I don’t know about the particular conservatives and libertarians who say that, but I’m not working toward the same ideals as the leaders of the environmental movement. I believe that their focus is more on their hatred of capitalism and desire for power than on actually protecting human beings or their natural surroundings.

Take, for instance, the reaction environmental leaders have had toward a proposal that some free-market economists have made in order to protect both the environment and our consumer society -- preservation through privatization.

The ecologists attribute the destruction of wilderness to selfish individualism and capitalistic property rights. But this actually doesn’t happen through individualism and property, but through the absence of these; namely, through collectivism (by means of “public ownership”) and the failure to clearly define property rights.

A company can only get away with destroying a forest if it is on “public” land and the government permits it. Since that land “collectively” belongs to some vaguely defined “public,” there is no objective measure by which to determine how much deforestation is to be permitted -- the land belongs to everyone and no one simultaneously.

Thus, economist Ronald Coase offers a solution: privatization.

His argument goes that, if a group of private individuals own a natural resource, that they will have a greater incentive to preserve it for future profits and to defend it from overuse.

And reality has demonstrated his theory’s validity. The latest trend in the timber industry has been the use of private tree farms. Since cutting down all of the trees in the world would destroy their businesses -- and therefore their revenue -- these companies understand that it is in their own interest to plant and harvest their own trees for future profits.

That famous environmentalist notion, that humans sustaining their survival through industrialization will ultimately lead to their demise, is false. Capitalism and nature smoothly coexist.

Yet the practice of tree harvesting has only met scorn from the “Greens.” They have successfully blocked a tree farm from being set up in Hawaii in the past, on the grounds that planting these commercial trees would mean bulldozing the naturally-growing vegetation, which they considered superior solely because it was not planted by man.

For these same reasons, they also deride the harvested trees as counterfeit and “unnatural,” and malign them as further evidence that humans are “arrogant” in their attempts to dominate nature for their own gain.

This rejection of free-market conservation puzzles libertarians, but it’s really no surprise. Though ordinary people sympathetic to environmentalism may genuinely care about preserving natural resources for human benefit, the movement’s leaders do not.

One set of environmental leaders is that of the eco-nihilists, who openly advocate the destruction of industrial civilization, which they want replaced by primitive tribal communities.

But the second group -- the eco-statists -- is more clever. They seek, not to ban technology, but to dictate over which technologies are allowed, how they are used, and who is to benefit from them, in a new form of fascism they call “sustainable development” or “smart growth.”

This explains why they despise free-market conservation -- it will still provide the world with trees, but it also allows the environmental elitists no control over other people’s lives or possessions.

The conservatives and libertarians who promulgate the notion of “free-market preservation” make an excellent point about how harmless capitalism really is. But their arguments still fall flat on most people, because they fail to answer the main accusation of the eco-nihilists and eco-statists -- that it is evil for human beings to use nature for their own gain.

Rather than answer this claim, they often acquiesce to the Greens’ “earth above man” notions in a futile attempt to appease them. The “enviro-capitalists” accept the premise that privatizing forests is good, not so much because it increases our material prosperity, but because it spares the wilderness.

It’s about time that the privatization advocates stop pandering to this altruist dogma.

True defenders of property rights aren’t afraid to state the obvious when they need to. Human beings have their own natural right to exist. People have no obligation to sacrifice their own comfort just so that some swamps, jungles, and mud puddles remain untouched.

If even the alleged defenders of capitalism do not acknowledge this, then who will?

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com (If you would like to continue seeing Stuart Hayashi's editorials on this site, please let Hawaii Reporter know at info@hawaiireporter.com)

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