Machan's Musings - Empty Environmentalism?
by Tibor R. Machan
In the community where I live, environmentalists are hard at work to put a stop to all developments, meaning, all efforts to increase the available housing and other human amenities for people wanting to live there. Orange County, CA, is a highly prized area—the weather is very desirable, there is nowadays an abundance of jobs, schools are passable, and the entertainment and amusement being offered up are better than in most places around the globe. So it’s no wonder people want to live there, and those with land find a demand to fill for homes and other amenities—developments, as they have been dubbed, probably because the designation tends to remove from it the human element and suggests raw greed.
Just now the biggest land owner in the region, the Irvine Company, has proposed what is referred to the "East Orange scheme," which is the nemesis of the local and other branches of the Sierra Club. The Club and all its allies are hard at work to try to bring the project to a halt. Their first line of attack is based on the contention that the new development is likely to grind the local traffic to a halt. But, in fact, this is only the first of their salvos. The far more important sounding reason they offer—when you check out their web site at www.eastorange.org — is that, "These lands are part of one of the most biologically important open space areas in the entire state."
I admit to not being very eager to go to the defense of the Irvine Company, mainly because it is one of those huge corporations that has no compunction about getting into bed with the government so as to enhance its economic fortunes. (For more on the company, see http://www.irvinecompany.com/aboutus/in_the_news/Bucking_a_trend/page_3.asp.) It began in 1864, when James Irvine made a killing in the California Gold Rush and later bought up about 120,000 acres of ranchland in what became Orange County, Southern California. The land the company owns covers the region several miles inland from the Pacific Ocean all the way north to the Cleveland National Forest where I live, in Silverado Canyon.
Anyway, what struck me about the crucial reference to how "biologically important" is the land to be used for development is that, while it sounds significant, if one thinks about it a bit, that phrase carries very little meaning. Suppose it said that the land is botanically important? Or zoologically important? Or residentially important? All these might convey some nearly clear meaning because they point to an area of life that the land may benefit. It may help plants, or animals, or people looking for someplace to live. "Biologically" is too broad a category and, since the company’s plans to develop it for human habitation, that, too, may well be part of what makes it important. We are, after all, biological entities, and when land is used to provide us with living space, that could be construed as being biologically important.
Surely, however, this is not what the Sierra Club & Co., want to convey by that phrase. But then, what? Something, one may assume, that is left deliberately unspecified in the text on the website.
For something to be important, it must be important to something else. Water is important for most life, as is oxygen and inhabitable land. Because, however, there is probably more demand for such land in certain regions of the world than is available, priorities need to be set.
In a free society the priorities are set by way of the pricing system, because costs show just how badly people want something. This amounts to a reasonably sensible rationing process, where the quantity and quality of goods people receive depends on how well-off they are, how hard they have worked to be so well-off, how lucky they have been, etc. All this works out without some group of central planners of the kind they had in the old Soviet Union, groups that are in the end clueless about how to allocate resources rationally.
My bet is that the Sierra Club people are just as clueless about that as were those in the Kremlin, although I am sure they fancy themselves very wise. And this they evidence by using such ambiguous and thus useless language as exemplified by the phrase "biologically important."
Don’t get me wrong—gridlock on Orange County roads can be hellish, in part because they are built by government, which tends to plan much like those guys did in the Kremlin, without a clear idea what actually is in demand and how much it will cost. Still, one can appreciate worries about crowded roads and other infrastructure challenges. What is a mystery, however, is what on earth "biologically important" should be understood to mean.
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