by Gus Dizerega

The environmental movement has challenged pre-existing ideologies to confront issues their founding thinkers never imagined. Market liberalism is no exception. Responses have usually taken two forms, either trying to make ecological issues a subset of free market economics, as in Terry Anderson and Donald Leal’s Free Market Environmentalism, or attacking environmentalists as enemies of humankind, reason, and liberty, as did Reason magazine, when I finally threw up, and stopped subscribing. (Their suggestion that we enviros were planning to exterminate humanity with manufactured bacteria was over the top. It better fit the ravings of the John Birch Society.)

Anderson and Leal’s approach works well for some things and fails utterly on others because, while both markets and ecosystems are spontaneous orders, they are geared to different rhythms. For them, the market is the final judge of ecological well being. There is no problem with devastated land or exterminated species, so long as the outcome was profitable. They have it exactly backwards.

Two recent books take a wiser approach, being both very pro-market and aware that ultimately the market needs to harmonize with natural processes rather than the other way around. Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins’ Natural Capitalism is a great discussion of why and how this can be and often is being accomplished. So is William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s misleadingly (for market liberals) titled Cradle to Cradle.
These authors argue the most basic clash between markets and ecologies is the former create waste and the latter do not. All waste for one form of life in nature is sustenance for another. Due to their huge scale and growing impact, markets need now to be modeled like ecologies. Products that cannot be safely returned to nature need to be produced so they can be indefinitely used in production, with no loss of quality. Simply reducing destructive activity is not the long-term answer, nor is settling for second best products because they are “eco-friendly.” Their books offer many successful examples of this principle at work even today.

The breakthrough here is their complete awareness of the similarities between human spontaneous orders and natural ones. F. A. Hayek pioneered this insight, but it has not been explored, largely due to the anti-environmental animus of all too many market liberals. Fortunately, the needed initial work has been done on the environmentalist side. Market advocates concerned with the environment should read and ponder at least one of these books. Preferably both.

Once it is clear that there is nothing intrinsically anti-market about environmentalism as such, much more interesting conversations can begin. Removing the Chamber of Commerce’s distorting goggles from their eyes and walking outside, leaving behind the fun house mirrors held by corporate flacks, would enable market liberals to perceive things quite differently. Here are some examples.

How many know that many environmental organizations are forced to lobby and sue Washington over public lands because mere citizens are forbidden from bidding on grazing allotments and timber sales in order to protect the land? If they win a bid, and do not graze the cattle or cut the trees, the land is put out to bid again! Any environmentalist I know would more prefer protecting the land rather than sending the same money to politicians. The real advocates of government privilege are the timber industry and subsidized ranchers. Enviros simply play by the rules they are given, rules stacked increasingly heavily against them.

Or take that biggest bug-bear of environmentalism’s most hysterical opponents, Deep Ecology. Deep ecologists argue that ethics does not stop with human beings or even animals. Is this necessarily anti-liberal? Thinkers as central to our tradition as David Hume or Adam Smith argued that “sympathy” – what today we would call empathy – grounds all moral behavior, and is a better foundation than natural rights abstractions or utilitarian calculations. Deep ecologists such as Arne Naess use the same kind of argument. Of course, seeing this requires actually reading serious deep ecological thinkers such as Naess. That is much harder work than mouthing slogans, getting corporate contributions, and feeling self-righteous. (I try to reduce the work load required in my own stuff. Check out “Deep Ecology and Liberalism” on my web site www.dizerega.com.)