If they refuse to do this, then nothing but their own irrationality should be blamed for their suffering. The threat of global warming, if there is really anything to it, should propel them into taking now the actions they should have taken long ago. 65

Indeed, it would probably turn out that if the necessary adjustments were allowed to be made, global warming, if it actually came, would prove highly beneficial to mankind on net balance. For example, there is evidence suggesting that it would postpone the onset of the next ice age by a thousand years or more and that the higher level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is supposed to cause the warming process, would be highly beneficial to agriculture by stimulating the growth of vegetation. 66 Growing seasons too might be extended. 67

Furthermore, any loss of agricultural land, such as that which is supposed to take place in lowlying areas as the result of higher sea levels, would be far more than compensated for by vast quantities of newly useable land in central Canada and in Russia. In addition, there would be the major contribution made by the preceding clearing of the Amazon and other jungles. (The clearing of these jungles—not “tropical rain forests,” as they are euphemistically called nowadays—and the concomitant elimination of their poisonous snakes and other hostile beasts, and replacement with farms and ranches, is an enormous boon from the point of view of human life and wellbeing. 68 )

Whether global warming comes or not, it is certain that nature itself will sooner or later produce major changes in the climate. To deal with those changes and virtually all other changes arising from whatever cause, man absolutely requires individual freedom, science, and technology. In a word, he requires the industrial civilization constituted by capitalism. What he does not require is the throttling of his ability to act, by the environmental movement. If it really were the case that the average mean temperature of the world would rise a few degrees in the next century as the result of the burning of fossil fuels and of other modern industrial processes, the only appropriate response would be along the lines of being sure that more and better air conditioners were available.

(Similarly, if there were in fact to be some reduction in the ozone layer, the appropriate response, to avoid the additional cases of skin cancer that would allegedly occur from exposure to more intense sunlight, would be to be sure that there were more sunglasses, hats, and sun-tan lotion available.) In absolutely no case would the appropriate response be to seek to throttle and destroy industrial civilization. Primitive man, the ideal of the environmentalists, was incapable of successfully coping with climate changes. Modern man, thanks to industrial civilization and capitalism, is capable of successfully coping with climate changes. To do so, it is essential that he ignore the environmentalists and not abandon the intellectual and material heritage that elevates him above primitive man.

Why Economic Activity Necessarily Tends to

Improve the Environment

It is important to realize that when the environmentalists talk about destruction of the “environment” as the result of economic activity, their claims are permeated by the doctrine of intrinsic value. Thus, what they actually mean to a very great extent is merely the destruction of alleged intrinsic values in nature such as jungles, deserts, rock formations, and animal species which are either of no value to man or hostile to man. That is their concept of the “environment.” If, in contrast to the environmentalists, one means by “environment” the surroundings of man—the external material conditions of human life—then it becomes clear that all of man’s productive activities have the inherent tendency to improve his environment, indeed, that that is their essential purpose.

This becomes obvious when one recalls that the entire world physically consists of nothing but chemical elements. These elements are never destroyed. They simply reappear in different combinations, in different proportions, in different places. Apart from what has been lost in a few rockets, the quantity of every chemical element in the world today is the same as it was before the Industrial Revolution. The only difference is that, because of the Industrial Revolution, instead of lying dormant, out of man’s control, the chemical elements have been moved about, as never before, in such a way as to improve human life and wellbeing. For instance, some part of the world’s iron and copper has been moved from the interior of the earth, where it was useless, to now constitute buildings, bridges, automobiles, and a million and one other things of benefit to human life. Some part of the world’s carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen has been separated from certain compounds and recombined in others, in the process releasing energy to heat and light homes, power industrial machinery, automobiles, airplanes, ships, and railroad trains, and in countless other ways serve human life. It follows that insofar as man’s environment consists of the chemical elements iron, copper, carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and his productive activity makes them useful to himself in these ways, his environment is correspondingly improved.

All that all of man’s productive activities fundamentally consist of is the rearrangement of nature-given chemical elements for the purpose of making them stand in a more useful relationship to himself—that is, for the purpose of improving his environment.

Consider further examples. To live, man needs to be able to move his person and his goods from place to place. If an untamed forest stands in his way, such movement is difficult or impossible. It represents an improvement in his environment, therefore, when man moves the chemical elements that constitute some of the trees of the forest somewhere else and lays down the chemical elements brought from somewhere else to constitute a road. It is an improvement in his environment when man builds bridges, digs canals, opens mines, clears land, constructs factories and houses, or does anything else that represents an improvement in the external, material conditions of his life. All of these things represent an improvement in man’s material surroundings—his environment. All of them represent the rearrangement of nature’s elements in a way that makes them stand in a more useful relationship to human life and wellbeing.

Thus, all of economic activity has as its sole purpose the improvement of the environment—it aims exclusively at the improvement of the external, material conditions of human life. Production and economic activity are precisely the means by which man adapts his environment to himself and thereby improves it.

So much for the environmentalists’ claims about man’s destruction of the environment. Only from the perspective of the alleged intrinsic value of nature and the nonvalue of man, can man’s improvement of his environment be termed destruction of the environment.

The environmentalists’ claims about the impending destruction of the “planet” are entirely the result of the influence of the intrinsic value doctrine. What the environmentalists are actually afraid of is not that the planet or its ability to support human life will be destroyed, but that the increase in its ability to support human life will destroy its still extensively existing “wildness.” They cannot bear the thought of the earth becoming fully subject to man’s control, with its jungles and deserts replaced by farms, pastures, and forests planted by man, as man wills. They cannot bear the thought of the earth becoming man’s garden. In the words of McKibben, “The problem is that nature, the independent force that

has surrounded us since our earliest days, cannot coexist with our numbers and our habits. We may well be able to create a world that can support our numbers and our habits, but it will be an artificial world. . . .” 69

The influence of the doctrine of intrinsic value and of its implicit hatred of mankind is present in the usage of the very word pollution. More and more, “pollution” is used to mean any change in the state of nature caused by man. It is only from this perspective that one can label as “pollution” such things as the possible changes in the chemical composition of the earth’s atmosphere which may result as the by-product of man’s productive activity. Consider. Somewhat more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or less ozone in the stratosphere (assuming these things were in fact the result of human productive activity) does not make the atmosphere dirty. It merely makes it somewhat different, requiring a somewhat different response on the part of human beings in order most efficiently to adapt to their environment. It is of a radically different character from pollution in the legitimate sense of, say, the discharge of human fecal material into drinking water. Its being subsumed under the concept of “pollution” serves as a vehicle to attack productive activity.

Closely related to the misuse of the word pollution is the practice of describing the chemical emissions into the atmosphere entailed in industrial production, as using the atmosphere as “a garbage dump.” The meaning of the word “garbage,” according to The American College Dictionary, is “1. refuse animal and vegetable matter from a kitchen. 2. any foul refuse; vile or worthless matter.” To use the term to describe chemical emissions is an unwarranted extension of the term having no other purpose than to attack productive activity and man’s life. Ironically, garbage is precisely that allegedly good “biodegradable” material the environmentalists are so fond of. A further irony is that precisely when human beings eliminate garbage, by burning it and thus reducing it to mere carbon and gases, they are denounced for dumping garbage—into the atmosphere.

Like the use of the word concupiscence in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word pollution to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it.

3. The Collectivist Bias of Environmentalism

As I have said, the ecology movement could not have nearly the following and the influence it does if its basic ethical perspective were known. Thus, most of the time it asserts that it actually has the welfare of people in mind, and that it is in the name of human wellbeing that it attacks technology and economic progress. When it does this, it proceeds as though despite all the best efforts of scientists, engineers, and businessmen to improve human life and wellbeing they systematically fail, at least in the long run. Here, as in the case of alleged global warming, the movement apparently claims to be able to see from the vantage point of its allegedly superior wisdom that the true road to human wellbeing requires that mankind not attempt to travel the road to wellbeing—that it renounce action based on science and technology. Only then, allegedly, by virtue of its renunciation of such activity, and by virtue of its inaction, will mankind avoid self-destruction.

In proceeding in this way, the ecology movement adopts the tactic of taking for granted all the benefits of economic activity and proceeds as though they existed independently of such activity. It then concentrates all of its attention on a few relatively minor phenomena of a negative kind that it traces to economic activity and that it regards as the sum and substance of such activity, such as the emission of certain chemicals into the atmosphere and the consequent creation of smog or, more recently, alleged global warming. Thus, for example, it treats automobiles and power plants as though they were a threat to human life and wellbeing rather than the enormous source of improvement that they actually are. It proceeds as though people could continue having efficient transportation and electric power and light while being deprived of the means required for their existence: the oil fields, pipelines, and power plants whose construction it fights tooth and nail.

In this process, the ecology movement refers to “conservation” as though it were some kind of magical method of achieving radical reductions in energy use without sacrifice. It claims, for example, that the loss of millions of barrels of oil per day can easily be offset by such means as simply doubling the number of miles per gallon obtained by the average automobile Americans drive. (In its view, evidently, people have up to now simply been too foolish to realize that they could get along just as well with automobiles that would cut their cost of fuel in half. Or, allegedly, if the buyers of cars have realized it, each and every manufacturer and potential manufacturer of automobiles has been too foolish to realize the enormous competitive advantage he would enjoy by meeting the public’s demand for such fuel-efficient cars. Or, if the manufacturers have realized it, they have not provided such cars, because each and every automobile manufacturer and potential automobile manufacture is allegedly part of a “monopolistic conspiracy” or otherwise just arbitrarily refuses to provide the market with such cars. In this way, the environmental movement contemptuously dismisses as of no significance such differences in

automobiles as size, weight, and power of acceleration, and the public’s demonstrated preference for larger, heavier, and more powerful automobiles that obtain fewer miles per gallon, over smaller, lighter, less powerful automobiles that obtain more miles per gallon.)

In its masquerade as fighter for human welfare, the technique of the ecology movement consists of an appeal to collectivism and hysteria, in order to create the impression of an overthrow of the harmony-of-interests doctrine of classical economics and the existence of a conflict of interests between the individual and the rest of society.

The truth is that the necessary tendency of economic activity to improve the environment, which was described at the end of the preceding section, is powerfully reinforced by the existence of freedom and free exchange. Freedom and free exchange create an inherent harmony of the rational self-interests of people. When the actions of individuals are free and do not represent the use of force, their effect is necessarily to benefit everyone involved. This is because each individual acts to benefit himself and must at the same time benefit those whose cooperation is to be secured, or else he will not receive it. In addition, no one standing outside the transaction can be harmed, because any evidence of harm to the person or property of others is grounds to prohibit the action as an act of force and violation of freedom. For example, under freedom, if I decide to construct a building, I do so because I judge that I can serve my own interests by doing so. At the same time, I can find workers and suppliers to help me build it and a buyer or tenants to use it, only by making it to the self-interest of all of these parties to deal with me. In addition, the construction of my building must not endanger other, surrounding buildings or passersby; if it does, I am guilty of an initiation of physical force against the property or persons of others, and thus grounds exist to stop me. As a result, the inherent tendency of my action is to produce improvement for others as well as myself, and thereby to improve general wellbeing.

The stock in trade of the ecologists, however, is to find cases in which perceptible negative consequences to others appear when the actions of large numbers of individuals are cumulated, and then incredibly to exaggerate the importance of those negatives by techniques of hysteria, in the process obliterating all concern for the rights and responsibilities of individuals. The ecologists conclude by arguing that no individual should be allowed to act without first proving that his action will have no adverse “impact” on the “environment.”

Thus, for example, ecologists consider such phenomena as the clearing of large areas of land for the establishment of farms. Such clearing of land may sometimes have the effect of raising the water level downstream and thereby causing flooding, as allegedly occurred along the Mississippi River as the result of the settlement of the Midwest. Likewise, they consider the fact that the movement of large numbers of people into the same area may result in traffic congestion. And in exactly the same way, they consider the effects of hundreds of millions or billions of people burning fossil fuels, using CFCs, and so on, which actions allegedly result in global warming and ozone depletion.

In their treatment of all such cases, the ecologists show themselves to be collectivists. They are prepared to hold individuals responsible for negative effects that are not the responsibility of individuals qua individuals, that is, for negative effects which are not caused by any individual, but which are the result of the combined actions of the members of the group to which the individual belongs. Such negative effects, not being the responsibility of any individual, should properly be regarded as the equivalent of acts of nature, and individuals should be left free to respond to them in the way most to their advantage. Instead, the ecologists seek to paralyze the individual by harnessing him to the collective—to prohibit him from acting in all cases in which noticeable negative consequences flow from the actions of the collective to which he belongs. And then, of course, instead of allowing the negative effects to be dealt with by the free actions of individuals, the ecologists can see no other solution than that of collective action, in the form of government planning.

In such cases, the ecologists mistakenly assume that they have the right to prohibit the actions they find displeasing. Actually, however, they do not. The fact that the separate, independent actions of vast numbers of people may result in significant negative consequences to someone by virtue of their cumulative effect is simply not the responsibility of any of the individuals concerned. It should not be a basis for prohibiting his actions. To prohibit the action of an individual in such a case is to hold him responsible for something for which he is simply not in fact responsible. It is exactly the same in principle as punishing him for something he did not do.

The harm that results from the cumulative actions of the whole category of individuals, without any of the individuals qua individuals being responsible, should, as I say, be regarded as having the same status as harm caused by acts of nature. That is, such phenomena as floods downstream possibly resulting from the actions of tens or hundreds of thousands of separately acting individuals, each of whom as an individual causes no perceptible harm to anyone, should be regarded in exactly the same way as floods that result when few or no human beings are present upstream. Exactly the same is true of the similar phenomena, or alleged phenomena, of global

warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. As the result, or alleged result, of the actions of vast numbers of individuals, each of whom has no individual responsibility for them, they should be regarded in exactly the same way as one would regard global warming, ozone depletion, or acid rain existing totally apart from modern economic activity. That is, they should be regarded as phenomena of nature, for which no individual human being is responsible and to which individual human beings must be left free to respond.

Those who are adversely affected in such cases should not blame anyone, but should simply be left free to take steps to protect themselves by engaging in the appropriate form of productive activity. In the case of downstream flooding, this might consist of building dikes or flood-control channels; in the case of traffic congestion, it might consist of building more roads, or moving elsewhere. 70 The kind of responses appropriate to the alleged cases of global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain have already been explained, in the preceding section. The all-encompassing appropriate answer to the ecologists in all the cases they bring forward of this kind is simply that under capitalism, man will deal with the negative forces of nature resulting as by-products of his own activity in precisely the same successful way that he regularly deals with the primary forces of nature.

Furthermore, it must never be forgotten that the harm done in these cases is necessarily minuscule in comparison with the good achieved. The ecologists use the technique of weighing the full harm against the actions of each individual alone. For example, they argue that an individual farmer should not be allowed to clear his land because if hundreds of thousands do so, flooding may be caused downstream. The fact is, the individual farmer accomplishes a substantial amount of good and no perceptible damage. If one wants to look at the damage caused by all the farmers together, it must be compared with the enormous good accomplished by all the farmers together.

The development of the Midwest, for example, obviously represented a far greater gain to virtually everyone than the occasional greater flooding in the New Orleans area, which may have been its result, represented a loss. (It represented a gain even to the people who lived in the areas subject to occasional greater flooding.) Yet the logic of the environmental movement, had it been present and guided government policy in the nineteenth century, could well have prohibited the development of the Midwest and required the American people to remain bottled up behind the Appalachian Mountains. (One can easily imagine a nineteenth-century campaign of ecological hysteria centering not only on the fear of such allegedly horrifying results as higher flood levels along the Mississippi, but also on the pollution of many rivers and lakes, and on the disturbance of the habitat of this or that species. The impending near extinction of the buffalo would probably have been considered sufficient by itself to stop the settlement of the Midwest, if the environmental movement had existed at the time.)

Precisely the same principles apply to the cases of global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. Each individual who uses an automobile, electricity, and so on, derives immense benefits from doing so and causes absolutely no perceptible harm to anyone. The same is true of the manufacturers of automobiles and is probably true even of the very largest individual electric utilities and chemical companies, in connection with the creation of acid rain. The prohibition or curtailment of such activities for the sake of preventing global warming, ozone depletion, or acid rain is fully comparable to prohibiting or curtailing the development of the Midwest for the sake of preventing floods at New Orleans. It is the attempt to stop production and its immense benefits for the sake of avoiding the relatively minuscule negative effects of the by-products of production. It is comparable to prohibiting the use of machinery and the achievement of all its benefits for the sake of avoiding such a thing as short-run technological unemployment.

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Of course, it is possible in productive processes for individual producers to cause perceptible negative effects on others. Even if this is not so in the case of acid rain, it was certainly so in the days when power plants and steel mills generated large quantities of soot which fell in the surrounding territory, and which the very tall government-mandated smokestacks that result in acid rain were designed to overcome.

In such cases, an important principle is that of who holds prior established rights. For example, if a steel mill begins operations in the open countryside, where the surrounding land is simply unused, and the landowners make no complaint over a period of several years or more, it appears reasonable to say that the steel mill acquires a right to continue its operations. The same, of course, would certainly be true if the steel mill made a mutually agreeable payment to the owners of the surrounding land as compensation for the negative effects of its operations. In either case, the price at which the surrounding land sells would tend to be cheaper in reflection of the negative consequences caused by the existence of the nearby steel mill. On the basis of such considerations, the owners of the surrounding land would have no justifiable basis for complaint. Justifiable grounds for complaint exist in cases in which an action of a producer creates some new negative effect, which has not become an established right, and which was not

reflected in the price that the present owners of the surrounding land paid for it. In such cases, the only proper way in which the producer can proceed is by buying the right to do so from the owners of the affected surrounding land. 71

In the absence of modern technology, the existence of densely populated areas necessitates considerable, individually perceptible mutual impositions by the inhabitants on the health, cleanliness, and property of one another. In the absence of lowcost iron and steel pipe, for example, there is virtually no alternative to using the open streets as sewers. In the absence of the automobile, there is no alternative to the streets being filled with horse droppings. In the absence of heating oil, natural gas, and electric power, there is no alternative to the soot produced by wood or coal-burning fires which falls on neighboring properties as well as on one’s own.

If people are to live in towns and cities in such circumstances, they must put up with such problems. However, thanks to economic progress, it becomes economically and financially feasible to reduce the extent of these impositions. This comes about as the result of the continual widening of technological alternatives, reductions in cost, and fall in prices relative to incomes that economic progress represents. 72 It is in this spirit that one should fundamentally understand such public health measures as the requirement of sewer hookups as a precondition to housing construction. It is in this spirit that one should understand such measures as the city of London’s requiring some years ago the gradual replacement of coal-burning furnaces with natural gas and electric furnaces. Measures of this kind, though they were better carried out by organs other than local governments, namely, by associations of private property owners, are consistent with the principle of individual rights. Furthermore, they are fully in the spirit of economic progress. They thus have nothing in common with the kind of measures characteristically advocated by the environmental movement.

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The ecologists employ the technique of confusing the effects of the actions of specific individuals with effects that can be caused only by cumulating the actions of large numbers of individuals to downplay the importance of positive individual contributions. For example, the Sierra Club has argued against government approval of the search for oil in Northern Alaska on the grounds that if oil were found there, it would represent only a 200-day supply, which is too little to justify the project, according to the Sierra Club. In a mailing to its members, the executive director of the Sierra Club declared:

Imagine! The supporters of drilling in the Refuge are willing to ravage a fragile ecosystem. To build airfields, pipelines and roads where caribou, polar bears and wolves, golden eagles, swans and snow geese make their home. To destroy a wilderness—perhaps North America’s greatest wilderness—forever denying the right of future generations to marvel at its majesty. And why. For a 19% chance

that they will find a 200-day supply of oil! 73

Thus, if an individual oil field succeeds in adding 200 days’ worth of oil to the world supply, it is allegedly too small to be worth developing. Presumably, each oil field must be capable of dramatically increasing the entire world’s supply—adding at least several years’ worth all by itself—if it is to be allowed to be developed. The implication of this position is that no one is to be allowed to act unless his action all by itself can have absolutely stupendous positive consequences, and is virtually certain to achieve them. Since the world supply of anything is almost always produced by large numbers of producers, each of whom produces a relatively small percentage of the total supply, the adoption of this standard easily serves to prohibit increases in production by practically every private individual or firm.

The leadership of the Sierra Club almost certainly knows that a 19 percent chance of finding oil is almost four times the chance that is present in most exploratory efforts and that oil in the area concerned is actually found seeping out of the ground. It is not so illogical as seriously to believe that roads and pipelines would be constructed without definite proof having first been obtained that substantial quantities of oil were actually present in the region. Nor is it so illogical as to believe that future generations will be able to go and marvel at the “majesty” of the area without the benefit of roads and airfields to bring them to it (that is, if the area were not a frozen barren desert and thus actually had majesty worth travelling to see). And the Sierra Club is almost certainly capable of realizing that if, as might be expected, the field contributed to production over a 20-year period and added just a 10-day supply to the otherwise existing supply of oil in each of those years, that would represent an almost 3 percent increase in the world supply of oil in each of those years. It is capable of realizing that such an increase in supply is approximately equal to the reduction in supply caused by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the consequent embargo imposed against Iraq, and that it would likely have as much effect in reducing the price of oil as the Iraqi invasion had in increasing it. The Sierra Club’s leadership undoubtedly is aware of all of these things.

Nevertheless, it attempts to trivialize the importance of the project by setting an impossible standard of what must be produced in order for the project to be considered worthwhile. 74 Having trivialized the project in this way, it can then rank the project below the alleged value of

maintaining absolutely undisturbed the wildlife in the region and the existing state of the mere ground itself, to neither of which anyone attaches any actual value.

Thus a major technique of the environmentalists is to confuse the individual with the collective—to hold the individual responsible for the negative effects resulting from the actions of the whole category of individuals to which he belongs and to demand that his positive actions be on a scale great enough dramatically to benefit the whole of society.

Confusion of the individual with the collective, indeed, of the individual with the cosmic, is present also in the environmentalists’ scare tactics. For example, Carl Sagan writes: “The typical temperature difference averaged over the whole world between an ice age and an interglacial is only 3˚ to 6˚C (equivalent to 5˚F to 11˚F). This should immediately sound an alarm: A temperature change of only a few degrees can be serious business.” 75

Of course, Dr. Sagan and every housewife knows how easy it is to bring a pot of water to a boil, let alone to raise its temperature by a mere few degrees. On this basis, he apparently believes that raising the temperature of the hundreds of millions of cubic miles of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans and thus the surface of the whole earth a few degrees is a comparably easy matter, which we are readily capable of doing if we do not employ him and his colleagues to take charge of our lives.

Indeed, as should now be clear, the mentality of collectivism permeates environmentalism. It contributes to the notion of a “fragility of nature” in all of its immensity comparable to the fragility of an individual’s possessions or an individual’s life. As we have seen, it plays a vital role in the existence of the belief that there is an “environmental crisis,” in projecting that only incompetent governmental action is available to deal with the changing environmental conditions allegedly caused by man’s productive activities, and not the intelligent actions of individual human beings. That is, it is totally ignorant of the intelligent actions of individuals coordinated by the price system, as the means of solving such problems. Indeed, the very notion of an “environmental crisis” is the result of a preexisting mentality of collectivism. If not for the prevalence of the mentality of collectivism, human productive activity would have gone on just as smoothly and successfully as before, with individuals being happily and legitimately unconcerned with avoiding the effects resulting from the actions of the collectives of which they are members and easily dealing with such effects as and when they arose.

Environmentalism and Irrational Product Liability

Confusions—inspired by collectivism—concerning the responsibility of individuals also arise in other important areas, which may or may not be connected with environmentalism. Thus, for example, an individual criminal is held not to be responsible for his actions. Instead, responsibility is held to lie with “society” and with other individuals, who somehow convey negative social attitudes to such individuals, such as lack of respect for their race or national origin.

The fallacy of such misplaced responsibility is present in the case of product liability, when large manufacturers who are aware that statistically so many accidents of a certain kind will occur per hundred thousand or million units of their product are held to be morally responsible for those accidents, especially if it is possible to take steps to prevent or mitigate them and they do not do so. To illustrate the logic of this view, one might imagine a fruit company that imports tens or hundreds of millions of bananas. Some percentage of the peels from these bananas will end up in places where people can slip on them and suffer serious injury. Never mind who thoughtlessly threw away the banana peels or who was responsible for watching where he walked. If it is known that statistically one person will break his neck or arm as the result of every X million bananas imported, the logic of this view implies that the fruit company somehow has responsibility for the injuries people suffer as the result of slipping on banana peels. (Presumably, it should be obliged to work on a nonskid banana peel.)

While the example of banana peels may seem farfetched, because no one has gotten around to bringing suit on this basis, it is difficult to distinguish the logic of it from cases which have been brought and won by the plaintiffs. For example, the Ford Motor Company was held responsible for the fact that in a certain category of collision the fuel tank of its Pinto automobile was apparently capable of exploding. On this view, the responsibility of the individual(s) who caused the accident was dropped from view, and it was assumed that because statistically there could be a certain percentage of such accidents, the manufacturer was responsible: he allegedly should not only have known about such a statistical probability but also have taken steps so that people would not suffer such grave injury in the accidents for which somehow none of them allegedly bore responsibility.

The logic of holding an individual responsible for the actions of others is also present in legislation requiring soft-drink manufacturers to charge return deposits on cans and bottles, which they would normally not seek to have returned and on which, therefore, they would not charge such deposits. The manufacturers are viewed as responsible for the actions of their customers, who simply leave the cans or bottles lying on the ground.

The effect of imposing such wrongly increased liability on producers is to increase costs and prices for every—

96 CAPITALISM one. And because of the grave uncertainties created wherever the sums in question are substantial, to prevent the introduction of new products, and sometimes, as in the case of the manufacture of small private airplanes, cause even the discontinuation of existing products. Irrational product liability is an important ally of the ecology movement in its campaign to end economic progress and reduce the standard of living.

Environmentalism and the Externalities Doctrine

The influence of the environmental movement has been promoted in the science of economics by a pernicious doctrine known as the theory of “external costs and benefits” or, sometimes, simply the theory of “externalities.” 76

The externalities doctrine must be understood against the background of the fact that economists realized early that the pattern of spending adopted by consumers determines the pattern of spending adopted by businessmen, whose products must sooner or later serve to satisfy consumers. They saw, for example, that if consumers spent more money for shirts and less for shoes, businessmen would be impelled to spend more money in producing shirts and less in producing shoes. The economists recognized in this the operation of a profoundly benevolent principle enabling people to obtain what they wanted by virtue of the ways in which they spent their money.

The supporters of the externalities doctrine are not satisfied with the fact that the spending pattern of consumers determines the spending pattern of businessmen. They add the further arbitrary demand that the individual should be able to lay claim to compensation for all the benefits his action causes to the rest of mankind and should be liable for all the costs it imposes on the rest of mankind, even though the benefits and costs in question are not subjects of purchase and sale in the normal context of the individuals concerned. From the perspective of the externalities doctrine, it is a flaw of capitalism whenever an individual’s action provides any kind of benefits to others for which he is not compensated, or imposes any kind of costs on others for which he does not compensate them. It calls upon the government to enter the scene and set matters right by deciding who owes what to whom and then effecting the necessary redistribution of wealth and income.

The alleged environmental damage caused by economic progress is regarded as falling under the heading of external costs, and it is urged that those responsible be held liable for damages. For example, it is argued that everyone whose car or factory emits any chemical into the air should be made to pay a share of whatever damages may be caused by the total volume of emissions of that chemical.

It is believed by many economists, including some who are usually staunch defenders of capitalism, that many of the demands of the environmental movement could be satisfied in this way within the framework of a capitalist society. They regard the demands of the externalities doctrine as fully consistent with the principles of capitalism, indeed, as representing a more-perfect implementation of those principles. In their eyes, the demand for compensation for all the benefits one causes is merely the principle of being paid for one’s work; the demand for liability for all the costs one imposes on others appears to them as an implication of the principle of accepting responsibility for one’s actions.

The externalities doctrine is a further confusion respecting the responsibilities of individuals. Even apart from imposing responsibility on individuals for results that individuals qua individuals do not cause, the error of the externalities doctrine is that it states matters far too broadly. A moment’s reflection will show that one should not be compensated for all the benefits one causes, nor be made liable for all the costs one imposes. One should be compensated only for those benefits one gives to others which those others freely contract to receive. One should be liable for damages to others only insofar as one’s action causes demonstrable physical harm to the persons or property of specific, individual others.

The broader standard of the externalities doctrine is an invitation to chaos and tyranny, for it opens the door to all kinds of arbitrary claims. According to the logic of the doctrine, beautiful women and the owners of beautiful homes and gardens should demand compensation for the pleasure the appearance of their persons or property brings to others without charge. Even the senders of unsolicited merchandise through the mail should also be able to demand compensation, if their merchandise confers any benefit on the recipients. Indeed, on the basis of the externalities doctrine, it is arguable that people are liable for payment for all the benefits that now come to them freely in the form of the work of all the inventors and authors whose discoveries or creations are not eligible for patent or copyright protection, starting with such contributions as fire and the wheel. Whether or not these payments are to be made to the descendants of the inventors or innovators, to the government, or to some other party, is a separate question. The principle holds that payment must be made for benefits received.

Whatever it may hold about the specific claims of the descendants of inventors and innovators, the doctrine implies that every living inventor or innovator should be prepared to meet demands for compensation by those displaced by the competition he inaugurates. For example, the doctrine implies that Henry Ford should have been made to pay for the support of unemployed black—

smiths and horse breeders, as though the latter had a right to go on in their routine irrespective of Ford’s improvements and irrespective of the voluntary choices of the buyers of means of transportation.

It is a distortion of sound principles and totally inappropriate to call for payment for every benefit bestowed or to demand compensation for every cost imposed. It is in the nature of a division-of-labor, capitalist society to bestow enormous benefits for which people do not have to pay. Indeed, in such a society perhaps 99.9 percent or more of everyone’s standard of living comes to him as an “external benefit” provided by the thinking of others past and present. It is also in the nature of such a society to impose various costs of a minor and transitional nature in the process of improving the methods of production and raising the general standard of living. The externalities doctrine implicitly represents a two-pronged attack on a division-of-labor, capitalist society: its logic would deprive people of the benefits such a society freely gives them, by making them pay the equivalent of those benefits. And, by making those who are the source of the benefits bear unnecessary and unjust costs in the process of bringing them about, it would operate to prevent the achievement of the benefits in the first place. 77

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There is no better place than this to observe that in addition to being used in support of environmentalism, the externalities doctrine is used as a fundamental justification for government activity beyond defense against the initiation of physical force. It is argued that insofar as important benefits are obtainable without individuals having to pay for them, a free market cannot function successfully. A typical case advanced to illustrate this claim is that of lighthouses, which, once they exist, benefit all the ships passing in the night, whether the ships’ owners have helped to pay for the lighthouses or not. It is argued that in this case, the possibility of avoiding payment and getting by as a “free rider” on the strength of the contributions of others will result in large numbers of shipowners refusing to pay for lighthouses and thus in either preventing their construction altogether or making their construction and operation less adequate. More broadly, as a general principle, it is argued that in such circumstances vital services will not be performed, or will be performed inadequately, because too many people will be hoping to take advantage of a “free ride.”

The substance of the free-rider argument is the gratuitous assumption that people lack sufficient rationality to act in their own interest in cases in which they cannot receive corresponding direct payment, and hence must be forced to act in their own interest in such cases. The clearest contradiction of this belief is the success of the activities carried on by countless private charities. In their case, individual donors give without expecting to receive any corresponding material payment, direct or indirect. Although the free-rider doctrine’s supporters are focused on such cases as lighthouses, the logic of the doctrine implies that all charitable activities should be performed by the government. The doctrine also implies that in every case in which there are benefits of any description which are not paid for, the government is to be put in a position in which it can demand a blank check, since no one can actually determine what voluntary payments made by the citizens on their own would be “adequate.”

The truth is that private citizens are capable on their own of providing for necessary activities for which it may not be possible to arrange the normal system of payment for goods or services received. This is true even in cases requiring the cooperation of millions of individuals. There is no reason why in such cases individuals could not agree to contribute to the financing of a project on a contingency basis, namely, on the basis of a sufficient number of other individuals making the same pledge. Whether it is a matter of a hundred ship owners concerned with constructing a lighthouse or a million property owners concerned with building a dam to prevent flood damage (or perhaps installing catalytic converters on their automobiles to reduce smog), there is no reason why an arrangement could not be made whereby the individual pledges his contribution on the condition of an equal or otherwise comparable contribution being pledged by a certain percentage of other such individuals. For example, the individual ship owner or property owner might agree to pledge a definite sum on the condition that half or two-thirds of the other ship owners or property owners made the same or a comparable pledge. Only when it was established that the necessary number of pledges had been made, would the pledges of the various individuals become binding. In such cases, there might be a class of free riders, but they would certainly not stop the activity from proceeding. (To some people, of course, such a procedure may appear cumbersome. Nevertheless, it is an insignificant price to pay for maintaining consistent respect for the rights of the individual.)

Finally, although the payment for a good or service in such circumstances might be less than it would be if somehow the usual circumstance prevailed of receipt of the benefit being directly contingent on payment being made, it by no means follows that the amount of benefit provided would be any less under private control than under government control. Government is inherently wasteful. As a result, it needs to spend much more money than a private organization to provide the same amount

98 CAPITALISM of goods or services. True, if it spends still more than that, it may provide more of the good or service than would be provided privately. But no objective basis exists for showing that it should provide more. In fact, the one outstanding objective fact in the situation is that in taking responsibility for activities beyond defense against the initiation of force, the government does something it should not do: namely, it initiates physical force against people. 78

4. The Economic and Philosophic Significance of Environmentalism

The American people must be made aware of what environmentalism actually stands for and of what they stand to lose, and have already lost in economic terms as the result of its growing influence. They must be made aware of the environmental movement’s responsibility for the energy crisis and the accompanying high price of oil and oil products, which is the result of its systematic and highly successful campaign against additional energy supplies. 79 They must be made aware of its consequent responsibility for the enrichment of Arab sheiks at the expense of the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people around the world, including many millions here in the United States. They must be made aware of its responsibility for the vastly increased wealth, power, and influence of terrorist governments in the Middle East, stemming from the high price of oil it has caused, and for the resulting need to send an American army to the region. In the absence of the environmental movement, the war in the Persian Gulf would not have been necessary. For in that case, the Iraqi dictator would not have been able to achieve a significant military build-up: he would not have had the oil revenues to finance it.

The American people must be made aware of how the environmental movement has steadily made life more difficult for them in prohibiting, or increasing the cost, of one economic activity after another. They must be shown how, as the result of its existence, people have been prevented from taking such necessary and relatively simple actions as building power plants and roads, extending airport runways, and even establishing new garbage dumps. They must be shown how the history of the environmental movement is a history of destruction: of the atomic power industry; of oil fields, oil refineries, and oil pipelines; of coal mines; of metal smelters and steel mills; of the Johns Manville Company and the asbestos industry; of logging companies, sawmills, and paper mills; of cranberry growers and apple growers; of tuna fishermen—to name only those which come readily to mind. They must be shown how the environmental movement has been the cause of the wanton violation of private property rights and thereby of untold thousands of acres of land not being developed for the benefit of human beings, and thus of countless homes and factories not being built. They must be shown how as the result of all the necessary actions it prohibits or makes more expensive, the environmental movement has been a major cause of the marked deterioration in the conditions in which most people now must live their lives in the United States—that it is the cause of families earning less and having to pay more, and, as a result, being deprived of the ability to own their own home or even to get by at all without having to work a good deal harder than used to be necessary.

Ironically, while claiming to be concerned about the “environmental impact” of everyone’s actions, the environmental movement is utterly unconcerned about the economic impact of its own actions. It demands that before human beings be allowed to act, they first prove an impossibility: namely, that their actions will bring no harm to any species, indeed, any geologic rock formation, anywhere on earth, for an indeterminately long period of time. It itself, however, is to be free to act without any concern whatever for the consequences of its actions on the lives and wellbeing of human beings.

The environmental movement does not care to know that the rise in the price of oil and all other increases in the cost of living that it has brought about necessarily have a negative impact on human health as well as on happiness, and have actually cut short an undetermined number of human lives. This is because as a consequence of having to meet higher costs of living, there are always at least some people who are put in the position of having to do without, or at least postpone, such things as medical checkups and necessary repairs on their automobiles, home heaters, or wiring systems, and who, because of this, suffer injury or even death from illnesses or accidents they might otherwise have avoided.

This kind of result is the effect of all legislation which increases costs. Such legislation always has negative economic consequences which are not immediately obvious. For it embraces the consequences of millions of people having to respond to some degree of straightening of their financial circumstances and corresponding decline in their standard of living. 80

Even more insidious, legislation that increases costs, or in any way reduces economic efficiency, has a cumulative negative effect on the standard of living, which results from the fact that it reduces the ability of the economic system to accumulate and maintain capital. This is the result of the vast diversion of capital from normal, productive uses to uses required by law to be in compliance with the ever swelling array of “environmental” regulations—for example, the vast sums of capital

that must be unnecessarily expended to remove asbestos from buildings, to replace underground gasoline storage tanks at service stations, or to prevent the escape of ordinary chemical fumes from dry cleaning establishments. Capital diverted in this way is drawn not only from the production of consumers’ goods but also from the production of subsequent capital goods. This last reduces the ability of the economic system to produce more capital goods than it uses up in production and thus its ability to increase the supply of capital goods, on which depends its ability to increase production in the future, including the future supply of capital goods. Carried far enough, by means of enough wasteful and destructive environmentalist regulations, the reduction in the production of capital goods may be so great as to make impossible even the replacement of the capital goods used up in production. If that happens, the subsequent ability to produce declines, including the subsequent ability to produce capital goods. 81

In sum, the American people need to be shown how the actual nature of the environmental movement is that of a virulent pest, consistently coming between man and the work he must do to sustain and improve his life.

If and when such understanding develops on the part of the American people, it will be possible to accomplish the appropriate remedy. This would include the repeal of every law and regulation in any way tainted by the doctrine of intrinsic value, such as the endangered species act. It would also include repeal of all legislation requiring the banning of manmade chemicals merely because a statistical correlation with cancer in laboratory animals can be established when the chemicals are fed to the animals in massive, inherently destructive doses. And it would include abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is one of the foremost practitioners of pseudoscience in the United States today and the leading instrument of the economic destruction that is practiced in the name of environmentalism. The overriding purpose and nature of the remedy would be to break the constricting grip of environmentalism and make it possible for man to resume the increase in his productive powers in the United States in the remaining years of this century and in the new century ahead.

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As I will show in the remainder of this chapter, the philosophic significance of environmentalism is more profound than its economic significance, which is certainly great enough. The cultural acceptance of a doctrine as irrational as environmentalism makes clear that the real problem of the industrialized world is not “environmental pollution” but philosophical corruption and moral depravity.

As an indication of the depths of the depravity into which contemporary society has fallen, I offer the following excerpt from a recent news story. I believe that the actions described in this news story rival in absurdity, and far exceed in viciousness, those described in the ancient report that the Roman Emperor Caligula had made his horse a member of the Roman senate.

A New York commodities dealer pleaded guilty in Federal District Court today to destroying 86 acres of wetlands on his hunting retreat and was ordered to pay a $1 million fine and $1 million as restitution.

The dealer, Paul Tudor Jones 2d, was also banned from hunting migratory wildfowl through 1991—“restitution for the birds,” said Judge Frederick Smalkin, who sentenced him.

. . . Under the plea bargain, he was fined $1 million, ordered to pay $1 million in restitution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and ordered to restore the 86 acres, said Jane Barrett, assistant United States attorney. Mr. Jones was placed on 18 months’ probation and barred from developing 2,500 of his 3,272-acre estate. Wetlands are critical because they filter pollutants and provide wildlife habitats. 82

The meaning of this news story is that the rightful owner of a piece of property has been wantonly deprived of his property—the substance of it—and then outrageously humiliated by a gang of smirking tormentors, indistinguishable in the nature of their behavior from hoodlums robbing an innocent man on the street. For what else does it mean to seize the power to determine the use of someone else’s property, without his consent and without compensation, and then punish him for daring to use what is in fact absolutely his right to use, and no one else’s, and, in the process, as a calculated act of outrage, make him pay compensation—for his use of his own property—to birds. The only difference between this and the activities of ordinary hoodlums is that the hoodlums in this case wear the robe of a U.S. district judge and occupy the office of an assistant U.S. attorney.

5. Environmentalism, the Intellectuals, and Socialism

Environmentalism is the enemy not only of industrial civilization, individualism, and capitalism, but also of technology, science, human reason, and human life. It must be fought in the name of these values. Those who should be leading the fight against it are the intellectuals. They, presumably, are men of the mind and thus automatically advocates of reason, human life, and all the fundamental human values that are obviously based on reason, such as science and technology.

Unfortunately, of course, it is not working out that way. If the intellectuals were opposed to environmentalism, it would never have achieved the following it has.

It would probably be nonexistent; if it existed, it would be utterly disreputable. The fact is that the great majority of today’s intellectuals, who should be fighting for human values, either do not know enough to do so, or have become afraid to do so, or, still worse, have themselves become the enemies of human values and are actively working on the side of environmentalism.

It is important to explain how this has happened.

I believe that to an important extent the hatred of man and distrust of reason displayed by the environmental movement are a psychological projection of many contemporary intellectuals’ self-hatred and distrust of their own minds, which have been made much more acute as the result of the visible worldwide collapse of socialism, and the fact that they, as the advocates and apologists of socialism, have been responsible for the destruction it has wrought. As the parties responsible for socialism— for a system which has brought poverty and tyranny to every country upon which it was imposed, from Soviet Russia and the East European nations to mainland China, Indochina, Ethiopia, Angola, and Cuba—they have certainly been “a plague upon the world.” And if socialism had in fact represented reason and science, as most intellectuals cannot help but continue to believe, there would be grounds to distrust reason and science. For then, reason and science would have been responsible for scores of millions of murders.

Of course, it is not reason and science that have been responsible for those murders. What have been responsible are the vicious, irrational ideas and immoral character of the majority of the last several generations of intellectuals. Although it is never spoken of, the undeniable fact is that the hands of several generations of Western intellectuals are covered with blood: intellectually and morally, they have been accessories, either before the fact or after the fact, to the mass murders committed by the socialist regimes.

Socialism, international and national, Marxist and Nazi, with all of its wanton destruction and mass murder, was not an accident visited upon mankind from heaven. It was the product of the leading ideas, moral and economic, of generations of Western intellectuals. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and all of the intellectuals who elaborated and disseminated their theories, were responsible for socialism’s coming to power in Russia and China and everywhere else that the rule of the Communists extended. And all those intellectuals who thereafter refused to know what was going on in those countries, who denied the facts, excused them, or outright lied about them—they bear responsibility for socialism’s having remained in power.

And wider than these groups, and fundamentally just as responsible, have been all the hordes of intellectuals who consistently evaded the ideas of the major theoretical defenders of capitalism and critics of socialism, by ignoring or otherwise refusing to take those ideas seriously. As the result of this evasion, even the very name of Ludwig von Mises, who was the greatest defender of capitalism and critic of socialism of all time, is still unknown to the great majority of intellectuals.

The great majority of intellectuals never bothered to try to understand the intellectual case for capitalism: namely, the economic theories not only of von Mises but also of the Austrian and British classical economists in general, and the political philosophy of John Locke and the Founding Fathers of the United States, and, more recently, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. For the most part, the intellectuals either ignored the intellectual case for capitalism or found it to be an object of amusement, and ridiculed it. Yet such ideas as the law of comparative advantage and the harmony of the rational self-interests of all individuals and groups, which the advocates of capitalism espoused, would have prevented the rise both of Marxism and of Nazism, and the existence of both world wars—if the intellectuals had taken the trouble to understand them. 83

Thus, I believe, it is certainly not without cause that the “mainstream” of today’s intellectuals has lost confidence in reason. The “intellectual mainstream” has practiced a longstanding policy of massive and willful evasion, in refusing to know what it could have known. It has carried evasion to the point of creating for itself an entirely illusory, make-believe notion of rationality, which has now come crashing down. The intellectual mainstream has so far removed itself from reality that insofar as it turns to introspective evidence for the reliability of reason, it encounters the fact that on the basis of virtually everything it believes, socialism should work. As I stated previously, it believes that on the basis of every principle it knows, socialism is ethically and economically superior to capitalism. 84 And when, at last, the intellectual mainstream is confronted with inescapable, overwhelming evidence of the failure of socialism, rather than admit it has been profoundly, devastatingly wrong, it decides that it has no other choice than to throw up its hands, and take the failure of socialism as the final, convincing proof of the failure of reason. And then, I believe, in appraising what it perceives as its longstanding adherence to reason in supporting socialism in the face of rising rivers of blood, it comes to the conclusion that reason can be a devastatingly destructive force, and that those who have adhered to reason are worthy of hatred.

Today’s intellectual mainstream, in other words, has very good reason for doubting its mind and hating itself. And thus it is not surprising to see that just as the failure of Marxian “scientific” socialism has become more and

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 101 more apparent, the ranks of the “greens,” who hate science and technology, have more and more swelled.

But while the greens have come to hate science and technology, they continue to love socialism. Their conception of a “postindustrial” world is entirely socialistic.

Indeed, it should be realized that the environmental movement has the potential for bringing about the achievement of socialism on a global basis, despite all of the enormous setbacks socialism has recently suffered around the world. The establishment of worldwide socialism is implied in efforts to limit global carbon-dioxide emissions and other global chemical emissions. The setting of such global limits and their allocation among the various countries of the world imply the existence of a worldwide central planning authority with respect to a wide variety of essential means of production. Such an authority would be necessary to determine which countries were to receive the right to burn how much oil or coal, and to carry on how much of virtually any industrial process that emitted chemicals held to be dangerous global pollutants. A global central planning authority is implicit in all potential international efforts to combat alleged global problems. For what is necessarily present in all such efforts is the attempt to organize mankind into a collective unit that acts as one and does so with consistency and coordination, i.e., is centrally planned.

Not surprisingly, one of the most prominent theorists of the environmental movement, Barry Commoner, offers a specific bridge between the doctrines of the socialists and those of the ecologists. The bridge is in the form of an attempted ecological validation of one of the earliest discredited notions of Karl Marx—namely, Marx’s prediction of the progressive impoverishment of the wage earners under capitalism. Commoner attempts to salvage this notion by arguing that what has prevented Marx’s prediction from coming true, until now, is only that business firms have been subsidized by society at the expense of the environment. In effect, says Commoner, the exploitation of the workers has been mitigated by capitalism’s ability—temporarily—to exploit the environment. But now this process must come to an end, and the allegedly inherent conflict between the capitalists and the workers will emerge in full force. In Commoner’s own words:

Marx believed that as capital accumulated, the amount of its fixed forms (productive machinery)—which is related to what he called the “organic composition of capital”— would increase. This is the denominator in the profit equation, and Marx believed that as this denominator grew, the rate of profit would fall. To counteract this trend, the capitalists would need to make increasing inroads on the share of production that goes to the workers. The working class would become increasingly impoverished, and the growing conflict between capitalist and worker would lay the grounds for the revolutionary change that is the political outcome of the Marxist analysis. . . .

In a curious way, an explanation of why Marx’s prediction has failed to materialize—that is, until now—emerges from the improved understanding of economic processes that is one product of the recent concern with the environment. . . . Since no one has to pay for it, there is nothing to keep pollution from happening. And, as we now well know, the cost is borne by society as a whole. As I pointed out in

The Closing Circle, “A business enterprise that pollutes the environment is therefore being subsidized by society; to this extent, the enterprise though free is not wholly private.”

I pointed out as well that this arrangement leads to “. . . [a]

temporary cushioning effect of the ‘debt to nature’ represented by environmental degradation on the conflict between entrepreneur and wage earner, which as it now reaches its limits may reveal this conflict in its full force. . . .

In this sense the emergence of a full-blown crisis in the ecosystem can be regarded, as well, as the signal of an emerging crisis in the economic system.” 85

Thus, according to Commoner, Marx will be proved right after all—on the basis of such things as the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and of beer cans on the beach. These will allegedly compel the world to adopt a social system in which much less is produced in total and in which the members of one group can gain only at the expense of the loss of the members of other groups. In that world, apparently, Commoner will feel at home. It will be a world in which men do not join together to subdue nature for their mutual and increasing benefit, but an impoverished, static world in which men must fight one another for scraps of bread, for the alleged sake of appeasing nature.

Along these lines, it should be realized that the belief in the need for global limits on carbon dioxide and other chemical emissions and thus in the need for international allocation of permissible emissions implies that every country is an international aggressor to the degree that it is economically successful (and thus, of course, that the United States is the world’s leading aggressor). For the consequence of its success is held to be either to push the volume of allegedly dangerous emissions beyond the safe global limit or to impinge upon the ability of other countries to produce, whose populations have more urgent needs. Thus, in casting the production of wealth in the light of a danger to mankind, by virtue of its alleged effects on the environment, and thereby implying the need for global limits on production, the ecology movement attempts to validate the thoroughly vicious proposition, lying at the very core of socialism, that one man’s gain is another’s loss. 86

Another important illustration of the profoundly socialistic sympathies of the greens is provided by a recent publication of the Sierra Club. This is a collection of essays entitled Call to Action, Handbook for Ecology,

Peace and Justice. The book is dedicated to “the people of El Salvador” and has a preface by Jesse Jackson. It contains articles with such titles as “Share the Wealth” and “Co-ops: An Alternative to Business as Usual.” Very significantly, and capturing the essence of the book, the editor declares in the foreword that “[T]he political and economic system that destroys the Earth is the same system that exploits workers. . . .” 87

The environmental movement, of course, also advocates socialism on a much less grandiose scale than that of a worldwide central planning authority. For example, it also advocates socialism in the form of “bio-regionalism,” which represents socialism on the scale of self-sufficient local regions allegedly distinguished by their biological characteristics. 88 Indeed, it is to be expected that the environmental movement will increasingly revert to the advocacy of such utterly naïve forms of socialism, which Marx labeled utopian.

Such forms of socialism are more consistent than is Marxism with the movement’s thoroughgoing irrationalism and also with the irrationalist origins of socialism itself. Socialism was originally founded on hatred for reason, science, technology, and the industrial civilization that rests on them. It began as an irrational reaction against the emergence of modern capitalism—as part of a wider “romantic” reaction against the Enlightenment as a whole. But in the nineteenth century, the prestige of capitalism’s underlying values was beyond challenge. The major contribution of Marx to socialism was to separate himself and his supporters from the then existing main body of the socialist movement, which he labeled utopian, and to wrap the socialist program in the mantle of reason and science. Henceforth, socialism was to be in the vanguard of science, enlightenment, and progress. The unraveling of that effort, which is now taking place across the world and which is manifest in the collapse of Communist regimes, means that socialism should be expected to revert to its irrationalist origins, which is precisely what it is doing in the rise of the environmental movement.

Thus, the green movement is the old red movement, deprived of its pretensions to rationality and seeking to evade its guilt by turning on reason itself, as though reason were responsible for the failure of socialism and for all the horrors that have been committed as the result of socialism. The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science and bent on the destruction of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but in its demented old age. 89

The only difference I can see between the green movement of the environmentalists and the old red movement of the Communists and socialists is the superficial one of the specific reasons for which they want to violate individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Reds claimed that the individual could not be left free because the result would be such things as “exploitation,” “monopoly,” and depressions. The Greens claim that the individual cannot be left free because the result will be such things as destruction of the ozone layer, acid rain, and global warming. Both claim that centralized government control over economic activity is essential. The Reds wanted it for the alleged sake of achieving human prosperity. The Greens want it for the alleged sake of avoiding environmental damage and for the actual, admitted purpose of inflicting human misery and death (which was also the actual, but unadmitted purpose for which the Reds wanted it). Both the Reds and the Greens want someone to suffer and die; the one, the capitalists and the rich, for the alleged sake of the wage earners and the poor; the other, a major portion of all mankind, for the alleged sake of the lower animals and inanimate nature.

Thus, it should not be surprising to see hordes of former Reds, or of those who otherwise would have become Reds, turning from Marxism and becoming the Greens of the ecology movement. It is the same fundamental philosophy in a different guise, ready as ever to wage war on the freedom and wellbeing of the individual. In seeking to destroy capitalism and industrial civilization, both movements provide ample potential opportunity for those depraved individuals who would rather kill than live, who would rather inflict pain and death than experience pleasure, whose pleasure comes from the infliction of pain and death.

Unfortunately, there is no lack of such individuals. There are serial murderers in the world. History tells us of mobs that cheered at the sight of human beings being torn to pieces by wild beasts in the arena, and of other mobs that cheered at the sight of “witches” and heretics burning alive at the stake. In our own time, there have been Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and an array of lesser such gangsters, each with a whole army of sadistic murderers at his beck and call. In every case but that of the serial murderers, there has been some kind of philosophical justification for the murders, such as the security of the State, the will of God, the achievement of Lebensraum, or the establishment of communism and a future classless society. Each of these alleged values supposedly justified the murder of living human beings. As the Communists were so fond of saying, “The end justifies the means.” And now there are the leaders of the ecology movement, whose alleged end is the preservation of such things as wildlife, jungles, and rock formations for their own sake,

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 103 and for whose alleged sake they look forward to throttling and destroying industrial civilization and decimating mankind.

Whatever may have been the delusions of religious fanatics and the advocates of racial or class warfare concerning the actual nature of their values, such delusions must wear exceedingly thin in the case of the environmental movement. It is transparently obvious that no one in the world can actually value such things as rock formations, jungles, and dangerous wildlife for their own sake. At best, that would be comparable to valuing pebbles on Mars or gas clouds on Jupiter for their own sake. But what some people can value, unfortunately, is the sight of other human beings suffering. This was the value which the Communists and the Nazis sought, which religious fanatics have sought, which serial murderers seek, and which the leaders of the environmental movement seek.

The kind of potential murderers that are to be found in the ranks of the environmental movement are, for the most part, probably not personally violent in any apparent way. In eras that are philosophically and culturally better than our own, they might even pass their entire lives quietly, in modest obscurity, causing harm to no one. In such a better era, Hitler might have passed his days as an obscure paperhanger, Himmler as a chicken farmer, and Eichmann as a factory worker or office clerk. Lenin would probably have been just a disgruntled intellectual, and Stalin perhaps an obscure cleric. But in the conditions of a collapse of rationality, frustrations and feelings of hatred and hostility rapidly multiply, while cool judgment, rational standards, and civilized behavior vanish. Monstrous ideologies appear and monsters in human form emerge alongside them, ready to put them into practice. The ecology movement is just such a movement, with just such a potential. Its expressions of approval for such images as that of a terrified human being, being eaten alive by alligators, is an invitation to torturers and murderers looking for a rationale to call for the exercise of their blood lust.

In my view, the open irrationalism of environmentalism and ecology marks them as nothing but the intellectual death rattle of socialism in the West, the final convulsion of a movement that only a few decades ago eagerly looked forward to the results of paralyzing the actions of individuals by means of “social engineering” and now seeks to paralyze the actions of individuals by means of prohibiting engineering of any kind. If such comparisons are possible, I think the Greens are actually a cut below the Reds and will fade much more quickly from the scene, because of their open irrationality. In the case of socialism and the Reds, there was for many years at least room for some doubt on the part of many people. It was possible for many years for people to believe that the purpose of the human sacrifices being called for on the part of the rich and the capitalists was to raise the level of the average human being by bringing justice and prosperity to the wage earners, who had allegedly been victimized by the injustices and economic evils of capitalism.

But with environmentalism and the Greens, the first thing to be sacrificed, with scarcely a moment’s concern, is the standard of living of the wage earners and the average human being. Indeed, from the perspective of environmentalism, their very existence for the most part represents “surplus population,” which prevents the existence of allegedly more important members of animal species. Thus the livelihood of wage earners is to be sacrificed en masse, without a thought, whenever the preservation of any “endangered species” is in question. Everything wage earners buy is to be made more expensive by restricting the production of energy and by imposing one unnecessary cost after another in efforts to escape imaginary terrors. 90 Environmentalism and the Greens stand for human sacrifice without even the pretense of human beneficiaries. They stand for sacrifice— for destruction—pure and simple. They reveal far more clearly than did socialism and the Reds the actual nature of the doctrine of altruism—of human sacrifice. 91

However justified today’s intellectual mainstream is in doubting its mind and hating itself, it has absolutely no basis for blaming its self-doubt and self-hatred on reason. What it took as reason in advocating socialism was never reason, but contemptible ignorance; what it apparently takes as having been loyalty to reason in its adherence to socialism was never loyalty to reason, but willful, defiant ignorance. The roots of the intellectuals’ abandonment of reason are to be found not in the collapse of socialism, but in their previous support of socialism.

In the days of a generation or more ago, when the intellectual mainstream still projected confidence in reason, what it took reason to mean in the realm of politics and economics was that a comparative handful of men— an intellectual elite—would arrogate to themselves a monopoly of thought: they would deny the rationality and the independence of the great mass of mankind, and treat everyone as clay for them to mold. Everyone would be compelled to live his life in compliance with their central plan. This was the meaning of socialism and its “social engineering.”

Naturally, this project failed miserably. Its failure was certainly not the failure of reason, however. On the contrary, it was the failure of a monumentally irrational idea: namely, that the independent exercise of reason by the great mass of mankind could be prohibited in the economic realm, and that somehow, on the strength of a

tiny, insignificant fraction of mankind’s collective intelligence, economic success could be achieved for all. Whatever sort of “fatal conceit” this may have been, to use the expression of Professor Hayek, it was not any conceit of reason. 92 At its base, the entire project was marked by the most profound contempt for reason—for the reason of all of mankind but that of the intellectual elite, which was to rule mankind under socialism.

Today, the intellectuals apparently think they have learned their lesson. They are through with engineering—all of engineering—and through with reason, because they think they know how badly the seemingly best-laid rational plans can run amuck. They now believe that man’s acting on nature on a foundation of reason and science is as dangerous as their acting on man on a foundation of “reason” and “science”—on what, in a state of virtual dementia, they choose to believe is reason and science, namely, Marxism and other variants of collectivism. Thus, for example, they believe that the engineering of atomic power plants and dams is as dangerous as the engineering of people that they so long supported in countries such as the former Soviet Union. This is how they act. This is how their behavior can be understood.

The lesson the intellectuals should have learned from the failure of socialism, and still could learn if they finally chose to end their ignorance and read the authors I have mentioned, above all, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, is the precise opposite of the one they claim to have learned. The correct lesson is that it is human reason that one must respect, namely, the reason of the individual human being. The substantive meaning of this proposition is that one must respect individual rights, as understood by John Locke and the Founding Fathers of the United States, and that the social system which one must uphold, as representing the consistent implementation of respect for individual rights, is laissez-faire capitalism. If the intellectuals understood this lesson, then they would understand that what it is dangerous to violate is laissez faire in the realm of human beings.

The obvious fact is, of course, that man can successfully control nature for the benefit of his life. But the essential politico-economic requirement of his doing so is that the government must not attempt to control man. The individual man or woman is the possessor of reason and the being of ultimate value, each to himself or herself, whose rights must be fully respected. It is these individually sovereign beings who must be free to act upon nature. When they are free, they form and intensify the associations that constitute a division-of-labor society. They create capitalism. They are then capable of acting upon nature with all of the progressively growing success demonstrated in the Western world over the last two centuries or more.

However, because today’s intellectual mainstream does not fundamentally distinguish man from inanimate nature—on such explicit philosophical grounds as determinism—the inference today’s intellectuals have apparently drawn from the failure of socialism is the lunatic notion that it is dangerous to violate laissez faire in the realm of nature. Instead of arriving at the insights of the British classical economists into the natural economic harmonies prevailing among free, rational beings and requiring the absence of government intervention, they believe they have gained insights into alleged natural harmonies prevailing among wild animals and inanimate objects. They call these alleged harmonies “ecosystems,” and they believe that the existence of “ecosystems” requires the absence of intervention by rational human beings in nature. In a manner reminiscent of economists arguing against government intervention into the affairs of human beings, they argue against human interference with nature and its alleged ecosystems.

Ironically, in arguing in this way, the ecology movement not only seeks the perpetuation of all the horrors of socialism, but also turns out to embody the substance of what was once an unjust caricature of the defenders of capitalism. For it adopts as its actual policy what its intellectual predecessors ridiculed the defenders of capitalism for supposedly believing, namely, that man should not intervene in nature for fear of unleashing unknown forces. That was what the advocates of socialism and government intervention repeatedly accused the defenders of capitalism of believing when the latter stood on the grounds of economic law and its harmonies as an argument against government interference in the economic system. In taking this position, the advocates of capitalism, of course, never advocated a policy of “do nothing,” as their socialist and interventionist critics claimed. On the contrary, they have always advocated that the government do nothing, so that the individual citizens could be free to do what was necessary to achieve their prosperity.

The defenders of capitalism argue both against government interference into the affairs of men and in favor of human interference in nature. The two are merely different sides of the same coin: namely, individuals must be free of government intervention precisely in order for them to be able effectively to intervene in nature. It is the individual citizens, not the government, who are the controllers of nature. Whether the government prohibits its citizens from acting on nature on the grounds that it must have a monopoly of such activity, or on the grounds that such activity is simply dangerous, the substance and the consequences are identical: namely, paralysis, poverty, and death. The socialists at least kept up the pretense

that they wanted to achieve human values more efficiently than free individuals could. The environmentalists make clear that their actual purpose in alleging the harmonies of “ecosystems” and arguing against human intervention in nature is the destruction of human values.

In the ecology movement, the Left has reduced itself to a mass of terrified ignoramuses, fearful of all “newfangled” technology. It reveals itself as a virtual Ma and Pa Kettle of the intellect; a remnant from the Dark Ages, having managed to survive all this time on some kind of intellectual wildlife preserve, to borrow an expression of Ayn Rand’s. What irony it is, that even as this is what the Left has become, its members continue to have the audacity to criticize the advocacy of capitalism and economic freedom as “reactionary.” The more consistent elements of the ecology movement openly urge a return to the Pleistocene—to the Stone Age—in order to live in an alleged harmony with nature. Yet, at the very same time, in the political arena, advocates of some measure of freedom and capitalism, who espouse recognizable elements of the social philosophy formed in the eighteenth century, in the Age of Reason, and found in the United States Constitution, are ridiculed as “dinosaur Republicans”—because they presumably wish to return to the Age of Reason.

It is high time this travesty ended. Its foundation was the Marxist doctrine that socialism was the politico-economic system called for by human reason and thus that movement toward it represented an improvement in human conditions, and, moreover, that mankind was impelled toward progress by automatic historical forces. All of these notions, of course, are totally false and are now discredited in the eyes of the world. Socialism is a vicious, destructive system. Movement toward socialism is movement toward tyranny, poverty, and death. On the other hand, capitalism is the politico-economic system actually called for by human reason. Its rising production and improving standards of living represent economic progress. Movement toward capitalism, or toward a more consistent form of capitalism, is what represents progress in the political realm. And, of course, neither movement toward capitalism nor toward socialism, that is to say, neither progress nor decline, is inevitable. Each depends on the influence of ideas: progress, on the influence of rational ideas; decline, on the influence of irrational ideas.

In the environmental movement, the Left now clearly reveals itself to be the most reactionary movement in the history of the world, a movement whose “moderates” seek a return to the economic conditions of a century ago, and whose logically consistent elements openly seek a return to the economic conditions of the Middle Ages or, indeed, of the Stone Age. If ever there were a group of people who, in the words of a wellknown “liberal” of the last generation, needed to be “dragged, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century”—into the modern world—it is today’s Left: the Greens of the ecology movement.

The transformation of the socialist movement into the ecology movement creates the opportunity for the defenders of capitalism to reclaim their rightful place as the true representatives of science, progress, and enlightenment, and to make sure that wherever intelligent people who value reason are found, they will increasingly enroll under the banners of capitalism.

Furthermore, the advocates of capitalism should now proudly proclaim that they turn to the thinkers of earlier centuries of the modern era for inspiration—to thinkers such as Adam Smith and John Locke—rather than to most of today’s intellectuals. Thanks to the Left’s transformation into the ecology movement, they can now claim, with obvious justification, the same kind of modernity in doing so that men of the Renaissance could claim in looking to the thinkers of antiquity for inspiration rather than to their ignorant contemporaries.

It can readily be conceded that Adam Smith and John Locke and the Founding Fathers of the United States rode in horse-drawn carriages and wore powdered wigs, and that contemporary intellectuals fly in jet planes and wear the fashions of today. But those men were the source of essential ideas on which the Industrial Revolution and our present level of technological and economic development rest. When they rode in horse-drawn carriages, they were thinking the thoughts that made possible the jet planes of today. Today’s intellectuals, although they fly in jet planes, are thinking thoughts which are incompatible with the continuation of industrial civilization. This is now blatantly obvious in their support of the ecology movement and in their growing denunciations of economic progress and transparent efforts to stifle it and undo it. They should certainly not be given any form of credit for the technological and economic achievements of the age in which they live, and which they are in fact out to destroy, and then, on the basis such error, be regarded as superior in any way to the thinkers of earlier centuries who made possible the accomplishments of our own. The nature of their souls and the intellectual level of their philosophy are well expressed in the call “Back to the Pleistocene!” a call which if they do not make themselves, they are certainly not at pains to dispute or capable of disputing. In other words, contemporary intellectuals, with few exceptions, are not at all “modern” or advanced, but backward and primitive, far, far behind intellectuals of earlier generations whom they delight in ridiculing.

The future course of civilization hinges on the extent

to which the advocates of capitalism and reason can take the intellectual offensive against an opposition that is now nothing more than a rapidly decomposing intellectual corpse. Their ultimate victory appears to be assured, provided only that they keep their philosophy alive.

6. Environmentalism and Irrationalism

While the collapse of socialism is an important precipitating factor in the rise of environmentalism, there are other, more fundamental causes as well. Philosophical-cultural forces are at work in the rise of environmentalism which are of the same fundamentality and significance as built modern civilization. 93 Only now, centering on a negative appraisal of the reliability of reason, they are working in reverse, to bring about the destruction of modern civilization.

Environmentalism is the product of a growing loss of confidence in reason long predating the collapse of socialism. It is the leading manifestation of a rising tide of irrationalism that is engulfing our culture. As previously mentioned, over the last two centuries the reliability of reason as a means of knowledge has been under a constant attack led by philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Russell. 94 The growth of irrationalism has been manifested in a series of developments each of which has contributed to the rise of environmentalism. Among them have been the loss of the concept of economic progress, the growth of irrational skepticism, a growing decline and outright perversion of education, and the cultural devaluation of man.

The Loss of the Concept of Economic Progress

An important intellectual confusion in the decades prior to the appearance of the ecology movement, which helped to pave the way for it and continues to sustain it, was the loss of very concept of economic progress. Somewhere along the line, the seemingly synonymous, but in fact very different, concept of economic growth took its place. Only after this change had occurred could the ecology doctrine succeed.

Growth is a concept that applies to individual living organisms. An organism grows until it reaches maturity, then it declines, and sooner or later dies. The concept of growth is also morally neutral, equally capable of describing a negative as a positive: tumors and cancers can grow. Thus the concept of growth both necessarily implies limits and can easily be applied negatively.

In contrast, the concept of progress applies across succeeding generations of human beings. 95 The individual human beings reach maturity and die. But because they possess the faculty of reason, they can both discover new and additional knowledge and transmit it to the rising generation, which then starts out in life in possession of a larger body of knowledge than did the present generation. If the new generation continues to think, it succeeds in further enlarging the sum of human knowledge and thus it too passes on a larger body of knowledge to its successors than it inherited. And so it can continue from generation to generation, with each succeeding generation receiving a greater inheritance of knowledge than the one before it and making its own fresh contribution to knowledge. This continuously expanding body of knowledge, insofar as it takes the form of continuously increasing scientific and technological knowledge and correspondingly improved capital equipment, is the foundation of continuous economic progress.

Progress is a concept unique to man: it is founded on his possession of reason and thus his ability to accumulate and transmit a growing body of knowledge across the generations. Totally unlike growth, whose essential confines are the limits of a single organism, progress has no practical limit. Only if man could achieve omniscience would progress have to end. But the actual effect of the acquisition of knowledge is always to lay the foundation for the acquisition of still more knowledge. Through applying his reason, man enlarges all of his capacities, and the more he enlarges them, the more he enlarges his capacity to enlarge them. 96

The concept of progress differs radically from the concept of growth in that it also has built into it a positive evaluation: progress is movement in the direction of a higher, better, and more desirable state of affairs. This improving state of affairs is founded on the growing body of knowledge that the possession and application of human reason makes possible. Its foundation is the rising potential for human achievement that is based on growing knowledge.

While it is possible to utter denunciations of too rapid “growth” as being harmful, it would be a contradiction in terms even to utter the thought of too rapid progress, let alone denounce it. The meaning would be that things can get better too quickly—that things getting better meant they were getting worse.

Irrational Skepticism

A major foundation of the ecologists’ irrationalism that is of long standing is the conviction that whatever we may think we know today about anything, can turn out to be wrong tomorrow, because of the discovery of something new which totally invalidates all of our presumed knowledge about it. This doctrine, which is now increasingly popular, has been a virtual stock in trade of philosophy courses and of higher education in general for several generations. It is on this premise that the ecologists believe and project that every technological

advance is a potential thalidomide. 97 All of their wild conjectures about mass destruction are reinforced by this premise, of which they are already convinced, in advance of, and apart from, the facts of any particular case.

Such skepticism rests on ignorance of the science of epistemology and on the fallacy of equivocation. It does not understand how man achieves knowledge—how he validates his conclusions and can therefore be rationally confident of them. It assumes, in effect, that all claims to knowledge are equal—the proved and the unproved— and that because some claims to knowledge turn out to be false, any claim to knowledge can turn out to be false. For example, it believes that the very fact that people ardently believed in Ptolemaic astronomy at one time, and were later proved wrong by Copernicus and Galileo, itself raises the possibility that Copernican and Galilean astronomy will someday be proved wrong. 98

The truth is that knowledge is knowledge and continues to be knowledge for all time to come. It is not overthrown by later discoveries, but is supplemented and expanded by them. The physics of Archimedes was not overthrown, but expanded by the physics of Newton. The geometry of Euclid is as true today as ever, though we now know much more about mathematics than Euclid did. The truths in the writings of Adam Smith are as true today as when he first wrote them, though our knowledge of economics has been greatly expanded by Ricardo, the Mills, Böhm-Bawerk, von Mises, and others. All of technological and economic progress is a confirmation of the fact that the discoveries of later generations add to the discoveries of previous ones rather than refute them. If new discoveries constantly refuted previous discoveries, as the skeptics claim, progress of any kind would simply be impossible. Progress rests on the fact that knowledge is a growing sum, in which the contributions of succeeding generations are added to those of previous generations.

Similar reasoning applies to the possibility of accidents, which the ecologists fear so greatly. Despite man’s best efforts, accidents sometimes occur. A dam may burst, a building may collapse, a drug may turn out to be unsafe. But by the nature of the case, accidents are the exception—a departure from the normal. Moreover, they are steadily tending to be reduced in frequency and severity as man’s knowledge and prosperity grow. Indeed, each accident, if its causes are studied and analyzed, itself tends to prevent a repetition of that accident. Thus, the actual record of man (when he chooses to use his reason) is a steady increase in safety. Few things could be more obvious than that the food, drugs, dams, buildings, bridges, ships, trains, and factories of the twentieth century are incomparably safer than those of the nineteenth century. Apart from the influence of growing irrationality, progress in safety has continued decade by decade in the twentieth century. (The irrationality I refer to is not only the phenomenon of narcotics use, but also destructive government interference through such means as inflation, confiscatory taxation, and stifling regulation. Such policies can prevent the necessary replacement or maintenance of facilities, let alone their improvement.)

The Destructive Role of Contemporary Education

It is sometimes observed that most of today’s high school and college graduates have very little education in science and mathematics and thus do not understand and cannot properly appreciate modern technology. There is considerable merit in these observations, but the problem goes much deeper. Namely, from the earliest grades, the prevailing methodology of contemporary education systematically encourages the irrational skepticism I have just described.

To explain how this is the case, I must briefly digress into the history of philosophy.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant foisted on the intellectual world a distorted version of what reason is, namely, a faculty divorced from knowledge of the real world and limited to awareness of a world of mere appearances created by the human mind itself. 99 Both in reaction against the Kantian version of reason and on the direct foundation of it, as early as the first quarter of the nineteenth century, reason was being popularly denounced by intellectuals of the “Romantic” era as “a false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” 100

The Romantics’ reaction against the Kantian version of reason can be understood in part in exactly the same way as Ayn Rand has described the later reaction of the Existentialists against it, namely, if “this is reason, to hell with it!” 101 Romanticism, however, also follows on the direct foundation of Kantianism, which holds that man’s mind is incapable of actually knowing reality and thus that “‘to attain a knowledge of the real, we must go out of consciousness.’” 102 According to W. T. Jones, a leading historian of philosophy:

To the Romantic mind, the distinctions that reason makes are artificial, imposed, and manmade; they divide, and in dividing destroy, the living whole of reality—“We murder to dissect.” How, then, are we to get in touch with the real? By divesting ourselves, insofar as we can, of the whole apparatus of learning and scholarship and by becoming like children or simple, uneducated men; by attending to nature rather than to the works of man; by becoming passive and letting nature work upon us; by contemplation and communion, rather than by ratiocination and scientific method. 103

The Romantics held that “we are nearer to the truth about the universe when we dream than when we are

awake” and “nearer to it as children than as adults.” 104 The clear implication of the philosophy of Romanticism is that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind: we allegedly possess it in our sleep and as children.

In its essentials, the philosophy of Romanticism is the guiding principle of contemporary education. Exactly like Romanticism, contemporary education holds that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind—that we possess this portion of our mental life if not in our sleep, then nevertheless as small children. This doctrine is clearly present in the avowed conviction of contemporary education that creativity is a phenomenon that is separate from and independent of such conscious mental processes as memorization and the use of logic. Indeed, it is an almost universally accepted proposition of contemporary pseudoscience that one-half of the human brain is responsible for such conscious processes as the use of logic, while the other half is responsible for “creativity,” as though, when examined, the halves of the brain revealed this information all by themselves, perhaps in the form of bearing little labels respectively marked “Logic Unit, Made in Hong Kong” and “Creativity Unit, Made in Woodstock, New York.” Obviously, the view of the brain as functioning in this way is a conclusion, which is based on the philosophy and thus interpretative framework of the doctrine’s supporters.

Now, properly, education is a process by means of which students internalize knowledge: they mentally absorb it through observation and proof, and repeated application. Memorization, deduction, and problem solving must constantly be involved. The purpose is to develop the student’s mind—to provide him with an instantaneously available storehouse of knowledge and thus an increasingly powerful mental apparatus that he will be able to use and further expand throughout his life. Such education, of course, requires hard work from the student. Seen from a physiological perspective, it may be that what the process of education requires of the student through his exercises is an actual imprinting of his brain.

Yet, under the influence of the philosophy of Romanticism, contemporary education is fundamentally opposed to these essentials of education. It draws a distinction between “problem solving,” which it views as “creative” and claims to favor, and “memorization,” which it appears to regard as an imposition on the students, whose valuable, executive-level time, it claims, can be better spent in “problem solving.” Contemporary education thus proceeds on the assumption that the ability to solve problems is innate, or at least fully developed before the child begins school. It perceives its job as allowing the student to exercise his native problem-solving abilities, while imposing on him as little as possible of the allegedly unnecessary and distracting task of memorization.

In the elementary grades, this approach is expressed in such attitudes as that it is not really necessary for students to go to the trouble of memorizing the multiplication tables if the availability of pocket calculators can be taken for granted which they know how to use; or go to the trouble of memorizing facts of history and geography, if the ready availability of books and atlases containing the facts can be taken for granted, which facts the students know how to look up when the need arises. In college and graduate courses, this approach is expressed in the phenomenon of the “open-book examination,” in which satisfactory performance is supposedly demonstrated by the ability to use a book as a source of information, proving once again that the student knows how to find the information when he needs it.

With little exaggeration, the whole of contemporary education can be described as a process of encumbering the student’s mind with as little knowledge as possible. The place for knowledge, it seems to believe, is in external sources—books and libraries—which the student knows how to use when necessary. Its job, its proponents believe, is not to teach the students knowledge but “how to acquire knowledge”—not to teach them facts and principles, which, it holds, quickly become “obsolete,” but to teach them “how to learn.” Its job, its proponents openly declare, is not to teach geography, history, mathematics, science, or any other subject, including reading and writing, but to teach “Johnny”—to teach Johnny how he can allegedly go about learning the facts and principles it declares are not important enough to teach and which it thus gives no incentive to learn and provides the student with no means of learning.

The results of this type of education are visible in the hordes of students who, despite years of schooling, have learned virtually nothing, and who are least of all capable of thinking critically and solving problems. When such students read a newspaper, for example, they cannot read it in the light of a knowledge of history or economics— they do not know history or economics; history and economics are out there in the history and economics books, which, they were taught, they can “look up, if they need to.” They cannot even read it in the light of elementary arithmetic, for they have little or no internally automated habits of doing arithmetic. Having little or no knowledge of the elementary facts of history and geography, they have no way even of relating one event to another in terms of time and place.

Such students, and, of course, the adults such students become, are chronically in the position in which to be

able to use the knowledge they need to use, they would first have to go out and acquire it. Not only would they have to look up relevant facts, which they already should know, and now may have no way even of knowing they need to know, but they would first have to read and understand books dealing with abstract principles, and to understand those books, they would first have to read other such books, and so on. In short, they would first have to acquire the education they already should have had.

Properly, by the time a student has completed a college education, his brain should hold the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organized and integrated, so that he can apply this internalized body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the miseducation provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfill the Romantic ideal of being “simple, uneducated men.”

Contemporary education is responsible for the growing prevalence of irrational skepticism. The students subjected to it do not acquire actual knowledge. They have no firm foundation in a base of memorized facts and they have not acquired any solid knowledge of principles because their education has avoided as far as possible the painstaking processes of logical proof and repeated application of principles, which latter constitutes a vital and totally legitimate form of memorization. Such students go through school “by the seat of their pants.” They are forever “winging it.” And that is how they go through life as adults. It is impossible for them to have genuine understanding of anything that is beyond the realm of their daily experience, and even of that, only on a superficial level. To such people, almost everything must appear as an arbitrary assertion, taken on faith. For their education has made them unfit to understand how things are actually known. Their failure to memorize such things as the multiplication tables in their childhood, makes it impossible for them to understand whatever directly depends on such knowledge, which, in turn, makes it impossible for them to acquire the further knowledge that depends on that knowledge, and so on. With each passing year of their education, they fall further behind.

Ironically, their failure to memorize what it is appropriate to memorize ends up putting them in a position in which to pass examinations, they have no other means than out-of-context memorization—that is, memorization lacking any foundation in logical connection and proof. Because they have never memorized fundamental facts, and thus have no basis for developing genuine understanding of all that depends on those facts, they are placed in the position in which to pass examinations they must attempt to memorize out-of-context conclusions. It is because of this that a growing proportion of what they learn as the years pass has the status in their minds of arbitrary assertions. They are chronically in the mental state of having no good reason for most or almost all of what they believe. Thus, in their context of actual ignorance masked by pretended knowledge, they are prime targets for irrational skepticism. To them, in their mental state, doubt of everything can only seem perfectly natural.

Such students, such adults, are easy targets for a doctrine such as “environmentalism.” They are totally unprepared intellectually to resist any irrational trend and more than willing to leap on the bandwagon of one that caters to their uncertainties and fears. Environmentalism does this by blaming the stresses of their life on the existence of an industrial society and holding out the prospect of an intellectually undemanding and thus seemingly stress-free pastoral existence, one which is allegedly “in harmony with nature.”

The destructive work of contemporary education carried on against the development of students’ conceptual abilities from the earliest grades on is compounded, as their education advances to the higher grades, by the teaching of a whole collection of irrationalist doctrines that constitute the philosophical substance of contemporary liberal arts education.

Among them, besides irrational skepticism and the recent addition of environmentalism, are collectivism in its various forms of Marxism, racism, nationalism, and feminism; and cultural relativism, determinism, logical positivism, existentialism, linguistic analysis, behaviorism, Freudianism, and Keynesianism.

These doctrines constitute a systematic attack on reason and its role in human life. All the varieties of collectivism deny the free will and rationality of the individual and attribute his ideas, character, and vital interests to his membership in a collective: namely, his membership in an economic class, racial group, nationality, or sex, as the case may be, depending on the specific variety of collectivism. Because they view ideas as determined by group membership, these doctrines deny the very possibility of knowledge. Their further effect is the creation of conflict between members of different groups: for example, between businessmen and wage earners, blacks and whites, English speakers and French speakers, men and women. And, of course, when collectivism becomes the guiding political principle of a country, the results are unmitigated disaster, ranging from impoverishment to mass murder. 105

Determinism, the doctrine that man’s actions are con—

trolled by forces beyond his power of choice, denies the very possibility of rational thought being capable of guiding human life and achieving human happiness. Existentialism, the philosophy that man is trapped in a “human condition” of inescapable misery, obviously teaches exactly the same conclusion.

Cultural relativism denies the objective value of modern civilization and thus undercuts students’ valuation not only of it, but also of the technology and science necessary to build such a civilization, and the valuation of human reason itself, which is the ultimate foundation of modern civilization. It also undercuts people’s willingness to work hard to achieve personal values in the context of modern civilization. The doctrine blinds people to the objective value of such marvelous technological advances as automobiles and electric light, and thus further prepares the ground for the sacrifice of modern civilization to such nebulous and, by comparison, utterly trivial values as “unpolluted air.”

Logical positivism denies the possibility of knowing anything with certainty about the real world. Linguistic analysis regards the search for truth as a trivial word game. Behaviorism denies the existence of consciousness. Freudianism regards the conscious mind (the “Ego”) as surrounded by the warring forces of the unconscious mind in the form of the “Id” and the “Superego,” and thus as being incapable of exercising substantial influence on the individual’s behavior. Keynesianism regards wars, earthquakes, and pyramid building as sources of prosperity. It looks to peacetime government budget deficits and inflation of the money supply as a good substitute for these allegedly beneficial phenomena. Its practical effects, as the present-day economy of the United States bears witness, are the erosion of the buying power of money, of credit, of saving and capital accumulation, and of the general standard of living.

Such doctrines, as I say, constitute the philosophical substance of what now passes for a liberal arts education. If one wishes to use the expression “intellectual mainstream,” and borrow for a moment the environmentalists’ alleged concern with the cleanliness of streams and such, these doctrines may justifiably be viewed as intellectual raw sewage comparable to what can be seen bobbing up and down in a dirty river. They and the methodology of contemporary education have totally fouled the “intellectual mainstream.” The kind of education I have described—if it can still be called education, consisting as it does of an unremitting assault on the rational faculty and every rational value—is responsible for the hordes of graduates turned out over the last decades who have had no conception of the meaning and value of the Constitution and history of the United States, of the meaning and value of Western civilization itself, or indeed, as we shall see, of the meaning and value of membership in the human race. It has been responsible for the decline in the quality of government in the United States, as, unavoidably, many such miseducated graduates have found their way into the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, and into major offices in all the other branches of government, and, of course, into all the various branches of the news media and publishing. I believe it has even been responsible for the widespread use of drugs, inasmuch as living in the midst of modern civilization with a level of knowledge as meager as that imparted by contemporary education, must be a source of chronic and profound anxiety, urgently calling for relief. To many, drugs may seem to provide that relief.

The “intellectual mainstream” has been at war with the surrounding capitalist society for over a century and a half. Today, the rise of environmentalism, and of feminism and the new racism, on university campuses and elsewhere, makes clear that the contemporary intellectual mainstream is also at war with the wider intellectual tradition of Western civilization as well. Environmentalism denounces Western civilization for extolling man above nature. 106 Feminism and the new racism denounce it as “sexist” and “racist,” the alleged product of white male genes. 107 Contemporary education, despite the existence of individual exceptions, is thus reduced in its essentials to the activities of a clutch of nonentities engaged in a two-front war with the surrounding material civilization of capitalism and with the intellectual heritage of all of Western civilization.

Clearly, as Ayn Rand observed over thirty years ago, “the intellectuals are dead.” And matters have now reached the point where the most urgent task confronting the Western world is to find replacements—“new intellectuals,” who, unlike the alleged intellectuals of today, will be committed to the value of human reason. 108 Unless such intellectuals can be found, and in sufficient number, the world coming into existence before our very eyes will be very much like the one H. G. Wells described in his science fiction story The Time Machine. In Wells’ story, set in the far future, the human race has divided into two degenerate branches: the hideous, subterranean Morlocks, who feast on human flesh, and the pretty, surface-dwelling Eloi, who in totally vacuous innocence serve as food for the Morlocks. 109

It is sometimes difficult to avoid believing that, figuratively speaking, as a result of irrationalist philosophy and its inculcation through contemporary education, these degenerate branches of the human race already exist, in the form of the leaders of the environmental movement and those who offer it no resistance or even rush to join it, oblivious to the obvious destruction that awaits them. For it would seem that contemporary education has

resulted in the creation both of monsters and of vast numbers of people so mentally enfeebled and so deprived of even an elementary sense of manhood that they have no wish or capacity to resist the monsters. Almost every day, such people hear open calls for the radical curtailment of energy consumption—their energy consumption—and they do not react. They buy bestselling books by environmentalists and read such passages as, “The environmentally sane standard of living for a population our current size would probably be somewhere between that of the average Englishman and of the average Ethiopian—each lives unreasonably.” 110 In other words, they read an open declaration by a leading environmentalist that if environmentalism has its way, their standard of living would be somewhere between poverty by American standards and outright famine! Again, they do not react. Of course, they do not even react against calls for mass death.

I believe that the reason the masses of people do not respond with outrage against environmentalism is partly the fact that their education has left them unable to take ideas seriously. They hear and read such pronouncements and have the reaction that, like so much of what they were taught in school, the pronouncements do not mean what they say. In addition, and even more important, their education, reinforced by the experience of growing up in a welfare state, has left many of them with a mentality similar to that of small children, who, lacking all knowledge of how wealth is created, sometimes appear to believe that “money grows on trees.” Very many of our contemporaries, almost certainly the overwhelming majority of the rank and file of the environmental movement, believe that the availability of goods is automatic and indestructible, and that they have a corresponding automatic right to goods. For the most part, they have little or no knowledge of history, and even the very best educated among them have absolutely no real knowledge of economic theory. They simply have no conception of the process of creating wealth or what its requirements are. They have absolutely no concept of what a remarkable productive achievement the economic system of the present-day industrial world actually is and that it is capable of being destroyed.

They are not, of course, so incredibly ignorant as to believe that human beings all over the world live as people do in the United States or the other industrial countries, or that even in these countries people have always lived as they now do. And they certainly do not believe that everyone even in the present-day United States lives well. But to the extent that they have any explanation of differences in the standard of living, it centers on the notion of a distribution of wealth. There are poor people in America and elsewhere in the world, they believe, because of “social injustice”—that is, because of an unfair distribution of wealth. And that is the basis on which they explain the lower standard of living of earlier periods, especially the nineteenth century.

Thus, like small children, they believe that automobiles, television sets, and everything else exist automatically, that, in effect, they just grow on trees. Moreover, they believe that these trees, unlike the trees of nature, will always exist, no matter what is done to them, and that, in the absence of “social injustice,” they will always be able to obtain from them all of the goods they now enjoy.

On this basis, they feel free to support the delivery of one blow after another to the economic system—ever more taxes, ever more regulations—in the expectation that they themselves will never suffer as a result of such actions. All that will happen, they believe, is that they will succeed in shaking loose some more goods, or, nowadays, more and more, succeed in putting an end to this or that irritant or annoyance. The only ones ever to suffer, they believe—if anyone ever actually suffers— are rich businessmen.

All of this is an essential part of the intellectual environment in which the ecology movement has flourished. In this intellectual environment, it is perfectly possible for people to proceed as though, for example, the only connection between their lives and the existence of oil companies is that the oil companies contribute to the pollution of beaches, or, with their pipelines, prevent the migration of one or another species of cute, precious animals. It is perfectly possible for them to carry such blindness to the level of economic activity as such, and to believe that the only practical effect of economic activity is “pollution,” and that in stopping economic activity all they will stop is “pollution.”

It is in this way that they are ripe for the remarkable conclusion, described earlier, that the threatening forces of nature are created by us and that we could do better without our material means for dealing with nature than with them. They feel free to abandon industrial civilization in the unstated conviction that if and when it is abandoned, they will still be able to keep essentially all the goods they now enjoy, and in addition will have such benefits as cleaner air, the preservation of assorted cute animals, and the avoidance of such allegedly impending calamities as frighteningly bad weather. Nothing, they believe, will be required of them but some token loss, such as having to sort their garbage for recycling, or to form carpools, which is not so bad, they feel, because it provides new bases for such good things as “sharing” and camaraderie.

Thus, in what may prove to be the greatest tragedy in all of human existence, we see at the end of more than two centuries of man’s most dazzling success, the prolif—

112 CAPITALISM eration of heirs who as adults possess less than the mentalities of children. We see a culture of reason and science being transformed before our very eyes into one which more and more resembles a culture of primitive man.

Only the emergence of a large number of “new intellectuals” prepared to fight against environmentalism and irrationalism and for reason and capitalism can assure that twenty-first-century man will be man in a sense worthy of the name. 111

The Cultural Devaluation of Man

The popular acceptance of environmentalism is explainable in all of its aspects on the basis of the irrationalism inculcated by the contemporary educational system and the consequent cultural decline of reason.

The cultural decline of reason is what has created the growing hatred and hostility on which environmentalism feeds, as well as the unreasoning fears of its leaders and followers. To the degree that people abandon reason, they must feel terror before reality, because they have no way of dealing with it other than by reason. By the same token, their frustrations mount, since reason is their only means of solving problems and achieving the results they want to achieve. In addition, the abandonment of reason leads to more and more suffering as the result of others’ irrationality, including their use of physical force. Thus, hatred and hostility increase as rationality decreases.

The closely related readiness of people to accept the doctrine of intrinsic values is also a consequence of the growing irrationalism. An “intrinsic value” is a value that one accepts without any reason, without asking questions. It is a “value” designed for people who do what they are told and who do not think. A rational value, in contrast, is a value one accepts only on the basis of understanding how it serves the self-evidently desirable ultimate end that is constituted by one’s own life and happiness.

As was implicit in earlier discussion, along with destroying confidence in science and technology, the rising tide of irrationalism and growing loss of confidence in reason means loss of the philosophical basis of the valuation of man. For reason is man’s fundamental distinguishing attribute and a culture’s view of reason determines its view of man. 112 Thus, as a further result of the assault on reason and loss of confidence in it, the philosophical and cultural status of man has been in decline. This decline was evident well before the emergence of environmentalism. It was evident in such phenomena as the acclaim given to the “antihero” in literature, to works of art and sculpture that were grotesque, twisted representations of human beings, and to books describing man in such terms as “the naked ape” or “the trousered ape.” In the last generation, as the growth of irrationalism has further accelerated and the effects of the process have more and more reached the general public, confidence in the reliability of reason, and thus the philosophical status of man, have declined so far that now virtually no basis is any longer recognized for a radical differentiation between man and animals. This explains why the doctrine of St. Francis of Assisi and the environmentalists concerning the equality between man and animals is now accepted with virtually no opposition. (Indeed, newspaper and television reporting of animal deaths has taken on a tone once reserved for the human victims of airplane crashes and similar tragedies. This was evident, for example, in the reporting of the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska and later in that of the oil spills in the Persian Gulf caused by Saddam Hussein. Numbers of dead animals and birds were reported in the same tone of tragedy as numbers of human casualties are reported.)

To the environmentalists, and the closely related supporters of “animal rights,” the possession of reason does not seem significant—because they consider reason to be unreliable; indeed, they regard it as a trap and a snare and hate it. With man’s distinctive attribute thus held to be unworthy of special valuation, man himself necessarily appears unworthy of special valuation. Thus, as the environmentalists see matters, they are advocates of a universal brotherhood of all species and all elements of the “environment.” In their eyes, there are, in effect, blacks, caucasians, orientals, giraffes, snail darters, flies, spotted owls, and mountainsides, all with equal rights in the “environmental family.” 113 The assertion of man’s rights above those of any other species or inanimate object is, in their view, a form of racism and Nazism—of “speciesism”—in which man seeks to treat other parts of the brotherhood of nature as concentration camp inmates. 114

This trend is directly and powerfully reinforced insofar as people are increasingly unaware that there ever was such a thing as the Age of Reason and what it stood for, and that there existed, and still do exist, philosophers of reason. Furthermore, people increasingly lack the intellectual capacity to acquire even the slightest understanding of what such thinkers have to say. For example, a book written in the eighteenth or nineteenth century is beyond the power of many of today’s college students and recent graduates to read; they think of it as having been written in “old English.” Worst of all, the introspective experience of the growing hordes of such miseducated people does not provide very powerful testimony on behalf of reason or the value of man. Nor does their external behavior, which increasingly incorporates such practices as the use of narcotics. To someone who can barely read, let alone write or even speak coherently,

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despite years of schooling, a view of man as a heroic being, if comprehensible at all, must appear to be from another planet. Such people are intellectually far more at home with the animals of the forest than with the man of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. They fulfill to the letter the ideal of the Romantics.

The environmentalists do not realize that, apart from man, the allegedly beautiful and harmonious “Nature” that they extol is in reality merely a place in which one thing eats another—alive. If man were nothing more than an animal, he would be entitled to act toward the rest of nature in exactly the same way as all other living things act, namely, to use it for no other purpose than as a means of serving his own survival. But man’s possession of reason elevates him above the rest of nature. By virtue of it, man has a range of knowledge and awareness incomparably surpassing that of every other species. And with the aid of goods that his reason makes it possible for him to produce, he comes to surpass all other species in virtually every physical respect as well. Thus, with the aid of goods such as automobiles, airplanes, ships and submarines, telescopes and microscopes, radio and radar, and bulldozers and steam shovels, he can outrace any animal, fly higher and faster than any bird, move in water deeper and faster than any fish, and see and hear further and in more detail and exert incomparably greater force than any other living being.

The possession of reason not only elevates man above the rest of nature in the inherent conflict of species for survival. Within the human race, it also creates a harmony of rational self-interests by virtue of making all men potential cooperators in the division of labor and thereby enabling each to serve his own self-interests better by living in peace with his fellow men and enjoying the benefits of the exercise of their reason as well as his own. 115 Thus, it is man’s possession of reason that is the foundation for an objectively demonstrable brotherhood of man, and for the respect that each human being should accord every other human being. It is man’s possession of reason that is the only basis for the existence of the concept of rights. Rights are precisely the social conditions of existence rational beings require their fellow creatures to acknowledge for the sake of the proper survival of all. The essential such social condition is that others not initiate the use of physical force against the individual. Only on the basis of respect for individual rights can human beings reap the benefits of the operation of each other’s motivated intelligence. 116 To put this another way, rights are fundamental utilitarian principles, with human life and wellbeing as the standard of what constitutes utility. 117

The only proper ethical standpoint is one which, on the basis of man’s possession of reason, asserts the harmony of the self-interests of human beings and the absolute priority of human life and wellbeing over that of any lesser species.

It is only in the name of the special value of man that individual rights can be upheld and such evils as racism and Nazism be opposed. The attempt, for example, to introduce the concept of “speciesism” as something akin to racism totally cuts the ground from all genuine opposition to racism. If man had the same status as cockroaches, what possible difference could it make if two beings the equivalent of cockroaches applied for a job, say, and the employer chose one and rejected the other because he had a prejudice in favor of one color of cockroach over another? Racism can only be opposed on the grounds that it is a denial of what the victim is entitled to as a human being, namely, among other things, recognition of his achievements and qualifications irrespective of his skin color—i.e., justice. The environmentalists are able to get away with such a concept as “speciesism” only because hardly anyone any longer stops to think of the meaning of words, but reacts to mere sounds and the tone of voice in which they are uttered. To the unthinking, “speciesism” sounds similar to racism in that it purports to attach significance to membership in some kind of category, and when it is uttered with the same tone of condemnation as that used in connection with racism, it sounds as though it must be an equivalent evil. 118

When the environmentalists disregard the special status conferred on man by the possession of reason, they do not thereby elevate flies, snail darters, and mountainsides to the level of man, but rather reduce man to the level of those things. If man is regarded as no better than flies, that is how he will be treated—that is how he is treated in every irrational culture.

Indeed, the doctrine of the environmentalists and the animal rights advocates implies nothing less than that a human being deserves to be killed for killing a fly—or for walking on grass or for leaving his footprints in the sand. Each of these things—flies, grass, sand—is alleged by the environmentalists to have a right either to life or to its preexisting condition. 119 If capital punishment is to be used to defend such an alleged right to life or preexisting condition, then the conclusion follows inescapably that human beings are to be killed for such things. And what if capital punishment is not to be used? Are human beings then to be imprisoned or flogged for the violation of such alleged rights of flies, etc.? If they are not, is there then to be no punishment at all for the violation of such alleged rights? If the violation of such alleged rights is not to be punished, does that mean that there is also to be no punishment for the violation of a human being’s right to life? In proclaiming an equality of species and of the “environmental family,” environmentalism is not merely

114 CAPITALISM mistaken. It reveals itself as psychopathic.

In this light, one may wish to consider such statements as: “It is an intensely disturbing idea that man should not be the master of all, that other suffering might be just as important. And that individual suffering—animal or human—might be less important than the suffering of species, ecosystems, the planet.” 120 The reader may find it difficult to distinguish some of the above thoughts from the utterances of a psychopath who, in the process of torturing his victim, declares that the victim’s suffering is “less important than the suffering of species, ecosystems, the planet.” The reader may encounter similar difficulties in differentiating these words as well:

To cap his argument, White [Lynn White, the leading environmentalist theologian] even dared to defend the rights of life-forms undeniably hostile to his own species, like the smallpox virus, Variola. . . . The implication was that a thoroughgoing Christian sense of morality must include smallpox, just as St. Francis included man-eating wolves.

Perhaps White hoped for a latter-day saint who could instruct Variola in cosmic courtesy. More likely, he simply recognized that in killing people the smallpox virus was only performing its appointed role in the ecosystem God created. 121

Of course, these words cannot actually be psychopathic. After all, if they were, such prestigious publishers as Random House and the University of Wisconsin Press could not possibly have published them. Could they? Furthermore, how could anyone object to the teachings of those who “love” so much that they love the enemies of man, and love man fully as much as they love wastelands, ferocious beasts, and vermin?

Contrary to the environmentalists, man and man alone introduces conscious purpose and the perception of order and harmony into the world, and is the source of all value to himself. All of these concepts center entirely on his furtherance, fulfillment, and enjoyment of his life. Man and man alone is capable of having purposes, and must have them if he is to live, since he can live only by means of thinking, planning, and acting on a long-range basis. 122 The perception of order and harmony comes into the world as man comes to understand the world and how to use that understanding to serve his life. In the process of serving his life, man gives value to nature and to other species of life, as means of serving his life. Always, he is the center and the source of all value and purpose and of the perception of order and harmony.

Of course, the members of other species may be presumed to be of value to themselves, in that they act to survive. However, insofar as their survival clashes with any human value, conflict exists between them and man, and man must—deserves to—prevail. The standard of man’s values is man’s life. All presumed other standards of value may be safely left to other forms of life, to represent them as best they can.

Regrettably, large numbers of our contemporaries apparently have so little self-esteem that it appears sufficient to them merely to assert the existence of any kind of will or value seeking that is contrary to their own and they are prepared to abandon their own values. Thus, there are growing numbers of people who abstain from wearing furs or eating meat out of deference to the desire of lower animals to go on living. Such people value themselves and the enhancement of their own lives below the lives of lower animals. They place their own value not only below that of the lower animals whose furs they might wear or whose flesh they might eat, but also below the value that lower animals attach to themselves. That is, they accord less value to themselves relative to lower animals than all the animals that hunt accord to themselves relative to other lower animals. A lion or leopard values himself above a zebra or gazelle. But the environmentalists and advocates of animal rights value themselves below cattle and sheep and as less worthy of enjoying cattle and sheep than lions and leopards. The logically consistent expression of their view is that of McKibben and White, which calls for surrender to suffering and disease.

True enough, the environmentalists do not always put it this way. What they often say is something along the lines that because man is higher than the animals his behavior must be better than theirs—that, in effect, he must become their benevolent keeper. In other words, the human race is to become a kind of Mother Teresa to the lower animals. This is altruism at the very bottom of the pit. Man, the being who can reach the stars, is to sacrifice his ascent to the heavens for the sake of animals who cannot rise from the mud, and this is how he is to be better than them. Exactly the same point applies to the nonsensical claim that the role of human beings is to serve as “stewards” of the animal kingdom and of inanimate matter, as though the highest creature on earth existed for the sake of the lowest and of inanimate matter. 123

To be sure, in serving his own life, man may extend the hand of a form of friendship to members of such species as cats and dogs, which in some ways resemble small children and which typically respond to him with what can only be described as joy and love. Indeed, the love people feel for such friendly creatures may provide a basis for overcoming the growing lunacy of animal rights. Whoever loves a dog, for example, should think of his dog’s pleasure in chewing on a steak bone, say, and ask himself if he does not, after all, value his dog’s pleasure above the life of the cow that provided the steak bone. And then he should ask if this is not perfectly right in view of the fact that the dog is capable of recognizing and responding to him with love, while the cow is little

more than an object, whose greatest contribution to human life and wellbeing is to serve as a source of milk, meat, and leather. Finally, he should ask himself if it is not also perfectly right that while his dog chews on the steak bone, he, the man, eats the steak itself because he values his own pleasure even more highly than that of his dog.

It is worth noting here that a frequent tactic of the environmentalists in promoting the notion of animal rights is to depict all animals as the equivalent of loving and adorable pets which man somehow viciously chooses to hunt down and terrorize. Amazingly, one environmentalist television “documentary” attempts to depict grizzly bears as the equivalent of puppies or kittens on the basis of the behavior of a young grizzly cub. It casually neglects the fact that an adult grizzly is a terror to man and, incidentally, to cats and dogs.

The producers of such “documentaries” also casually show wild jungle cats terrifying weaker animals and actually eating them alive—animals whom their cameramen, being present on the scene, might have saved from such brutality. At the same time, they and the rest of the environmental movement endlessly berate man for his killing of animals that are not conscious of their fate and that, if necessary, he renders unconscious before killing, as, for example, seal pups. (It should not be necessary to say that the fact that in such cases typically a small number of human beings kills animals on a vastly larger scale than is the case in the animal kingdom itself is a reflection of the existence of the division of labor, not of wanton, pointless killing. Those who work as seal hunters and so forth, act on behalf of the enormously larger number of people who consume the products the animals make possible.) Surely, even if human beings were no better than lions or leopards, an individual human being would have as much right to the skin of a seal as a lion or leopard has to the flesh of a gazelle. But human beings are incomparably better, more efficient in serving their needs, and deserve incomparably more of everything than any animal does.

The environmentalists and the advocates of animal rights need to learn the value of man and of themselves as the possessors of reason. Perhaps if they were to acquire the education they thus far have apparently lacked, they would succeed in learning their own value.

Man—rational man—not only is capable of creating an economic system which can produce an ever rising standard of living, but, precisely because he is rational— because he is man properly so called—also deserves such an economic system and all of the marvelous goods it can bring. In this spirit, the twenty-first century should be the century when man begins such great undertakings as the colonization of the solar system. It should not be a century in which he returns to the Dark Ages. It is the intention of every page and every word of this book to make sure that it is the former alternative which prevails.

Notes

1. See above, pp. 39–41. Most of this section previously appeared in my book The Government Against the Economy (Ottawa, Ill.: Jameson Books, 1979), pp. 15–19.

2. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in reducing the costs of extracting oil from tar sands, to the point where such oil now accounts for approximately one-fourth of Canada’s annual production of crude oil. The recoverable oil from the deposits in Alberta alone is estimated to be 300 billion barrels, versus 265 billion barrels estimated for Saudi Arabia. See New York Times, December 28, 1994, p. C5.

3. See below, pp. 123–128, for an explanation of how the division of labor provides the framework for continuous economic progress. See also below, pp. 176–180, for an explanation of how, within the framework of a division-of-labor society, the profit motive achieves continuous economic progress, and pp. 622–642, for an explanation of the process of capital accumulation.

4. See Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 14.

5. In W. T. Jones, The Medieval Mind, vol. 2 of A History of Western Philosophy, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), p. 6.

6. See below, pp. 303–304, for the reasons why government ownership of an industry causes inefficiency.

7. See below, pp. 234–237.

8. “Dismantling of the Shoreham Nuclear Plant Is Completed,” New York Times, October 13, 1994, p. B6. See also “New Chapter for Shoreham: New York Files to Take Plant,” ibid., June 29, 1990, p. B3. Remarkably, the environmentalist destroyers of the Shoreham plant attack its owner, the Long Island Lighting company (Lilco), for having high power rates, as though their policies had nothing to do with those rates. It appears, moreover, that Lilco’s acquiescence in its own total elimination has been obtained by a $9-billion takeover offer from New York State, which is to be financed by the sale of municipal bonds in that amount. If this offer is consummated, it will repeat the pattern previously evident in the government’s takeover of the American railroad industry, namely, first, the government’s destruction of an industry’s or company’s profitability, followed by the comparative relief of socialization at a price that at least provides some measure of compensation. Following an official statement of the takeover offer, which would entail a purchase price of Lilco’s stock at $21.50 a share, the firm’s stock rose 25 cents to $17.375 a share on the New York Stock Exchange. (Wall Street Journal, Western ed., October 28, 1994, p. A9.)

9. See “Mideast Crisis Puts New Spotlight On an Idle Oil Plant in California,” New York Times, September 1, 1990, p. 1.

10. The expression “factors of production” can be understood as synonymous with the expressions “means of production” or “physical elements of production.” As will be seen, in the context of a division-of-labor economy, in which all productive activity is vitally dependent on the earning of money, use of the expressions implicitly requires that the physical goods or services representing the factors of production be purchased for the sake of making subsequent sales. On this point, see below, pp. 442–456.

11. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, 3d ed. rev. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966), pp. 127–131.

12. See ibid.

13. Cf. David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 3d. ed. (London, 1821), chaps. 2 and 3; reprinted as vol. 1 of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). 14. See above, n. 3 of this chapter. See also above, pp. 45–46, and below, 106.

15. For elaboration of this point, see below, pp. 313–316. 16. For elaboration of these propositions, see below, pp. 191– 192 and 206–209.

17. Of course, if the property in question were of truly outstanding beauty, it would have greater economic value as a tourist attraction than in any ordinary economic use such as coal mining. All that would be necessary to ensure its use in this capacity would be that it be privately owned. In this way, all possible competing uses would be free to find expression in competing bids to the owner, with the one most highly valued by the consumers thereby being free to outcompete the ones less highly valued by the consumers.

18. Cf. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, “Government Garbage,” Free Market 8, no. 2 (February 1990), pp. 2, 8. See also Peter Passell, “The Garbage Problem: It May Be Politics Not Nature,” New York Times, February 26, 1991, pp. B5, B7.

19. Rockwell, “Government Garbage.”

20. Ibid.

21. Today’s conservationists and environmentalists, of course, have a preference for “biodegradable” garbage, such as decaying animal and vegetable matter, which rots and smells. They prefer this to the inert kind, such as aluminum or styrofoam, which appears to remain in its original condition for an indefinitely long time. The basis of their preference appears to be that they object to the existence of permanent evidence of modern technology and concomitant mass consumption.

22. The last sentence of this paragraph and the next two paragraphs are taken, with a few minor changes, from The Government Against the Economy, pp. 19–20.

23. Of course, the essential objection to the policy of conservationism is not strictly that it compels us to perform more labor, though that is almost always true, but that it compels us to expend means of production of greater value to achieve a saving of lesser value. There are cases in which we must expend two or more hours of low-paid labor to save one hour or less of high-paid labor, or many hours of labor to save a quantity of extremely valuable material. The comparative market prices involved determine which is the appropriate course of action. See below, pp. 206–209 and 212, for further explanation of this principle.

24. Cf. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), pp. 1012–1013; The Virtue of Selfishness (New York:

New American Library, 1964), pp. 1–34.

25. See above, pp. 43–45.

26. See above, pp. 63–66.

27. The destructive government policies I refer to are prounion and minimum-wage legislation, the welfare system, farm subsidies, rent controls, and laws prescribing such things as the number of people who may occupy an apartment or the minimum floor space, window area, and so forth which must exist per occupant. Prounion and minimum-wage legislation deprive people of the opportunity of obtaining employment by making labor artificially more expensive and thus reducing the quantity of it demanded below the supply available. The welfare system eliminates the necessity of being self-supporting and thus of learning the skills necessary to become so and thus the possibility of advancing from there. Farm subsidies make the price of food higher than it would otherwise be. Rent controls create shortages of rental housing by enlarging the quantity of rental housing demanded and reducing the supply available, thereby making it impossible for some people to find housing. Laws prescribing minimum levels of housing amenities have the effect of pricing housing beyond the reach of some people. In the absence of such laws and of rent controls, some amount of housing would be available for and within the financial reach of every working person. For elaboration of all these points, see below, pp. 172–294 passim, 580–594, and 655–659.

28. Chapter 4 will show how the invention, production, and application of machinery all depend on the division of labor. See below, pp. 123–128.

29. New York Times, May 25, 1992, p. 1.

30. Cf. Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1971).

31. See above, pp. 48–49.

32. An excellent book that refutes most of the specific claims of the environmentalists is Jay Lehr, ed., Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992). Portions of this chapter, previously published as a pamphlet The Toxicity of Environmentalism, appear as the summary to the book.

33. George Reisman, “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism,” Intellectual Activist 5, no. 4 (April 30, 1990), pp. 4–7; reprinted as a pamphlet (Laguna Hills, Calif.: The Jefferson School of Philosophy, Economics, and Psychology, 1992). 34. For a comprehensive discussion of the safety of nuclear power, see Petr Beckmann, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear (Boulder, Colo.: Golem Press, 1976).

35. New York Times, September 20, 1990, p. A15.

36. For elaboration of this point, see below, pp. 275–278. See also pp. 172–180, for an account of the contrasting operations of capitalism.

37. Carl Sagan, “Tomorrow’s Energy,” Parade, November 25, 1990, p. 10.

38. Ibid., p. 11.

39. It should be realized that it is no answer to this fact to point to cases in which the loss of energy may appear to be compensated for by a change in the kind of equipment or materials used—for example, obtaining the same illumination, despite the consumption of less electricity, by means of using specially designed lamps. By their nature, cases of this kind entail greater costs. If they did not, there would be no need for the conservationists to urge, let alone attempt to compel, the adoption of

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 117 such things. The significance of the higher costs is that less wealth is available for other purposes. Thus, conservation provides energy for one use only by depriving people of energy needed for other uses and, in provoking their efforts to compensate for this loss, may well deprive them of wealth required for other purposes.

40. Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday, October 22, 1989, p. 9.

41. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 176.

42. Another example is that of Christopher Manes, the author of Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990). He and the Earth First! organization he supports regard famine in Africa and the spread of AIDS as environmentally beneficial developments. The founder of Earth First!, David Foreman, has described mankind “as a cancer on nature,” and has said, “I am the antibody” (in New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 29, 1990, p. 22). Another representative of Earth First! writes: “Only a very few of human pathogens are shared by other partners on our planet. Biological warfare will have no impact on other creatures, big or small, if we design it carefully” (in Forbes, October 29, 1990, pp. 96–97). And Paul Ehrlich, one of the oldest and most prominent leaders of the environmental movement, who is supposedly entirely respectable, criticizes the “preoccupation with death control,” by which he means, “preoccupation with the problems and diseases of middle age.” In his view, such preoccupation, and its consequent lengthening of human life expectancy, “will lead to disaster.” (Ehrlich, The Population Bomb [New York: Ballantine Books, 1968], p. 91). 43. New York Times, August 30, 1990, pp. A1, C15.

44. The alleged danger of radiation is not a valid objection to atomic power. The radiation emission of an atomic power plant located next door to one’s house is equal to about two percent of the radioactivity one normally receives from all other—almost entirely natural—sources. On this point, see Beckmann, Health Hazards, pp. 112–113. Nor are the alleged dangers of storing atomic wastes a valid objection. Nature itself has always stored such highly radioactive elements as radium and uranium without significant danger to human life.

45. See above, p. 75.

46. In the case of whales, domestication might be feasible if the establishment of electronically fenced ocean “ranches” were allowed and if some part of the existing population of whales could be made private property. In the case of the buffalo, it appears that to a modest extent they now are raised commercially.

47. Forbes, January 8, 1990, p. 303.

48. Cf. Edward C. Krug, “Fish Story,” Policy Review, no. 52 (Spring 1990), pp. 44–48.

49. See Fortune, February 11, 1991, p. 145.

50. See March 18, 1988 broadcast of ABC’s “20/20.” See also Bruce Ames, “What Are the Major Carcinogens in the Etiology of Human Cancer?” in V. T. De Vita, Jr., S. Hellman, and S. A. Rosenberg, eds., Important Advances in Oncology 1989 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1989), pp. 241–242.

51. See New York Times, August 15, 1991, pp. 1, A14.

52. “20/20”; Ames, “Major Carcinogens,” p. 242.

53. “20/20”; Ames, “Major Carcinogens,” p. 244.

54. Ames, “Major Carcinogens,” p. 244.

55. Orange County Register, October 31, 1990, p. B15. See also Rogelio A. Maduro and Ralf Schauerhammer, The Holes in the Ozone Scare (Washington, D. C.: 21st Century Science Associates, 1992), pp. 11–40, 98–149.

56. Cf. Ames, “Major Carcinogens,” pp. 243–244.

57. See “No Evidence of Global Warming in 1980’s Is Detected by Satellites,” New York Times, March 30, 1990.

58. Ibid., December 13, 1989, p. A18. See also Lehr, Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, pp. 393–437.

59. Ehrlich, Population Bomb, p. 61.

60. Cf. McKibben, End of Nature, p. 111.

61. See “Scientists Warn of Dangers in a Warming Earth,” New York Times, May 26, 1990.

62. Ibid.

63. See below, Chapter 6, especially pp. 209–211 and 212. 64. On the operations of the price system and the vital role it plays in genuine economic planning—that is, the economic planning of private individuals and business—see below, pp. 137–139 and 172–294 passim.

65. The process of rational reform would be greatly accelerated, if students from such countries, when attending universities in the United States, were taught the virtues of capitalism rather than Marxist propaganda.

66. On these points, see New York Times, January 16, 1990, p. C1, and ibid., September 18, 1990, p. B5.

67. See ibid., December 13, 1989, p. A18.

68. The ecologists, of course, denounce it, on the grounds that it destroys various plant and animal species and contributes to global warming through destroying forests. They also claim that after the land has been cleared and the existing soil nutrients are exhausted, the land becomes desert. In answer to this last, they have apparently never heard of the Atherton tablelands in Australia, which were originally jungle and which are now, and for many years have been, beautiful and thriving farmland. Nor, apparently, do they take into account the ability to replenish soil nutrients through the use of chemical fertilizers.

69. McKibben, End of Nature, p. 170. Italics mine.

70. Nature, to be sure, does not produce anything directly comparable to traffic congestion, but it does produce all manner of obstacles in the way of travel, such as forests, rivers, and mountains. Thus, traffic congestion is abstractly comparable to nature’s obstacles to travel.

71. Of course, it would be possible for the owners of surrounding land at some later time to buy back this right. This would occur in cases in which the increase in the value of their land once free of the negative effects caused by the present producer outweighed the value to that producer of continuing his present operations. In such cases, the owners of the surrounding land would be able to offer him a price that made the surrender of his previously acquired right financially worthwhile.

72. The fall in prices relative to incomes that economic progress achieves is, of course, present when incomes rise faster than prices, which is the way the phenomenon is experienced when accompanied by inflation of the money supply. On the subject of how real incomes rise, see below, pp. 176–180. See also pp. 618–622 and 655–659.

73. Letter signed by Michael L. Fisher is undated (but appeared sometime in 1990), p. 3. Emphasis his.

74. Exactly the same practice, it is worth noting, was followed by the administration of former Governor Jerry Brown of California, which argued that oil fields off a certain portion of the state’s coast should not be developed because they would provide the nation as a whole with only a ten-day supply of oil. 75. Carl Sagan, “Tomorrow’s Energy,” p. 10.

76. For an exposition of the doctrine, see Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), pp. 770–775.

77. It is worth noting that in a division-of-labor, capitalist society everyone normally does earn his standard of living, even people of average and below average ability. But he earns it very easily. The essential thing that is required of the great majority of people is merely the expenditure of the mental effort required to learn the new skills made necessary by the work of the innovators. Thus, someone with the muscles and brawn of a caveman, or a blacksmith, is enabled to enjoy a standard of living that includes such things as automobiles and television sets, merely by being willing to acquire an elementary education, to learn some new skills throughout his life when others introduce further advances, and, above all, to respect the rights of such others to their greater gains. For elaboration on the economic position of the average person under capitalism, see in particular Chapters 9 and 14, below.

78. For a further critique of the externalities doctrine, in particular the external-benefits doctrine, see below, pp. 335–336. 79. For a full account of how the environmental movement, in conjunction with the U.S. government, has been responsible not only for the high price of oil and oil products but also for virtually every other aspect of the energy crisis, see above, pp. 66–67 and 172–264 passim, but especially pp. 234–237. 80. These principles were clearly understood both by the U.S. Federal Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit and by the U.S. government’s Office of Management and Budget under the Bush administration. The Court cited research demonstrating that one additional death may result from reduced incomes caused by each $7.5 million of additional expense imposed by government regulation. On this basis, the Office of Management and Budget blocked the enactment of a costly set of environmental regulations proposed by the Department of Labor which ostensibly sought to promote workers’ health and safety. The Office found that the regulations were so expensive that their enactment would cause more deaths than they would avoid. See “Citing Cost, Budget Office Blocks Workplace Health Proposal,” New York Times, March 16, 1992, p. A13. 81. For elaboration of the principles involved in the present discussion, see below, pp. 622–642.

82. “Marsh Destroyed, Owner Is Fined,” New York Times, May 26, 1990.

83. The law of comparative advantage is explained on pp. 350–356. The doctrine of the harmony of interests is demonstrated in almost every chapter of this book, but see especially Chapters 6, 9, 11, 13, and 14.

84. See above, pp. 35–36.

85. Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 252, 254. For a refutation of all aspects of the Marxian exploitation theory, see below, pp. 473–498 and 613–666.

86. If the influence of the ecology movement continues to grow, then it is perfectly conceivable that in years to come, the very intention of a country to increase its production could serve as a cause of war, perhaps precipitating the dispatch of a U.N. security force to stop it. Even the mere advocacy of economic freedom within the borders of a country would logically—from the depraved perspective of the ecology movement—be regarded as a threat to mankind. It is, therefore, essential that the United States absolutely refuse to sanction in any way any form of international limitations on “pollution”—that is, on production.

87. Cf. Brad Erickson, ed., Call to Action, Handbook for Ecology, Peace and Justice (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), p. 5.

88. See, for example, Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985). This book is marked by total ignorance of history and of every proposition of economics.

89. Cf. Ayn Rand, “The Left: Old and New,” in Ayn Rand, The New Left.

90. The costs merely of complying with the environmental movement’s demands for the cleanup of toxic waste sites is estimated at between $300 billion and $700 billion over the coming few years. See “Experts Question Staggering Costs of Toxic Cleanups,” New York Times, September 1, 1991, p. 1. (The cost of complying with other antipollution regulations is currently $115 billion per year. [Ibid., p. 12.]) Even using the EPA’s farfetched methods of estimating risk, the maximum number of cancer cases which can be linked to public exposure to hazardous wastes is approximately 1,000 per year. (Ibid.) All reasonable protection against such wastes can frequently be secured for as little as one-half of one percent of the costs presently mandated by law and by the EPA. (Ibid.) Thus, hundreds of billions of dollars have been and are to be squandered to appease the imaginary terrors of the environmentalists.

91. On the nature of altruism and self-sacrifice, see Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged and Virtue of Selfishness.

92. Cf. F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, W. W. Bartley III, ed. (London: Routledge, 1988).

93. See above, pp. 19–36.

94. See above, pp. 35–36.

95. I am indebted for this vital distinction to von Mises. It was an observation he made in his seminar at New York University. 96. This proposition bears an essential similarity to the theory of capital accumulation presented below on pp. 622–642. 97. Thalidomide, of course, was the drug that was prescribed as a tranquilizer for pregnant women and that turned out to cause major damage to fetuses.

98. On these points, see the article of Leonard Peikoff, “Maybe You’re Wrong,” Objectivist Forum 2, no. 2 (April 1981), pp. 8–12.

99. See Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2d ed. enl., ed. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (New York: New American Library, 1990), pp. 77–82.

100. In W. T. Jones, Kant to Wittgenstein and Sartre, vol. 4 of A History of Western Philosophy, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1969), p. 102.

101. Ayn Rand, “The Cashing-in: The Student Rebellion,” in Ayn Rand, Capitalism, p. 235.

NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT 119

102. Ayn Rand, Objectivist Epistemology, p. 81.

103. Jones, Kant, p. 102.

104. Ibid., p. 104.

105. See below, Chapter 8 passim.

106. For example, McKibben writes: “Perhaps the ten [sic] thousand years of our encroaching, defiant civilization, an eternity to us and a yawn to the rocks around us, could give way to ten [sic] thousand years of humble civilization, when we choose to pay more for the benefits of nature, when we rebuild the sense of wonder and sanctity that could protect the natural world.” (McKibben, End of Nature, p. 215.) According to this passage, the ten thousand years in which man has risen from the cave and which embrace the totality of man’s civilization were a mistake—they were “encroaching, defiant.” In the next ten thousand years, McKibben hopes, the wildlife, the weeds, and the rock formations that constitute nature will be protected from us, because we will have abandoned anything resembling Western civilization.

107. On the new racism and its hostility to Western civilization, see my essay “Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism.” 108. See Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1961) p. 67.

109. See H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1895); reprinted in Treasury of World Masterpieces: H. G. Wells (New York: Octopus Books, 1982.)

110. McKibben, End of Nature, p. 202.

111. An essential requirement of becoming such a “new intellectual” is, of course, to read and understand the works of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and the British classical and Austrian economists, as well as the political philosophy of John Locke and the Founding Fathers of the United States. The importance of all of these works was explained above, in the Introduction to this book. In addition, a thorough knowledge of history and extensive reading of the great classics of literature and philosophy, as well as familiarity with mathematics and natural science at what used to be the college level, are also requisite. In other words, to be a “new intellectual,” one must have an education similar in kind to that which intellectuals used to have, plus be thoroughly familiar with the philosophy of Objectivism, the writings of von Mises, classical and Austrian economics, and the political philosophy on which the United States was established.

112. See above, pp. 19–21.

113. It is interesting to recall here some previously quoted words of Graber, whose implications I did not develop at the time: “I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota. . . .” The philosophical meaning of these words is that Graber sees no fundamental distinction, requiring separate classification, between his own children and flies and earthworms.

114. The term speciesism appears, among other places, in Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) pp. 5, 138, 142, 153. This book is impregnable against all arguments falling in the category of reductio ad absurdum inasmuch as it enthusiastically supports almost every imaginable absurdity that is present in the doctrine of animal rights. For example, it states, approvingly: “The ecologist noted that smallpox, as part of the biotic community, was a product of evolution as were wolves and whales and redwood trees. According to the biocentric reading of environmental ethics, there was no logical reason for discriminating against the virus just because it was small and harmful to humans” (p. 85). Interestingly, the author pretends throughout to be a fervent supporter of John Locke and the doctrine of natural rights. Yet at no point in his book is there a discussion of the connection between human reason and rights or of the proreason, proman context in which John Locke wrote. The word reason does not even appear in the book’s index. Although publication of such a philosophically disgraceful book by a university press should not be surprising in today’s environment, it should still provoke outrage.

115. See below, Chapter 4. See also von Mises, Human Action, pp. 143–176 on the nature of human society, and below, Chapter 9 passim.

116. Cf. Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” in Virtue of Selfishness; and the discussion of rights in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 1061–1063. 117. This observation, of course, has bearing on the dispute between those defenders of capitalism who support the doctrine of natural rights and those who describe themselves as utilitarians. If rights are understood in the context of taking man’s life as the standard of useful action, there need be no conflict. 118. Interestingly, exactly the same kind of process of lack of thought has resulted in the term “discrimination” becoming one of opprobrium. It is perfectly proper, in fact absolutely necessary to human survival, to discriminate between food and poison, between tigers and pussycats, between danger and the lack of danger. What is not proper is to ignore an individual’s achievements and superior qualifications because of his racial membership. Such behavior represents a failure to discriminate on the basis of fundamentals—namely, what the individual has accomplished—in favor of discriminating on the basis of a triviality, namely, his mere racial membership. It is to deny credit to the individual for what is within his power, while condemning him for what is not in his power. It is for this reason that discrimination based on race is wrong. But today’s unthinking mentalities hear the word “discrimination” uttered with condemnation and then believe that any form of discrimination is evil, including discrimination in favor of the competent over the incompetent.

119. “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other socalled ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.” (Christopher D. Stone, a University of Southern California law professor in Nash, Rights of Nature, p. 121. Stone argued this position before the U.S. Supreme Court with the support of the Sierra Club. His views were endorsed by Justice Douglas. [Ibid., pp. 128–131].)

120. McKibben, End of Nature, p. 182.

121. Nash, Rights of Nature, p. 95.

122. Cf. Ayn Rand, Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 11–16.

123. People can, of course, legitimately be concerned with the avoidance of unnecessary cruelty to animals. Much more importantly, they can legitimately be concerned with the avoidance of unnecessary suffering on the part of their fellow human beings. The proper course for those who truly are concerned with eliminating unnecessary human suffering is not to immolate themselves, but, first and foremost, to support capitalism and its underlying philosophy and economic theory, and, no

less, to pursue their own rational self-interest. For elaboration see below, pp. 332–335, and above, n. 111, which provides a list of the major philosophical and theoretical sources in defense of capitalism. Practically the whole of this book is a demonstration of how the pursuit of rational self-interest operates to the interest of all. Long before the reader reaches the end of this book, it should be overwhelmingly clear to him, if he has read with any significant degree of understanding, how the self-interested activities of businessmen and capitalists accomplish far more economic benefit for the poor, and thereby alleviate far more suffering and hardship, than the work of the most devout practitioners of self-sacrifice and charity ever has accomplished or ever could accomplish. These results, of course, are not the motive of the businessmen’s and capitalists’ activities—selfish profit is the motive—but they are the necessary, inevitable effect of those activities, provided only that the businessmen and capitalists are left free to pursue their profit and thus to carry on their activities.