Ed. Note: This is Part 4 of a six-part series. “America’s Enlightenment Heritage” (Part 1) is here; “Conservation vs. Preservation” (Part 2) is here; “Inhuman Rights” (Part 3) is here; “The Value of Nature” (Part 5) is here; and “The ‘Ideal’ of Primitivism” (Part 6) is here.
“The fundamental concern of environmentalists is about the logical incompatibility of the values underlying a modern, technological, capitalist society, and the values embodied in the environmentalists’ image of Eden.”
Why, despite such transparent manipulations of fact and science, and their overt indifference to economics, have environmentalists been winning the battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people?
Because they’ve never based their appeals primarily on facts, statistics, science, or economics. They rest their case ultimately on ethical and philosophical grounds. Both their appeal and their shamelessness arise from the widespread belief that they are idealists: that they are champions of the Good against the forces of Evil that are sullying and raping a once-virginal planet.
Reading environmentalist literature or listening to the movement’s founders and leaders, one is always struck by the style of the language: a hybrid of the spiritual, the self-righteous, the aesthetic, and the apocalyptic. This religiosity is not surprising, given the movement’s historic roots in Greek and Judeo-Christian mythology, and in the pantheism and transcendentalism of the movement’s nineteenth-century intellectual forerunners. Nor does their basic premise—the allegedly “intrinsic value” of untouched nature—allow much wiggle room for compromise. After all, if a virginal planet is to be our moral and aesthetic ideal, just how much planet-raping by Man are we going to allow?
Critics of environmentalists have seldom understood this, or known how to respond. The best among them have tried to confront environmentalist claims and activities with exposés of their “junk science.” Some try to employ economic arguments, showing the enormous costs that environmentalists are imposing on people and businesses. Other less sophisticated critics try to appeal to the public’s common sense, denouncing environmentalist “extremism.” Sadly, the most futile response in the face of environmental activism—piecemeal appeasement—too often comes from the beleaguered business community.
None of these responses is working, of course, because they are all beside the point. They don’t address the fundamental concern of environmentalists. That concern is about values. It’s about the logical incompatibility of the values underlying a modern, technological, capitalist society, and the values embodied in the environmentalists’ image of Eden.
Appeals to science, economics, common sense, or compromise will work only if both sides accept their legitimacy as methods to resolve conflicts. But how can that happen when one side dismisses science as Frankensteinian, economics as selfishness, reason as Man’s curse, and compromise as moral weakness?
For example, consider the response to the movement by some who call themselves “free market environmentalists.” They attempt to co-opt the label, popularity, and values of environmentalism while relying on the principles of market economics to solve environmental problems. Their approach is to argue that most problems of pollution and overuse of resources can be resolved by properly recognizing property rights and applying marketplace incentives.
However, that argument, though valid, is not nearly adequate. For one thing, it assumes that problem-solving lies at the heart of the environmentalist agenda: that the conflict is over pollution and dirt, rather than values. Even worse, it concedes the anti-human values that inspire environmentalists, treating these as off-limits to criticism and analysis. It thus attempts to bypass and ignore the very premises that motivate environmental activism, and that are responsible for environmentalism’s public appeal and success.
An article in Spring 1998 Dissent magazine illustrates the point. In it, law professor and environmentalist Eric Freyfogle attacks and dismisses “free market environmentalism”—not on economic or scientific grounds, but on moral grounds. He writes:
Efficiency, the market’s most exalted promise, is a desirable quality of the means we use to achieve an end. But efficiency, standing alone or embedded in a market, cannot tell us whether species are worth saving. That decision requires a moral judgment… A related market message, equally troubling, is the legitimacy that it grants to self-centered behavior. However effective economic incentives might be, they do not push people to look beyond their own self-interest, and land health will never come about so long as we each look out only for ourselves.1
After calling for more collectivist political control over the marketplace, Freyfogle concludes: “Progress on environmental issues, then, will depend on our continued use of moral language.”
To environmentalists like Freyfogle, the free market ignores allegedly “higher” moral values while it encourages selfishness—and therefore, capitalism is, at root, a morally flawed system, and the cause of many environmental crises.
To such mentalities, it’s therefore useless to argue that the free-market approach improves human well-being, or even that it solves environmental problems more efficiently than government regulation. Economic arguments and considerations are beside the point. In the great scheme of things, the environmentalists argue, morality trumps economics.
Economists reply that theirs is a science of means, not ends—that economics makes no value-judgments. But in fact, the entire field of economics rests upon implied value judgments. Economics not only assumes that people wish to improve their material situations by seeking greater abundance; it also assumes that to fulfill their desires for well-being and happiness, their rational use of natural resources is good. After all, why should people act economically? The tacit answer must be that doing so is a good thing.
By contrast, environmentalism declares that it’s wrong to pursue one’s personal fulfillment by altering natural resources. It declares—on moral and philosophical grounds—that humans should limit their personal desires, and instead embrace scarcity. In other words, environmentalism declares that the entire economic way of looking at things is immoral.
Capitalism and science are values only to people who want to achieve material progress; they rest implicitly on the idea that self-interest is good. Yet this clashes with age-old moral teachings, which hold that goodness consists of “service to others”—and that self-interest is evil.
This explains why economic and scientific arguments have failed to inoculate the public against environmentalism. By and large, people want to do the right thing. But if they’ve been taught to equate “the right thing” with self-sacrifice, and evil with selfishness—if they’ve been taught “Paradise” is Eden, that perfect Garden in which Man is a humble steward of the “natural balance”—then how can they possibly remain sympathetic to the enterprises of science and free market economics?
In logic, they can’t. In fact, they haven’t.
Yes, economic and scientific arguments are very important—but they are simply not enough. They don’t address the philosophic and moral criticisms of individualism and capitalism. How can economics answer the philosophic criticism that so-called “old growth forests,” untouched by humans, are spiritually superior to those planted by greedy lumber and paper companies for human use? How can science address the ethical criticism that every isolated subspecies of bird, animal, or even plant, has a moral right to an undisturbed existence and habitat—a right that requires the cessation of all logging, mining, and land development?
For many centuries, intellectuals have rejected as selfish the right of individuals to live for themselves. They have rejected as ethically bankrupt the pursuit of happiness. They have rejected as demeaning and unseemly the seeking of worldly profit, wealth, and material comfort. The result, as philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand points out, is that capitalism still remains an “unknown ideal.”
It is time to make that ideal known. Until we do—until we offer a compelling moral and philosophical case for human life and liberty as an alternative to the environmentalist philosophy of human abasement and self-abnegation—the movement will continue to win in the court of public opinion, and on the battlefields of public policy.
As a first step, we must challenge two false philosophic ideas at the root of environmentalism. The two fallacies are:
______________________________
About the Author
Robert Bidinotto is an award-winning journalist, editor, lecturer, and novelist who reports on cultural and political issues from the perspective of principled individualism. Over three decades he has established a reputation as a leading critic of environmentalism.
As a former Staff Writer for Reader’s Digest, Bidinotto authored high-profile investigative reports on environmental issues, crime, and other public controversies—including articles on global warming and the 1989 Alar scare. His Alar article was singled out for editorial praise by Barron’s and by Priorities, the journal of the American Council on Science and Health. He authored a monograph, The Green Machine,and for several years ran a website (“ecoNOT”), both critically examining the environmentalist philosophy and movement.
Bidinotto’s many articles, columns, and reviews also appeared in Success, Writer’s Digest, The Boston Herald, The American Spectator, City Journal, The Freeman, and Reason. He served as the award-winning editor of The New Individualist, a political and cultural magazine, and as editor of publications for the Capital Research Center, a nonprofit watchdog group.
In 2011, Bidinotto began writing political thrillers. HUNTER—the debut novel in his Dylan Hunter series—soared to the top of the Amazon and Wall St. Journal bestseller lists. BAD DEEDS, the first sequel, dramatizes the evils and dangers of environmentalism. A number-one best-selling Audible political thriller, BAD DEEDS was named “Book of the Year” by the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance. Bidinotto’s thrillers are available on Amazon.
Learn more about Robert Bidinotto at his fiction website, “The Vigilante Author” and at his nonfiction blog.