| | Ed, thanks for the compliment. The best analysis I've read on environmental issues is the long chapter in George Reisman's Capitalism; my comments primarily reflect what I learned from that source. Another excellent source is Robert Bidinotto's blog EcoNOT.com.
Vera, thanks for your good natured response to my post. I don't want to twist the meaning of your comments. But, with respect, some of your ideas on this topic reflect widely-held fallacies: from economics, from ethics, and from (what I see as ) technophobia.
An example of a fallacy from economics is your belief that a free society is capable of or even likely to yield productive activity that "runs down" the earth's ability to properly support human life. However, natural resources are not primarily a product of nature; they are a product of individual human ingenuity.
Another economic fallacy involves dropping the issue of private property rights when considering the issue of pollution. In fact, neither concept can be correctly understood in the absence of the other. For, in a free society based on voluntarism and private property, pollution is an act of tresspass: the dumping of someone's unwanted material by-products on another's property. True, the rivers, oceans, and air are not privately owned, but they can and ought to be. And of course, "unwanted material by-products" are materials for which some enterprise paid good money going in, but has to toss away going out. So aside from the central issue of disposal without trespassing, the profit motive constantly encourages private firms to minimize pollution.
Still another economic fallacy is the view (often held implicitly) that productive activity is a zero sum game, in which someone's profit represents another's loss. This view attributes morally tainted motives to the producer who supposedly exploits the losers with shoddy goods, with radiation poisoning and other forms of pollution, with tainted landscapes and vast parking lots, with advertising that inspires glutenous human wants. However, in a free society producers must appeal to the self interest of their customers; consequently, gouging and exploitation are impossible and have never happened (not in the way that orthodox historians teach us.) In fact, the smoke belching from some industrial stack represents improved physical well-being and opportunity for lots of people: those who buy its products or products it contributes to, those who supply its materials and equipment, and those who work there.
Human "wants" get criticized a lot as "selfish", "greedy", and "materialistic". And it's true that some people exaggerate the importance of material acquisition to the exclusion of spiritual concerns. For example, someone who commits fraud, or abuses a friend's trust, for the sake of acquiring a new BMW has skewed values. But, of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to own a fleet of BMW's and to achieve as much material well-being as one can, provided that one does not sacrifice other values essential to one's happiness. Whenever I hear someone protesting human "wants", as though "wanting" were somehow morally tainted, my antennae go up. Perhaps in your case this criticism is unfair.
Finally, I doubt the realism of contemporary fears of technology: the angst associated with nuclear power, electromagnetic radiation from power lines, ingesting or touching "chemicals", animal or human "cloning", and CO2 "pollution" (which makes plant life flourish!). In fact, I doubt the validity of the concept of eco-systems.
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