Vol. 15 No. 21 · 4 November 1993
pages 22-23 | 3425 words
Privatising the atmosphere
Jeremy Waldron
- Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment by John Gray
Routledge, 195 pp, £19.99, June 1993, ISBN 0 415 09297 3
By instinct and by reputation, environmentalists tend to be socialists. They are hostile to private industry, they scorn the profit motive, and they are profoundly suspicious of any claim that societies work best when economic decisions are made in the medium of unregulated markets. By emphasising the dire consequences for the environment of unrestrained industry, they present themselves as champions of big government, large regulative agencies and strict legal controls.
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 23 · 2 December 1993
From Alan Milne
For every proposition connecting ecocide with central planning advanced by John Gray, I could advance one connecting substantial damage to the environment with free enterprise. If we survey the economic and environmental history of the USA over the last hundred and fifty years we cannot but draw the moral that individual and corporate ownership has not left the ecosystems in much better shape than Kazakhstan is now in. It is true that east of the Mississippi is in better shape but that is because the ecosystems had greater powers of recuperation than in Central Asia, not because Carnegie, Morgan and Rockfeller put conservation before money-making. As for the Midwest, if Gray and Jeremy Waldron (LRB, 4 November) are going to argue that the dust bowls were the result of public ownership I will laugh so loud that you, down under, will hear me.
The appalling truth is that ecocide has accompanied every form of economy. The only valid generalisation to be made from a study of forty centuries of history is that man’s progress has been accompanied, with exceptions, by the massive, sustained and totally self-centred destruction of other species which the wanton killing of herbivores by carnivores falls a long way short of. These exceptions are temperate forests in North-West Europe and eastern North America and tropical forests in Central and South America and South-East Asia; only they are resilient enough to recover from the ravages wreaked on them.
Alan Milne
Sandy Bay, Australia
