Ideology of ecologism

By Christopher Lingle

UBUD, Bali ― As the world marked Earth Day on April 22, it reminds us that the most compelling political issue of the new millennium is finding how to arrest and reverse actions that undermine our natural environment.

To many observers, no less than a revolution is necessary to change public opinion and to implement policies to increase awareness concerning the impact of humans on the natural world.

To achieve these goals, mainstream environmentalists tend to look to an expanded role of public-sector authorities as the correct or perhaps the only way forward.

This bias invites opponents of greater government intervention to suspect that the ``green'' agenda is driven by an opposition to free markets as much as by concern for the environment.

Since protection and rehabilitation of the environment are worthy goals, the debate should be a matter of methods rather than objectives.

And the quest for solutions should begin with an understanding that government interventions can as easily cause environmental damage than to be a remedy. A clear instance of this is the ecological destruction under authoritarian-socialist regimes like the former Soviet Union and China.

One particular worry is that the promotion of government interventions and coercion to protect the natural environment will ignore the impact on the human environment.

This could lead to a new ``ism'': whereby technocrats guided by scientific evaluations of environmental impacts replace bureaucrats guided by scientific socialism and social engineering.

In the end, ``ecologism'' would impose the same sort of coercive restraints on individual behavior on the grounds that they would promote the interests of the wider community.

Just as the ``good intentions'' of communism gave way to authoritarianism that brought economic and social failure, we must guard against the emergence of ecologically-based authoritarianism.

There must be safeguards against the fervor for improving environmental quality giving way to the overreach of government that erodes personal self-determination and freedom of choice.

Otherwise, ecologism might lead to the sort of failures of socialism whereby the pursuit of social goals led to unintended and unforeseen destruction of individual rights on an extensive scale. In all events, caution is in order in relying on much of the conventional wisdom that supports anxieties over environmental degradation.

Many of the accepted truths of the green movement are based on dubious facts and spurious reasoning. Just as Hitler used false generalities about Jews and gypsies, environmentalists gain support by generating hysteria over issues that are unsupported by logic or science.

On one hand, there are the unfulfilled prophesies (fantasies?) of the Club of Rome report (``Limits to Growth'') that point to inevitable global conflict arising from resource depletion. More recently, dubious questions about scientific ethics concerning global warming alarmism was revealed in the wake of Climatgate.

For its part, ecologism encourages intolerance toward individual choice and invites distrust of private property. This finds extreme form in ``eco-terrorism'' and the confiscation or destruction of private property to promote an environmental agenda.

While attempts to halt degradation of the natural environment can ``pollute'' the human environment, they may also interfere with correcting problems in the natural environment.

If restraints based on ecologist logic are excessive and interfere with entrepreneurial initiatives that are the engine of economic growth and innovation, the community would be worse off.

Suppressing access to market-based rewards will slow the pace of technological advance and dampen gains in income.

This is because environmental awareness depends upon countries reaching a minimal annual per capita income level that data suggests is about $4,000. And higher income levels provide the means to implement technological improvements to protect the environment.

As it is, increased taxation and regulatory powers of governments leaves citizens with less control over rightfully earned incomes and less freedom to choose how to spend what is left to them.

It turns out that billions of free minds operating within free markets have more potential to improve environmental conditions and make human life better than armies of bureaucrats.

It turns out that government intervention and regulation are not the only way to resolve environmental problems. Economists have expended considerable effort to examine ways to use the pricing systems to overcome similar problems caused by the ``tragedy of the commons.''

Examples of market-based mechanisms for resolving environmental problems include marketing pollution rights and privatizing wilderness areas or using market incentives to preserve wildlife. And then there are innovative technological advances like ``tagging'' so that ownership of dispersed resources or sources of pollution can be identified.

Each of these proposals relies on providing individual incentives to encourage better monitoring of the use of resources and the environment. Private ownership allows individuals to benefit directly from conservation so that gains from enhanced values create strong incentives to husband natural resources for maximum returns.

As we move into the new millennium, the global demise of authoritarian regimes and heightened awareness of environmental issues provides hope for the future.

But an ideology of ecologism and new ``environmental rights'' that clashes with property rights and individual freedoms will likely weaken support for protection of the natural environment.

If an essential and literal condition for environmentalist policy is to promote balance, then it must reflect the fact that rights and freedoms of individuals really matter.

And it must be the outcome of an honest adherence to scientific ethics. Unfortunately, public officials and climatologists that promote the theory that humans have had a strong, negative impact on climate change have erred on both counts.

Christopher Lingle is a visiting professor of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala and research scholar at the Centre for Civil Society in New Delhi. He can be reached at opinion@koreatimes.co.kr. The views in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.