Why Is It Nature verus People; T. Machan

3. Recall that portions of the post-Watergate campaign financereform statute were struck down as violative of the First Amendment by the Supreme Court's 1976 opinion in Buckley v. Valeo. For a good overview of current laws and regulations, see Sam Kazman, "Purer Politics, Greasier Pigs, and Other Wonders of Campaign Reform," Regulation, Summer 1992, pp.62-68. 4. Lillian BeVier, "Campaign Finance Reform: Specious Arguments, Intractable Dilemmas," Columbia Law Review, May 1994, p. 1273. 5. Steven D. Levitt, "Congressional Campaign Finance Reform," Journal ojEconomic Perspectives, Winter 1995,pp. 183, 193. 6. According to one observer, "If you were foolish enough to abolish lobbying, you would only drive it underground, where it would be far more abusive and corrupting than it is in the open." Jonathan Rauch, Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer ofAmerican Government (New York: Random House, 1994), p.159.

7. Levitt, pp. 188, 192. 8. Ibid., p. 192. Why Is It Nature versus People? by Tibor R. Machan T he environmentalist lobby in Washing ton is working overtime these days moaning over the prospect of reduced budgets and rolled-back regulation. Don't get me wrong. I do not dismiss everything scary coming from ecologists. Human beings can be reckless and destruc tive, although I doubt our worry should be about the environment instead of ourselves. After all we can flourish only if there are no great disasters, whether of our own making or through climatic happenstance. What makes me doubt the complete san ity of many environmentalists is their con stant insistence on reading human life out of the rest of nature. As if we were not natural and did not belong with the rest of the world-indeed, as if we had·been dumped into reality by some runaway garbage truck disposing of unnatural trash.

Dr. Machan teaches philosophy at Auburn Uni versity, Alabama. The plain fact is that we are every bit as natural as are ants, snail darters, spotted owls, or wetlands. We are the crown of creation, the highest level of nature attained in the known universe. What's more, this means that housing developments, too, are part of nature. As are high-rise buildings, bridges, disposable diapers, and even nu clear waste. Part of the rhetoric that gives environ mentalists the apparent moral high ground concerns the supposed conflict between the sacrosanct natural versus the lowly artifi cial, technological, and "man-made." I am sure we all have heard instances of this blather, as when some program on the Discovery channel proclaims that some part of nature has been undermined by, you guessed it, "MAN"! Yet, consider this: when a zebra is de stroyed by a lion, it isn't depicted as the sad demise of some natural thing at the hands of an alien, unnatural force. When hurri632 THE FREEMAN • OCTOBER 1995 canes, volcanoes, typhoons, or tornadoes wreak havoc across the globe, these are accepted as natural events, to be lamented as only minor disturbances, not ecological disasters. Dh, once in a while even these are traced in some incomprehensible, remote fashion to alleged human misconduct. (But just how that is conceived by the finger wagging environmentalist crowd is rather bizarre. Most of those scientific types don't really believe in freedom of the will, in the capacity of human beings to make real choices! So how then can they blame us for anything?) In fact we are every bit as much a part of nature as those wetlands the environmen talists wish to protect from us. Why don't they go out to protect other parts of nature from, say, termites or floods? Why they are unwilling to read out of this world every thing else that changes the surrounding environment is one of those puzzles these folks simply refuse to address.

What makes sense is that human beings are a different natural phenomenon from, say, volcanoes and foxes, to name just two natural beings that cause some destruction here and there in the universe. But remem ber, birds are different from fish, and fish are different from rocks, and so forth and so forth. The fact that human beings manifest even radical differences is by no means unprecedented. Nature repeatedly keeps in troducing such variations, nothing strange about that any more. But no. The environmentalist crowd keeps treating the novelty that we are as freakish, alien, undesirable. Housing devel opments are not natural, nor are freeways, parking lots, or dams. Why? Well, there is no answer given to that question because the idea is obviously nutty. What a natural being does is by definition natural. It happens that doing wrong is new-other beings do not do the wrong thing, that's reserved to hu man nature. But it's natural, too. It is our task to avoid doing wrong, to keep doing right, but the problem is not between natural versus non-natural or anti-natural.

The whole rhetoric of environmentalism needs to be recast into terms that make better sense. Let's not exclude human life from the realm of nature. Then we can ask whether it is the right thing for us to build houses, bridges, dams, parking lots, or nu clear power generators. Those are real is sues. The nature versus human beings story is a phony one, through and through. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY No-Brainer by Russell Madden I n a recent issue of TV Guide the actor LeVar Burton was quoted as saying that, "The attack on PBS by the new Congress is a no-brainer. Anyone who opposes funding for PBS and does anything to discourage kids' programming should have their [sic] head examined." He went on to say that "[It's] the only commercial-free environ ment where parents can be assured that children will be introduced to their ABCs without someone trying to sell them some thing. " Mr. Burton, of course, has a vested in terest in PBS: he is the host of "Reading Rainbow. " This show introduces young readers to children's books in the frame work of mini-documentaries on various his torical and cultural topics. I've enjoyed watching the program myself on occasion. I know of few who would disagree that the show is both fun and educational.