Those concerned with individual liberty are likely to resist Diamond’s program because of its coercive nature. But that objection may prove inadequate: many people may believe our situation is so dire that we need to sacrifice freedom to ensure the survival of our species. However, I will argue that Diamond’s case fails even on its own terms.

Diamond contends, “Now we realize that [a rising population] matters only insofar as people consume and produce. . . . [Many commentators find a big problem in the] populations of countries like Kenya . . . growing rapidly . . . but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little.”

However, the residents of countries like Kenya generate problems out of proportion to their consumption levels. Their relative poverty means that they burn dirty but cheap fuels, that they cultivate much more land than their First World counterparts to produce equivalent output, and that they devote little of their income to activities like creating wildlife preserves.

Diamond continues, “People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption. . . . When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes . . . become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists.” So why not allow the poor every chance to catch up by promoting economic freedom? Then their improving living standards will give them hope for the future and lessen the tendency for them to embrace nihilism.

To support his case, Diamond cites China: “Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out.. . . The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates.”

Here, Diamond has embraced a hoary economic fallacy. What counts as a “resource” is an economic question, not a material given. Things become resources when acting man conceives of how he can employ them to further his ends. The history of economic development is one of creating greater value out of the same quantity of physical inputs. Whereas in 1970 “it took [Americans] 15,000 BTU to produce $1 of GDP . . . [by] 2003, this had fallen to 9,500 BTU, a decline of nearly 37 percent,” writes Richard H. Mattoon, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Similarly, “since 1950 . . . 200 million acres of U.S. farmland have been retired,” despite the growth in America’s population, says Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute.

Indeed, the nascent field of nanotechnology already offers much more efficient use of raw materials, as well as holding out the possibility that the contents of garbage dumps or sewage plants efficiently could be transformed into valued consumption goods. (For examples, see http://tinyurl.com/32bm4v.) And progress in space travel will make available physical resources from beyond the earth. “Available resources” are constrained by human ingenuity, not by fixed physical endowments.

Diamond writes, “Per capita consumption rates in China are still . . . below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. . . . Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent and . . . metal consumption by 94 percent.” But as China becomes more prosperous, its increasing demand for productive inputs and the consequent rise in their prices will spur entrepreneurs to employ those inputs more efficiently and to find alternatives to scarce commodities.

Diamond chastises those who advocate freedom as the best solution to poverty, saying, “[W]e . . . promise developing countries that if they will . . . institute honest government and a free-market economy—they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax. . . .”

I suggest we humbly admit to having no idea what kind of lifestyle our descendants may achieve. Think of Stone Age Jared Diamond berating optimists for suggesting that one day, most humans might be able to live to the venerable age of 50 or 60 reached by only a lucky few in his time.

Diamond advocates a future “in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels [since] willingly or not, [Americans] shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.”

That conclusion assumes that raising living standards requires ever more use of the same resources employed today. However, Stone Age consumption of mammoth tusks and inhabitable caves was clearly unsustain-able given a population growing from 100,000 to 6,000,000,000. Fortunately, there was no need to increase consumption of those products in step with our increased numbers.

To support his case, Diamond notes that “Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably. . . even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply.”

But why are current fishing enterprises exploiting these resources so profligately? Private owners of limited resource pools have an incentive to use them responsibly, not extracting so much for current income that tomorrow’s income goes to zero. Notice that there is no crisis of sheep, chickens, or corn being harvested “non-sustainably.” But when the stock of a resource is unowned, then every producer is motivated to grab as much of that common pool as soon as possible, since other producers will be doing the same.

Political Will

Diamond recommends reliance on “political will” to enforce a command-and-control regime of conservation. Even if he has no concern for the loss of personal freedom his program entails, I suggest that he is betting on the wrong horse in this race. A conservation “solution” that relies on coercing individuals to ignore their self-interest is inherently “non-sustainable”: any time the “political will” enforcing it wavers, it is likely to fail. Governments, always in need of the support or at least the acquiescence of their citizens, in times of crisis are quite likely to opt for the reckless exploitation of some resource over the threat of widespread unrest or rebellion. Preserving our natural heritage for the benefit of future generations is a laudable aim, but our best hope for realizing it is to create institutions aligning wise stewardship of the environment with individuals’ desire to improve their own lives, rather than fantasizing that everyone can be united perpetually behind some central planner’s bucolic vision.

According to Sachs, F. A. Hayek, “the Austrian-born free-market economist, . . . suggested that high taxation would be a ‘road to serfdom,’ a threat to freedom itself.” There is now, however, “a rich empirical record to judge [this] scientifically.” “The evidence” (he says) comes from comparing the Nordic social democracies (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland) with the Anglophone developed countries (Canada, the United States, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand).

The Nordics (he says) have met the challenge of “sustainable development”: they have reconciled “the . . . power of markets” with the reassurance and protection of (governmental) “social insurance.” They “combine . . . respect for market forces with . . . anti-poverty programs.” And “[t]he results . . . are astoundingly good” for households with the lowest incomes.

Thus Nordic income per head of working-age population is 4.5 percent higher than in the lower-taxed Anglophone countries. The Nordic unemployment rate is only slightly higher than the Anglophone rate (6.3 percent versus 5.2 percent). The Nordics have far higher budget surpluses as a proportion of GDP. In short, the Nordic territories “outperform” the Anglophones on average (in terms of these measures).

“Despite [their] high taxation,” the Nordic countries are highly dynamic: “they spend lavishly on higher education” and on R&D. While only 1.8 percent of Anglophone GDP goes to R&D, the Nordics spend 3.0 percent—two-thirds as much again. Sweden has the world’s highest ratio: “nearly 4 percent of GDP.” All, “especially Sweden and Finland,” have gained “global competitiveness” through the information-technology and communications revolution. In addition, the Nordics have “relatively low” taxes on capital.

In the Nordic areas 27 percent of GDP (on average) goes to “social purposes” via government; the Anglophone figure is only 17 percent. Nordic labor policies direct the “low-skilled” to “key quality-of-life areas such as child care, health, and support for the elderly and disabled.” The Nordic “poverty rate” is 5.6 percent—less than half that of the Anglophones, which is 12.6 percent.

Thus (according to Sachs) high taxes and high “social spending” have not “crippled prosperity” in the Nordic territories: “Von Hayek was wrong. In strong . . . democracies, a generous social-welfare state [is] a road to . . . fairness, . . . equality and international competitiveness,” not serfdom.

Now, Sachs, of course, speaks for U.S. government officials and their academic advisers. All have a vested interest in raising taxes and government spending and in increasing the numbers of government officials, evermore. Let us, however, “scientifically” take another look at the “rich empirical record.”

(What we’ll find: Scandinavia, especially Sweden, is an official’s dream come true. On average, over half of people’s income is confiscated. It is Scandinavia’s long-established integration into the growing international economy that has in fact continued to supply Scandinavians with their incomes, which officials then tax away.)

1. Between 1960 and 1990: Among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, those with the largest government sectors (spending in excess of 60 percent of GDP) had the lowest growth rates. Those with the smallest proportion of government spending (less than 25 percent of GDP) had the highest growth rates—more than four times faster.

Between 1990 and 2005: the average overall tax burden came to 61 percent in Sweden, 58 percent in Denmark, and 55 percent in Finland.

2a. Between 1970 and 2003, in OECD rankings of economies: Denmark declined from third to seventh place; Sweden Finland rose from 17th place in 1970 to ninth in 1989, then fell back to 15th in 2003. fell from fifth to 14th.

2b. Over the same period (1970–2003) Ireland shot up from 22nd to fourth. In 1989 Irish taxes and government spending equaled 53 percent of its GDP. In 2006 this had fallen to 35 percent.

2c. In 2004: Irish productivity per working hour was nearly 26 percent higher than in Finland, just over 29 percent greater than in Sweden, and a whopping 43.2 percent above the Danes.

3. During 1995–2004: Compared with Sweden, the lowest incomes rose more than six times faster in Britain and more than eight times faster in Ireland. In 2004, 20 percent of Swedish households fell below the official “poverty line,” compared with around 18 percent in Britain and just under 15 percent in Ireland. In short, those with the very lowest incomes improved their position much, much more in lower-taxed Britain and Ireland than in higher-tax Sweden.

Over the same period, when the rise in the lowest incomes is compared with the average increase: Britain did 2.5 times better than Sweden, while Ireland was 2.35 times better. In other words, the lowest incomes came far, far closer to the average in low-tax Britain and Ireland than in high-tax Sweden.

4. Between 1981 and 2003: private-sector employment rose 56 percent in low-tax Ireland. There was a 12 percent rise in Denmark—in very low-productivity “employment” (see above, 2c.) But in high-tax Sweden and Finland, no new private-sector jobs were created. In other words, the government took the entire increase in the labor force over some 22 years. With the same number of people employed in the private sector and low growth rates overall, real incomes just about stagnated. From these stagnant real incomes, people had to pay ever-increasing taxes and support ever-increasing government officials and ever-increasing government spending.

5. According to a working paper prepared for the European Central Bank in 2003: Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have the most inefficient government sectors of all OECD countries in terms of the use of inputs. In Sweden the same level of output could be obtained for only 57 percent of the input. For Denmark this figure is 61 percent, for Finland, 62 percent. In other words, some 43 percent of the labor and other resources “used” in the Swedish government sector are—in effect—idle. The proportion effectively idle in the Danish government sector is 39 percent, and 38 percent in Finland.

In Sweden doctors saw an average of nine patients a day in 1975. In 2005 they saw four—or less than half as many. More than half of all patients have to wait 12 weeks to be examined and then at least as long again for treatment. In short, for most Swedish patients, from just making the appointment to seeing the doctor to actually getting treated, there’s a gap of some 24 weeks at least. (You’d better not fall sick in Sweden.)

6. Even in the later 1980s, Swedish doctors worked only some 57 percent of the hours that American doctors worked. And as early as the 1970s, doctors, dentists, lawyers, and so on worked only a few months each year—to avoid astronomical tax rates. By the 1970s retailers asked buyers: “With or without receipt?” while house painters, mechanics, plumbers, and more all operated largely in a cash economy. Books were already being published on avoiding tax for those on average incomes.

7a. The actual unemployment rate is disguised by classifying large numbers under other heads: (a) make-work in the government sector, (b) “early retirement,” (c) long-term “sick,” and (d) university “students” who are in fact avoiding open unemployment.

7b. The so-called “unemployment trap” is extremely high in Denmark and Sweden. When necessary expenses like transport, food, and so on are included, the lowest take-home pay is lower than the government payments received.

8a. All large Swedish companies, save one, were established in the late nineteenth century or in the late 1920s. Business taxes are very low, but they overwhelmingly favor larger established companies. Unincorporated-business income is taxed as heavily as personal income, but dividends and company incomes at much lower rates. Taxes on capital gains, however, are the highest in the world in Denmark and Finland.

8b. Labor mobility is low, which reduces productivity. People are stuck in unsuitable jobs. Labor input is also far less in practice: Some one-fifth of the workforce is absent, on average—double the proportion in the 1970s. In 1988 Swedes took an average of 26 days of sick-leave; this was still true in 2002. In addition, there are numerous other grounds for people to be absent with pay.

“One Size Fits All”

9a. The “welfare” state must operate on the principle of “one size fits all,” of course. Thus in Sweden the state supplies all childcare, schooling, medical services, and aged care, except for a minuscule proportion. But even here, “private” suppliers are paid from taxes. Swedish legislation virtually prohibits direct private purchase of alternatives.

9b. The tax system virtually forces women with children to work, so their children can go to state child care. This goes from preschool to after-school for older children. All this raises “employment” figures: Child-minders are “employed” while mothers at home are not.

“Private” childcare is state-funded and has to charge the same low fees as the state system. “Private” child-minders are also paid by the state. Officials can ban any adult from caring for children in his or her own home. Even family arrangements have to be reported under threat of prosecution; the proposed carer—even granny—is investigated (for a criminal record) and inspected annually.

9c. Up to 1992 there were virtually no private schools in Sweden. Then “vouchers” were introduced. “Private” schools are forbidden to charge fees. Thus taxes pay for all “private” schools, and they are prevented from competing on costs.

9d. The overwhelming bulk of people have to depend on state-supplied medical services. Government entities now buy an extremely small percentage of hospital services and aged-care services from “private” suppliers. The latter’s costs are lower, of course, and the entities’ employees are happier than when they were part of the government. Only a handful of the extremely wealthy have private health insurance.

9e. “Pensions” are paid from payroll taxes. There are both flat-rate and earnings-related pensions. In the 1990s Swedish officials required all employees, additionally, to pay a minute fraction of their incomes into “private” pension funds or into a government fund in default. All such payments are channeled through a new set of officials; payers and funds have no direct contacts at all. This minuscule “change” is seen by politicians, officials, their academic advisers, journalists, and so on as earth-shaking. It has just been announced that future state pensions will be well below those being paid currently. Only a handful of the wealthy have private pension plans with an insurance company.

9f. One aspect of the Swedish “welfare state” is particularly disturbing: the power that official “social workers” have over children. Children can be removed from parents and put into foster care for a wide variety of reasons. Disputes go before special administrative tribunals, not the ordinary courts. So the whole situation is stacked in favor of the official and against the parent. Foster parents receive tax-free payments from the state. In high-tax Sweden this is a huge advantage, which results in really good incomes.

A comparison with England underlines the power officials have in Sweden. In November 2001 some 21,500 employees of municipal social services in Sweden were assigned to “individual and family care.” This amounted to one children’s social worker per 414 people of all ages. In England in 2005 there were some 33,980 staff (full-time equivalent) who dealt with children and families. This came to one such official for every 1,484 people in England. Thus, pro rata, Sweden has nearly 3.6 times as many children’s “welfare” officials as in England. Are Swedes really some four times more prone to child abuse and neglect than the English?

Not surprisingly, when it comes to children forcibly removed from their parents and put into official care, Sweden runs well ahead, pro rata. In 2003 in Sweden there was one child in official hands for every 598 Swedes. In England in 2005 there was one child in “care” for every 836 residents. Thus—pro rata—there were 40 percent more children in Sweden who were officially taken away from their parents as compared with England. Are Swedish parents really 40 percent more incompetent and feckless than English parents?

State-Dominated Housing

10. Housing in Sweden: Government officials dominate here too. Only some 39 percent of all “dwellings” are owner-occupied. Some 21 percent are privately owned rental housing; 20 percent are rental housing provided by municipally owned companies; and 17 percent are cooperatives. The latter received state subsidies from the 1920s to the late 1990s. Municipal companies receive state subsidies from general taxation and some capital from municipal taxation. They pay only a “reasonable”—that is, subsidized—interest rate on this last. Their income is made up from rent and subsidies.

Thus around 37 percent of all “dwellings” in Sweden are built from taxation, largely or entirely. Only some 60 percent of housing is provided completely through private saving.

Anyone may rent a municipal flat—there are no income limits. Municipal companies are obliged by statute to provide housing for those with lower incomes. Swedish officials regard “income segregation” as undesirable so they accept higher-income tenants too.

In municipal housing, officials ask tenants to assign values to such things as the location; their living area; its standard, general amenities; convenience to state transport; and so on. Rents are set by negotiations between the municipal company and its tenants’ association, but rents also have to include an allowance for continued maintenance and cover the expenses of the highest-cost municipal company. Private rents are higher and are negotiated between landlords’ and tenants’ associations.

Private tenants may appeal their rents to an administrative tribunal. In 90 percent of cases the tribunal simply decides whether the rent is “reasonable.” In 10 percent of disputes the private flat is compared with a local municipal flat and 5 percent is then added to the private rent.

11. Exports: Norway is one of the world’s largest oil exporters from the oilfields deep under the North Sea. An American audience cannot know this, of course, so here Sachs is silent. In 2005, 68 percent of Norwegian exports consisted of oil and natural gas.

Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are overwhelmingly integrated into the global economic order. In 2005, foreign trade—exports and imports combined—equalled 90 percent of total output in Sweden; 80 percent in Finland; and 88.5 percent in Denmark. In short, all three territories are simply sectors of the world economy and have been since the late nineteenth century.

Thus their major export goods were developed mainly in the late nineteenth century and in some cases, very much earlier.

Let us take Swedish exports for the eight months from January to August 2006. Pharmaceutical goods, chemicals, metal manufactures, industrial machinery, optical goods—all together these equaled 28 percent of the total. Swedish firms have exported these items since the late nineteenth century. Timber and its products, iron ores, other minerals, and iron and steel together came to 22 percent. Sweden has exported these goods since the late fifteenth century at least. Telecommunications came to 14.3 percent. This includes telephones, made in Sweden since the late nineteenth century. “Transport equipment”—Volvos and Saabs—equaled 13.8 percent. Sweden has exported these since the late 1920s.

Advanced telecommunications also formed only a small percentage of Finnish exports in 2006; the bulk were already in place in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Electrical and optical products came to 24.5 percent; wood-pulp, paper, and wood products equaled 16.2 percent; basic metals, machinery, and equipment formed 26.2 percent.

The same picture is found in Denmark in 2005. Exports of foodstuffs (butter, cheese, bacon, fish, and so on), timber, and other primary products—important since at least the late nineteenth century—came to 15.8 percent. Medicines, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals came to 13.7 percent. Machinery and instruments—many items produced in Denmark since the late nineteenth century came to 26.4 percent. Textiles, clothing, furniture, and glassware—distinctively Danish—equaled 9.7 percent, energy, 10.3 percent. (For further reading, see Lorraine Mullally and Neil O’Brien, eds., Beyond the European Social Model, 2006, available online at htttp://tinyurl.com/ynqnp.)

12. Thus it is by participating in a growing international economy that Scandinavians produce increasing outputs. These are largely taxed away and allocated by bureaucracy. People’s continuing toil puts growing resources into government officials’ hands.

As a government adviser, Sachs must naturally see officials’ activities as the source of all goodness, including international competitiveness. The causation is rather the other way about. Successful integration into the international economic order produces output that officials then tax and remove from the people. Then officials (under the relevant authorizing legislation) use the revenues to support themselves (and their families), and to spend money or disburse it to authorized recipients under various authorized headings, namely, pensions, other incomes, schooling, medical and hospital services, aged care, child and after-school care, and so on. From the standpoint of government officials, and therefore their academic advisers, this is a delightful paradise. Naturally, therefore, Sachs describes this as “a generous social-welfare state . . . fairness. . . equality . . . international competitiveness.” This is exactly how it appears to the officials involved.

Finally, my editor asks me: “Why do the Nordics put up with it? What about the high disincentives?” One answer is: precisely the almost complete integration into the international economy. The output comes from large and small firms integrated into international production. These firms and their employees can hardly vanish into an underground economy. They must remain visible. Even if the firms, as legal entities, acquire another “nationality”—as many have done—their operations and employees remain in Scandinavia. This is because of the skills and expertise built up over the decades and centuries. Swedish steel must continue to be manufactured in Sweden. Volvos made in Portugal lack some intangible something compared with Volvos made in Sweden. Bang & Olufsen made in Bulgaria sounds dubious; made in Denmark, it does not.

Moreover, heavy taxes are levied on individuals, not businesses. The incomes are captured at the point where there can be least escape.

Every April 22 celebrations of Earth Day take place around the world. This can serve as a reminder to reflect on the status of our planet. Some believe the earth is in great peril and that stringent measures to restrain economic development and technology are necessary to avoid a horrible fate. These measures are guided by three key concepts.

One concept is “sustainable development.” The idea here is to minimize the use of nonrenewable natural resources so there will be more left for future generations. While the idea sounds good, there are some problems with trying to enforce it through government restrictions.

There is no such thing as a “natural resource.” Nature doesn’t determine what is a resource. Human wants and ingenuity determine this. In this sense, all resources are manmade. Nonsense, you say. Man didn’t make the petroleum in the ground. Nature did.

It isn’t the substance of petroleum that makes it a resource. It is the use to which it can be put that makes it so. Time was when finding oil on your property was a bad thing. It could poison livestock and ruin prime cropland. Between then and now, human brainpower has figured out how to put this substance to good use as a fuel for motor vehicles and an ingredient in plastics, among other things. So today petroleum is a resource.

Whether petroleum will be as crucial in the future as it is now is unknown. It is likely that it will not be. The history of technology indicates that new methods continually replace old methods. For tens of thousands of years humans traveled on foot. For thousands of years humans used animals to ride or to pull vehicles. For the last 100 years humans have ridden in gasoline-powered vehicles. The efficiency with which this gasoline has been used has continuously increased, netting more person-miles and ton-miles to the gallon.

Alternatives to gasoline-powered vehicles are being developed. At some point, gasoline may go the way of the horse and drop out of contention as the main transportation power source. So saving petroleum or other substances that may be critical resources now in anticipation that they will be needed in the future may be unwarranted.

Conserving resources for the future may impose unnecessary constraints on progress. The long-term trend since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago has been one of increasing prosperity. Succeeding generations have been wealthier than preceding generations. Chances appear pretty good that later generations will be able to afford a higher standard of living than we now enjoy.

Consequently, requiring the poorer current generation to save more so that wealthier following generations will have more seems inequitable. The inequity is especially egregious when it comes to those currently living in poverty. “Sustaining” subsistence is far less tolerable than sustaining a life lived in the relative comfort of your typical American environmental activist. Many inhabitants of Third World countries depend on selling raw materials like petroleum. They depend on affordable fuel to help grow their economies. Measures that reduce the availability or increase the price of resources will be a lot harder on these poor people than on the affluent in the West.

A second key concept of environmental alarmists is the so-called “precautionary principle.” The idea here is that anything that entails any amount of risk is to be shunned or prevented from happening. According to this way of thinking, only when it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be safe should such a product or activity be permitted.

An example of the precautionary principle in action is the environmental alarmists’ protest against genetically modified foods. Scientists can now use gene-splicing to engineer more favorable traits into food. “Golden rice” is one of the products developed by this technique. This genetically modified rice incorporates more vitamin A into the plant. The benefit of this is that it enables people whose diets are over-dependent on rice (as is the case in many Third World countries) to obtain sufficient amounts of this vitamin to ward off blindness. This is not to say that everyone who eats plain rice will go blind. However, a distressingly large portion of the children in Third World countries do go blind from insufficient quantities of vitamin A in their diets.

Despite the beneficial attributes of golden rice, it is still a genetically modified “Frankenfood” to many environmental alarmists. The gene-splicing necessary to create golden rice is unnatural. It could have unforeseen consequences. It would be better, argue advocates of the precautionary principle, to wait until it can be proven to be totally safe before its widespread introduction into the food supply.

It is easy for the affluent and well fed, who can supplement abundant food supplies with vitamins, minerals, and herbal nutrients, to be cautious about new, untried, genetically modified foods. No one is saying these people must eat these innovations. But it is not so easy for people living in constant danger of malnutrition to wait for more evidence that genetically modified foods are perfectly safe.

Further, the notion that genetically modified foods are a recent innovation ignores the thousands of years of human genetic “tampering” with nature that has produced many agricultural products we take for granted. There was never a time when the type of cows that produce our milk ran free and wild. Modern milk cows are the outcome of thousands of years of selective breeding that has modified the genetic make up of these creatures.

Hybrid Corn

A similar story can be told about the corn-on-the-cob we chow down on at picnics. American Indians nurtured this hybrid through cross-fertilization of carefully selected weeds. Or how about that pet Chihuahua at the end of your leash? Ever see a pack of them run down prey on one of those nature shows?

The fact is, people have been genetically modifying other living creatures for thousands of years. It’s just that earlier methods were less predictable and more time-consuming than modern gene-splicing methods. We are doing what we have always done—change the world to make it more to our liking.

If the precautionary-principle zealots had walked among our cave-dwelling ancestors, they probably would have tried to prevent the use of fire. It’s dangerous and polluting. It has killed far more people than nuclear energy—a modern substitute in many uses. Yet, even today, environmental alarmists oppose replacing coal-fired electricity with nuclear-generated electricity.

The precautionary principle takes a healthy skepticism about the new and untried (after all, most new ideas are a flop; only a minority ultimately succeed) and turns it into a stultifying phobia. Progress requires that we take calculated risks in the effort to make things better. The track record of science and technology in this regard should be a source of confidence. The human mind is an amazing tool. It ought not to be tied down by irrational fears.

A third key concept of the environmental lobby is that there must be “stakeholder participation” in important decisions. Transactions between buyers and sellers are deemed insufficiently participatory. Third parties would like to butt in and dictate different terms for the transactions.

In the marketplace buyers and sellers find each other and voluntarily enter into agreements to trade money for products or services. No one forces either party to trade. Either is free to refuse or back out of a transaction before it is consummated. Often buyers can return merchandise and get their money back if they are dissatisfied.

While it is legitimate to insist that the voluntary participants in market transactions not leave a mess for others to clean up (for example, smoke from the coal-fired power plant that sells electricity to business and residential customers), it does not necessarily follow that these others be given an equal or dominant voice in the terms of the transaction.

Consider the case of the pesticide DDT. There are many places in the Third World where DDT could save lives if it were used to combat malaria-carrying mosquitoes. An estimated two million deaths per year are attributed to malaria. Public-health workers in these afflicted areas are willing to buy DDT. There are companies willing to manufacture it. However, “stakeholders” from the environmental quarter have prevailed on governments to ban the trade in this product.

DDT was banned on the basis of its suspected contribution to thinning eggshells among wild birds. The forecast was for massive die-offs among birds leading to what the originator of this concern—Rachel Carson—said would be a “silent spring.” There is no evidence that DDT is harmful to humans.

Saving wild birds is a worthy goal. If it can be done without endangering people, few would object. Saving wild birds at the cost of human lives, though, is much less defensible. From the security of an America that is largely safe from the ravages of malaria, the risk/reward trade-off from banning DDT might look acceptable. The trade-off is far less acceptable in regions where malaria is a major killer. The people living in these regions ought to be free to use DDT to save their lives. The intervention of the environmental “stakeholders” interferes with this freedom. (Fortunately, some attitudes have changed and the World Health Organization now sanctions some uses of DDT.)

Getting It Backwards

The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. People living on the edge of subsistence cannot afford to conserve the environment. Their energies must go into surviving. People who are prosperous can afford to think about conserving the environment. So to the extent that the measures demanded by environmental alarmists retard progress, they also endanger the environment.

That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback.

A few years ago I visited the historical site of “the shot heard round the world”—Lexington, Concord, and Battle Road in Massachusetts. The area is lush with trees and greenery. Park Rangers explain that in 1775 the area was void of this greenery. The trees were chopped down to make way for farming. In those days farming was so much less efficient than today that 80 percent of the population had to engage in it to provide enough food to feed the nation. Vast swaths of countryside had to be leveled for the low-yielding crops of that era.

Technology has changed all that. Pesticides and genetically modified crops have allowed more of the fruits and vegetables to escape being eaten by insects. Better transportation has enabled more food to get to market before spoiling. Refrigeration has allowed food to stay edible longer. As a result, the portion of the workforce needed for agriculture has dropped to 2 percent. Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert to forest.

This is the model for saving the rest of the planet: let freedom to think and trade make use of the genius of humanity for a better world.

The small industrial town of Kalundborg, located 75 miles from Copenhagen, shouldn’t be on the radar screen of most visitors to Denmark. It has nonetheless become something of a Mecca for “sustainable development” theorists the world over.

Kalundborg’s main attraction, apart from its twelfth-century cathedral, is a network of recycling linkages that have developed over the last three decades between four large industrial plants, the municipality, and a few smaller businesses. This “Industrial Symbiosis,” as it is now known, originally comprised five core partners: an Asnæs power station (Denmark’s largest), a Statoil refinery (Denmark’s largest), a Gyproc plasterboard factory, Novo Nordisk’s largest pharmaceutical and industrial-enzymes plant (which produces, among other things, 40 percent of the world’s supply of insulin), and the City of Kalundborg.

Beginning in the 1970s a series of deals between these otherwise independent entities gave rise to various recycling linkages. For example, a few years ago, the Asnæs station supplied residual steam from its coal-fired power plant to the Statoil refinery in exchange for refinery gas that was formerly flared as waste. The power plant burned the refinery gas to generate electricity and steam, and sent its excess steam to a fish farm, a district heating system serving 3,500 homes, and the Novo Nordisk plant. Sludge from the fish farm and pharmaceutical processes became fertilizer for nearby farms. Surplus yeast from the biotechnology plant’s production of insulin was shipped to farmers for pig food. The fly ash from the power plant was sent to a cement company, while gypsum produced by the power plant’s desulfurization process went to the Gyproc gypsum-wallboard plant. The amounts of avoided wastes were significant, including 200,000 tons of fly ash and 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide, while Asnæs saved up to 30,000 tons of coal a year. While most of these linkages are still functional, a few were abandoned and new ones have since been created.¹ (See diagram.)

A Spontaneous Phenomenon

By all accounts the Kalundborg industrial symbiosis was not designed by consultants or financed by Danish government officials, but rather was the result of several distinct bilateral deals between company employees seeking, on the one hand, to reduce waste-treatment and disposal costs, and, on the other, to gain access to cheaper materials and energy while generating income from production residue. Indeed, it was only in the late 1980s that the various participants in the symbiosis first recognized the environmental implications of the partnerships and exchanges that had evolved since the early 1970s. There remains to date no higher level of organization managing this interaction.

Jorgen Christensen, a spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, was explicit on this point when asked to describe how people in Kalundborg had “designed” their recycling linkages: “We didn’t design the whole thing. It wasn’t designed at all. It happened over time.”

Henning Grann, a Statoil employee, reinforced this view a few years later: “The symbiosis project is originally not the result of a careful environmental planning process. It is rather the result of a gradual development of co-operation between four neighboring industries and the Kalundborg municipality.” Erling Pedersen, CEO of the Industrial Development Council in the Kalundborg region, concurred with this evaluation when he wrote in 1999 that the industrial symbiosis “was not a planned network, but a series of projects initially quite independent from one another. There was no original joint management, but rather bilateral agreements between independent partners.” Most interesting is his statement that “the network did not evolve with any academic knowledge of scientific environmental network theories, but as good and economical management practice. All projects required investments and resulted in revenues or savings for the parties involved.”²

The story of the Kalundborg industrial symbiosis is interesting on at least two counts. First, it illustrates how localized inter-industry recycling linkages have spontaneously developed, most of all because they made good business sense.³ Second, it shows how modern environmental regulations, hailed by many as the main reason why the environment has improved recently, have actually turned out to be quite unproductive.

Why Kalundborg Would Have Never Emerged in America

Traditionally, dangerous pollution problems in English-speaking countries were handled through the common-law doctrines of negligence, trespass, nuisance, and strict liability. Liability was thus imposed whenever harm resulting from a pollutant could be demonstrated with scientific evidence. Such a system mandated no specific conduct, but allowed private parties both to recover monetary damages for harm caused and an injunction against offenders who did not or could not reduce emissions to a nonharmful level.⁴

In the last three decades, however, this legal approach to industrial pollution has given way to a regulatory system that sets and enforces specific standards of conduct (typically dubbed “command and control”). Despite somewhat catchy names, such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, modern American environmental regulations that deal with industrial waste have been built on the view that byproducts are a nuisance to be destroyed rather than potentially useful resources. The result is that many environmental statutes typically define pollution prevention in a way that excludes recycling and reclamation, while instituting pervasive biases against technological innovation. The result, not surprisingly, is that creating wealth out of industrial waste is now much more difficult than it was in the past.

Kalundborg provides an interesting lesson in this respect. As many commentators have pointed out, the flexibility of the Danish regulatory framework made possible events that would have been prohibited in America. For example, the flue gas that Statoil pipes to Gyproc and the liquid sulfur that Statoil sells to Kemira probably would not have been approved in the United States because both substances would be classified as “hazardous waste.” Furthermore, the new resources created from these byproducts would also have been treated as hazardous under the so-called “mixture and derive from” rule, which classifies as “waste” new products that incorporate industrial waste. Also, the movement of sulfur from Statoil to Kemira and of scrubber-ash gypsum from Asnæs to Gyproc would have violated a 90-day-storage rule, which, as its name implies, prevents the accumulation of such material for more than 90 days. In the Danish case, the possibility of a longer storage period made the project economically viable.

The flexibility of Denmark’s approach to environmental matters, coupled with the Danish Environment Ministry’s encouragement regarding the use of all waste streams on a case-by-case basis, allows firms to focus on finding creative ways to become more environmentally benign instead of fighting the regulator. As a result, they can use byproducts as inputs rather than “virgin” materials that are often virtually identical in chemical composition.

There have probably always been two views of industrial byproducts. One considers residuals to be health and environmental hazards, urging people to take every step to protect both humans and the natural environment against them. The obvious solution to pollution problems then lies in reducing production and in destroying waste. The second approach considers residuals as potential resources from which marketable products can eventually be derived.

Past experience and current regulatory problems suggest that the second approach is both more sensible and economical. Perhaps, then, the development of an institutional framework that requires firms to prevent pollution, but leaves them free to develop new and profitable uses for byproducts, is the real road to sustainable development.

Notes

1. For a concise and updated introduction to the Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis, see www.symbiosis.dk/.
2. For the sources of these various quotes, see Pierre Desrochers, “Cities and Industrial Symbiosis: Some Historical Perspectives and Policy Implications,” Journal of Industrial Ecology, Fall 2001, pp. 29–44.
3. Since Kalundborg first began to draw interest on these issues, similar industrial symbiosis has been “discovered” in, among other places, Austria, Germany, Finland, and various American and European petrochemical complexes. My research suggests that similar cases were probably very common throughout history. See my “Cities and Industrial Symbiosis” and “Regional Development and Inter-Industry Recycling Linkages: Some Historical Perspective,” Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, January 2002, pp. 49–65, for a more detailed discussion of these other cases.
4. For a brief introduction to the topic and further references, see Pierre Desrochers, “Industrial Ecology and the Rediscovery of Inter-Firm Recycling Linkages: Some Historical Perspective and Policy Implications,” Industrial and Corporate Change, November 2002, pp. 1031–57.

Most advocates of “sustainable development” assume that traditional market incentives, such as the price system and private property rights, lead to wasteful and environmentally harmful practices. Not surprisingly, some proponents, such as bestselling authors Paul Hawken, Sim Van Der Ryn, and Stuart Cowan, have suggested that central planning might prove more effective at coordinating industrial waste recovery.¹

Substituting central planners for spontaneously evolved market transactions to increase industrial recycling is not only an old idea, but also one that failed abysmally when it was tried on a large scale in communist economies. The results, to use Ludwig von Mises’s term, was “planned chaos” on a scale that sustainable-development theorists can hardly imagine.²

By several contemporary accounts—and contrary to now-widespread belief—past entrepreneurs and industrialists did a fairly good job at creating wealth out of industrial waste.³ Nevertheless, the turn of the twentieth century saw the emergence and eventual dominance of an intellectual perspective that attempted to substitute “rational” planning and large-scale enterprises for anarchic market competition. Accordingly, many authors indicted markets for their inherent wastefulness and environmental destruction.⁴

For example, “scientific management” theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, a man for whom the laissez-faire economic model held no sway, wrote in 1911 that when looking at America one could not avoid seeing “our forests vanishing, our water powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron . . . in sight.”⁵

Taylor and others ushered in the idea that the economic revolution of industrialization both enabled and required the replacement of “mere profitability” by objectively developed measures of efficiency. They declared a “war on waste” that occurred because of the failure to implement the principles of scientific management and that resulted from the anarchic and uncoordinated marketplace. It was the marketplace, they said, that brought about unnecessary duplication of productive units, the production of unnecessary goods, and the large discrepancy between supply and demand.

These efforts culminated in the early 1920s when Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover convinced the Federated American Engineering Societies to appoint a Committee on Elimination of Waste in Industry, in which Taylor’s disciples occupied 11 of the 17 positions. Like many other such documents, the final committee report, Waste in Industry, had little to say on byproducts and focused instead on time-wasting strikes, the waste of manpower and money in unemployment, and the loss of effort and money through careless planning.

A few proponents of scientific management nonetheless addressed the issue of industrial byproducts and advocated central planning as the best way to recover them. For example, in 1918 British engineering professor Henry J. Spooner devoted about one-seventh of his 300-page book Wealth from Waste to byproduct recovery, concluding:

[T]he marked success attending the spasmodic and sporadic attempts that have been and are being made to collect waste articles is a sure indication of the enormous amount of wealth awaiting organised collection and treatment. The municipalities have it in their power to render great services to the State by organising a complete system, including house-to-house calls by voluntary women helpers. But nothing of real importance is likely to be done on an extensive scale until such schemes are organised throughout the country from some State department, such as the Local Government Board.⁶

Stuart Chase, an American journalist and popular writer who is often credited with coining the term “New Deal,” expressed similar beliefs in his 1926 book The Tragedy of Waste. His rationale for advocating central planning was this:

Whenever material of any sort is burned down or thrown away, with it goes a certain number of chemical elements—oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur—in various chemical combinations, which may or may not be valuable, but which are always suspect until the chemist has reviewed them. . . . It does not pay, of course, to save all—perhaps most—discarded material. But it pays more now than it did a generation ago, and the process is accelerating. . . . The invariable question to be answered is whether the salvage is worth the cost of conversion. The trouble is that while no must often be the individual manufacturer’s answer because he cannot finance large scale renovation, the answer of the whole community is often yes.⁷

While American and Western European authors proved unable to impose the central planning of industrial-waste recycling on their countries, this approach was later adopted on a large scale in the Eastern European economies, where it proved to be an unmitigated disaster. While relatively few studies were written on the topic in English, the Hungarian-born American sociologist Zsuzsa Gille, although no fan of market economies, recently published a detailed study of the Hungarian planners’ attempt to institute such a scheme in the post-war era.⁸

Planned Chaos in Socialist Hungary

Gille’s main findings can be summarized as follows: The Hungarian socialist era (1948–1989) saw the emergence of an official culture that valued thriftiness and the reuse of waste. The main result of this supposedly new perspective was a number of policies designed to turn industrial waste into useful byproducts. Unfortunately, those policies failed to live up to their promises and were abandoned in recent years with the return to traditional market incentives.

The 1950s saw the creation of an elaborate hierarchical input and output quota system of waste registration, collection, distribution, and reuse. Between 1950 and 1959, 34 central regulations on the collection, storage, delivery, and price of waste materials were issued. Companies generating certain types of waste were first required to collect them and offer them for transfer to other firms in accordance with quotas. According to Gille, “Subsequent laws prescribed which wastes were to be delivered to which company, how to calculate the price of wastes, what to do with hitherto unregulated waste materials, and how much material reward could be given to those who collected wastes beyond the planned amount” (p. 206).

Waste also became a key issue around which the population was mobilized. The culmination of these campaigns was the Gazda movement, named after a metallurgical worker, Géza Gazda, who had invented a new way to reuse scrap metal. As Gille points out, however, these policies led to two unintended consequences. The first was that the reuse of waste materials required additional inputs that were in short supply. As a result, waste was piled up but not used.

Second, the policies also strengthened the tendencies of centrally planned economies toward wasteful production since they created an added incentive for workers and managers to produce with higher waste ratios. These consequences were increasingly acknowledged and led to the revocation of the waste quotas by the end of the 1950s.

The concept of waste as useful material nonetheless remained on the agenda of the central planners. According to Gille, from the mid–1970s on, waste was increasingly seen as a cost of production, and further policies, such as price increases for byproducts, monetary rewards for collection, and additional funding for re-use facilities, were put in place to cut such costs. But instead of centrally calculated waste quotas, enterprises were now free to decide which wastes they wanted to re-use, sell, treat, or dump. Gille argues that, while these programs proved successful for some potentially dangerous wastes, in the end they failed to increase the portion of secondary materials among industrial inputs.

Why Did Central Planning Fail?

The central planning of industrial-waste recycling failed abysmally. Proponents of the system no doubt would say that the Hungarians did not try hard enough or set the wrong waste quotas. This answer does not seem plausible in light of the general failure of central planning and of similar results in other communist countries where such schemes were imposed.

A better explanation is to be found in the so-called Austrian-school critique of central planning that was elaborated by Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and other economists who built on their insights.⁹

Rather than creating an orderly society, central planning has the opposite effect. By short-circuiting the price mechanism and imposing the necessarily limited knowledge of a few planners on a multitude of individuals, central planning destroys the capital base and creates economic randomness, which eventually brings chaos and economic regression.

Thus a rational policy of minimizing industrial waste, embracing all aspects of production and consumption, can best be pursued under free-market capitalism, in which profit-seeking entrepreneurs can compete at creating valuable resources from hitherto useless byproducts.

Notes

1. Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce (New York: Harper Business, 1993); Sim Van Der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, Ecological Design (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).
2. Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1947), available at www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msSApp.html#Appendix.
3. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see my articles in the April, May, and June 2003 issues of Ideas on Liberty.
4. For a detailed history of social engineering and conservation policies during this period, see John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), and Sulevi Riukuletho, The Concepts of Luxury and Waste in American Radicalism, 1880–1929 (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 1998).
5. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/taylor/sciman.
6. Henry J. Spooner, Wealth from Waste: Elimination of Waste a World Problem (Easton: Pa.: Hive Publishing Company, 1974 [1918]), p. 21.
7. Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 261–62.
8. Zsuzsa Gille, “Legacy of Waste or Wasted Legacy? The End of Industrial Ecology in Post-Socialist Hungary,” Environmental Politics, vol. 9, no. 1, 2000, pp. 203–31.
9. For a concise summary of this line of thought, see Sanford Ikeda, Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism (New York: Routledge, 1997), and the relevant texts listed in the Austrian Study Guide of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org/StudyGuideDisplay.asp?SubjID=9).

In the mind of the 21st-century environmentalist, Victorian cities and towns evoke images of black coal smoke and unsanitary conditions. For most people of the time though, they were one of humanity’s supreme achievements. Not as clean as the countryside, no doubt, but thriving places where millions of rural poor had been lifted out of their miserable condition.

Pollution might have seemed an acceptable price to pay for such progress, but a surprisingly large number of Victorians thought it reasonable to expect both a higher standard of living and improved environmental amenities, if some trends that they witnessed in their day continued in years and decades ahead. First among these were the tremendous successes of entrepreneurs and technologists in creating valuable byproducts from industrial waste.

While many writers collected bits and pieces of information on these achievements, the journalist Peter Lund Simmonds (1814-1897) published a massive synthesis on the topic, first in 1862 and in a significantly revised form in 1873, which he titled Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances; or, Hints for Enterprise in Neglected Fields.¹ Simmonds’s books discussed the profitable re-use of virtually all types of industrial and other waste. A point he never tired of making was that not only had considerable wealth been extracted from formerly wasted residuals, but also that the environment was typically better off as a result. A few such cases will give a glimpse of the achievements of Victorian manufacturers.

As Simmonds reminded his readers, what should be done with the fifth quarter of the animal, or the “offal,” was a question that “formerly used to be perpetually assailing Boards of Health, and other sanitary bodies who have the supervision of slaughter-houses, meat-markets, &c.” By the time he wrote his books, however, the offal of cattle suited for food, the waste from dressing skins and preparing leather, and other animal refuse had all found “distinctive and remunerative uses.” A contemporary of Simmonds, the polymath Charles Babbage, thus described in 1832 the profitable uses of horn byproducts: “The tanner who has purchased the raw hides, separates the horns, and sells them to the maker of combs and lanterns. The horn consists of two parts, an outward horny case, and an inward conical substance, somewhat intermediate between indurated hair and bone. The first process consists in separating these two parts, by means of a blow against a block of wood. The horny exterior is then cut into three portions with a frame-saw.”

Babbage proceeded to enumerate the various processes used to turn parts of the horn into combs, a glass substitute for lanterns, knife handles, soap, glue to stiffen cloth, and fertilizer. “Besides these various purposes to which the different parts of the horn are applied,” Babbage wrote, “the clippings, which arise in comb-making, are sold to the farmer for manure [fertilizer]. . . . The shavings, which form the refuse of the lantern-maker, are of a much thinner texture: some of them are cut into various figures and painted, and used as toys. . . . But the greater part of these shavings also are sold for manure.”²

As Simmonds pointed out, if “such skill and ingenuity” had not also been exhibited in the case of bones, and if bones had been left to rot, “producing fever and disease,” there would indeed have been “cause for anxiety amongst sanitary authorities.” Yet, this was not the case, and it was there for all to see “how the danger is dispelled, and a source of evil becomes the agent of much good, and the subject of a thriving and prosperous industry.”³

Recycled Water and Other Byproducts

What was true for animal byproducts was true for most other industries. Simmonds thus describes a process developed at the Kinghole woolen mills, near Dumfries, by which the refuse water of the washing houses had been converted into valuable commercial material. “By means of mechanical appliances and chemical action,” he wrote, “the refuse formerly turned into the river Nith to the injury of the salmon, is made to produce stearine, which forms the basis of composite candles, as well as a cake manure that sells at 40s per ton.”

A friend of Simmonds, the chemist Lyon Playfair, similarly described progress at another textile mill where the recovery of used madder (the residual of a plant that formed the basis for a dye) provided both economic and environmental benefits. “The large quantities of spent madder constantly accumulating,” he wrote, “were found exceedingly inconvenient.” Used madder was not valuable enough to be turned into fertilizer and, as a result, this waste material was at first thrown into rivers. But, Playfair observed, it came to the attention of chemists that one-third of the coloring matter was thus thrown away. A simple treatment with a hot acid was soon devised and again rendered it available as a dye. The result, he observed, was that the “waste heaps are now sources of wealth, and the dyer no longer poisons the rivers with spent madder, but carefully collects it in order that the chemist may make it again fit for his use.”⁴

The slag from iron furnaces provides another interesting illustration. This waste matter was on the mind of several Victorians and led to numerous proposals and experiments. For instance, on the evening of March 25, 1855, a Dr. William Smith of Philadelphia read a paper at a London meeting of the Society of Arts on “The Utilization of the Molten Mineral Products of Smelting Furnaces,” in which he discussed a new technology that he had developed to turn slag into bricks or blocks for the construction industry. In the discussion that followed, one Mr. Nesbit said that even though the paper was of great importance, he thought that the subject was not new. Actually, he had himself labored much on the topic almost a decade earlier and, as he pointed out, his experiments took him to numerous works in southern France, south Wales, and parts of England and Scotland.

Other interesting remarks were made during this meeting on the cost to manufacturers of getting rid of this byproduct and on the fact that it could therefore be obtained cheaply from them. A Mr. Austin noted that he had known some iron masters who paid a lot to convey the slag away, which increased the price of iron, and that this would not be the case if it were convertible to useful purposes. This, he was convinced, “only required the spirit and energy which Englishmen possessed, to carry it out to a very profitable result.”⁵

Smith’s proposal, like many others before and after him, did not prove commercially successful. An innovative solution to the problem of slag was nonetheless found a few decades later when it became largely used as a substitute for stone in concrete and for sand in cement mortar. The British engineer John Kershaw described the major improvement that this brought to the British landscape: “Not only has this new manufacture solved the problem of slag disposal in Staffordshire, and in the other iron-producing districts of this country, but . . . the immense accumulations of slag, due to the past activities of the blast-furnaces, are being gradually removed, and the outward aspect of what in the past has been known as the ‘Black Country’ is undergoing a gradual change for the better, as a result of the success of this new manufacture.”⁶

Perhaps the most spectacular case of profitable byproducts recovery in the Victorian era resulted from the purification of coal gas. As Playfair wrote, coal gas was only reluctantly accepted at the beginning of the nineteenth century because of its noxious side effects: “It was no mean innovation to replace tallow candles and oil lamps by an air streaming through pipes, but the difficulties attending its purification from noxious ingredients appeared even more insuperable than to reconcile the public to the innovation: the gas had an insupportably foetid odour, and certainly injured health when burned; it discoloured the curtains, tarnished the metals, ate off the backs of books, and covered everything with its fuming smoke.”⁷ According to Playfair, “it required a man of courage, as indomitable as [Frederic] Winsor, its great advocate, to persuade the public to continue its use until means were found for the removal of these noxious qualities.”

The negative side effects of coal gas resulted from the presence of substances such as sulfureted hydrogen, which tarnished the metals and, with sulfuret of carbon, produced sulfurous fumes; ammoniac compounds, which changed the colors of dyes and acted on leather; and tarry vapors, which deposited soot. In time, however, chemists were able to turn the sources of these problems into profitable byproducts.

As Playfair put it, “the waste and badly-smelling products of gas-making appeared almost too bad and foetid for utilization, and yet every one of them, Chemistry, in its thriftiness, has made almost indispensable to human progress.”

Among other examples, the bad-smelling tar yielded benzole, an “ethereal body” that proved valuable as a solvent and for preparing varnishes, making oil of bitter almonds, removing grease spots, and cleansing soiled white kid gloves. The same tar gave naphtha, a solvent of Indian rubber and gutta percha. Coal tar also furnished the chief ingredient of printer’s ink in the form of lampblack. It also substituted for asphalt in pavements. When the tar was mixed with coal dust (previously wasted in mining operations), it formed by pressure an excellent and compact artificial fuel. The water, condensed with the tar, contained much ammonia and was readily convertible into sulfate of ammonia, which was used as a fertilizer and in many other lines of work. Cyanides were also present among the products of distillation and were converted into the dye known as Prussian blue. The naphthaline, which used to choke the pipes, was also made into a beautiful red dye, closely resembling the color previously obtained from madder. Coal, when distilled at a lower temperature than that required to form gas, turned into an oil containing paraffin, which was largely used as an antifrictional oil for light machinery.

Learning from the Victorians

Most “sustainable development” theorists show little faith in the incentive structure of market economies to do well financially and environmentally at the same time. Yet many Victorian commentators who were more familiar with commerce and industry saw a direct connection between increased competitive pressures and improved environmental amenities. In their judgment, technological innovation and entrepreneurial behavior insured both a better standard of living and solutions to serious pollution problems.

This is not to say, of course, that Victorian firms were more efficient or cleaner than current manufacturing operations whose foundations are built on more than a century of subsequent innovations. The criteria by which the environmental consciousness or environmental performance of Victorian entrepreneurs should be judged are therefore not 21st-century standards of cleanliness, but rather the improvements that they brought over previous practices. As the economist Thomas DeGregori writes, innovation and progress are never defined in terms of ultimate or final solutions, but rather in terms of “creating smaller or less important [problems] than those we solve.”⁸

Even though the evidence presented here only deals with the United Kingdom during the Victorian era, similar processes can be found in all past advanced economies. Simmonds said: “Great Britain was the first to carry out this utilisation on an extensive scale, and her example is now being followed largely on the Continent, in Australia, the United States, and even in the River Plate States [Argentina and Uruguay], where numerous substances, formerly wasted, have now become profitable articles of commerce.”⁹ If Simmonds’s assessment was correct—and it is corroborated by the fact that a few decades later treatises similar to his were written by French, German, and American authors¹⁰—a case can be made that economic development and improved environmental amenities have not only never been incompatible, but that economic progress has always mandated the development of more efficient practices and the discovery of profitable new uses for industrial waste.

1. Peter Lund Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances; or, Hints for Enterprise in Neglected Fields (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1862), and Peter Lund Simmonds, Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances: A Synopsis of Progress Made in Their Economic Utilisation During the Last Quarter of a Century at Home and Abroad, 3rd ed. (London: Hardwicke and Bogue, 1876 [1873]).
2. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832). Available at http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/babbage/babb2.
3. Bethnal Green Branch of the South Kensington Museum, Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection Illustrating the Utilization of Waste Products (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1875), p. 36.
4. Lyon Playfair, On the Chemical Principles Involved in the Manufactures of the Exhibition as Indicating the Necessity of Industrial Instruction (London: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 1852), pp. 173-74.
5. “The Utilization of the Molten Mineral Products of Smelting Furnaces,” Journal of the Society of Arts, March 30, 1855, pp. 335-41.
6. John B.C. Kershaw, The Recovery and Use of Industrial and Other Waste (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1928), pp. 3-4.
7. Playfair, pp. 186-88.
8. Thomas R. DeGregori, A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Changes in Human Development (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1985), p. 5.
9. Peter Lund Simmonds, Animal Products, Their Preparation, Commercial Uses and Value (New York: Scribner, Welford and Armstrong, 1875), p. iii.
10. For more detail on this issue, see Pierre Desrochers, “Industrial Ecology and the Rediscovery of Inter-Firm Recycling Linkages: Some Historical Perspective and Policy Implications,” Industrial and Corporate Change, November 2002, pp. 1031-57.

This observation is not limited to economics. It can be applied to all areas of human study, including political philosophy. Once learned, that lesson can prevent a great deal of human hardship. Take, for instance, a concept promoted by left-wing environmentalists, “sustainable development.” The term itself actually sounds rather pleasant. Most of us—oddly, excepting those who use this term most often—support development, and we want it to last.

But to understand this concept we have to look beyond the short term. We have to ask ourselves what are the ramifications and logical conclusions of this theory. First, we have to be clear about what is usually meant by the term. It most often means the preservation of resources for future generations. The concept originated with the United Nation’s World Commission on Environment and Development, the Brundtland Commission, named after its socialist chairwoman, Gro Harlem Brundtland. The commission members said sustainable development “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”² The more vocal proponents refer to the consumption of resources today as “stealing” from future generations.

The advocate of individual rights immediately has problems with this theory. It not only postulates that rights belong to a collective but to a collective that doesn’t even exist. By definition, a future generation is a group of people not yet born. As the saying goes, “Tomorrow never comes.” The reason is simple: when tomorrow does arrive it ceases being tomorrow and becomes today. So it is with future generations. Once an individual is actually born he ceases to be a potential member of a future generation and becomes the actual member of the current generation.

If we accept the theory that resources must be preserved for future generations, then we assume that groups of unborn individuals have a right to those resources. But, strangely, this right vanishes the moment those individuals are born, because each future generation, once born, is saddled with the same obligation to yet-still-unborn generations. Moreover, while advocates of sustainable development argue that the unborn have a right to a resource, they also argue that many members of the same future generations should be prevented from coming into existence—that is, they tend to support government intervention meant to reduce the size of future populations. Apparently, unborn generations have property rights but no right to life.

Another problem for the sustainable development theory is that we don’t know what resources will be needed in the future. A hundred years from now people might still be using petroleum to heat their homes or power their cars. But they might not.

As a boy I often visited my grandmother in Chicago. She had a large old house not far from Lake Michigan. On one side was a trap door with a metal slide leading to the basement. Periodically, a truck would pull up and drop a large load of coal down the slide to the basement. There was always a massive pile of dirty, smelly coal down there. The basement was covered in fine coal dust. A large furnace, which required constant maintenance, generated steam for the radiators and for hot water. Every so often my grandmother would have to shovel coal into the furnace—otherwise there would be no heat.

A policy in my grandmother’s day to save coal for future generations would have required her to use much less. She would have been colder—but no one would have been better off. If that old house still exists, I doubt it is heated with coal. Her children don’t use coal today. Coal conservation would have been a lose-lose situation.

Similarly, if we had made policies 20 years ago based on consumption patterns then, we would have worked hard to preserve copper supplies for telephone use. Yet today few phones use copper wires for transmission. They use fiber-optic cables. A huge percentage use no transmission wires at all.

Why sacrifice the well-being of living people for the sake of nonexistent possibilities? Why make sacrifices when we know for certain that much of what is used today will be unwanted tomorrow? Certainly there are resources used today that will still be required in the future, but demand may be significantly less relative to supply. In fact this is precisely what has been happening with virtually every natural resource.

Impossible Projections

In just a short time the resource needs of our generation have changed dramatically. It is unlikely that any of us would have correctly projected today’s resource requirements. Yet sustainable-development advocates project future consumption over generations, centuries, perhaps millenniums.

To complicate matters even more, whether something is or is not a resource depends entirely on human ingenuity. Once, oil on one’s property devalued the land. It killed the cattle, made agriculture difficult, smelled bad, and had no useful purpose. The negative value turned positive when someone figured out how to use it. A bane became a resource. As human knowledge increases, more and more substances become resources.

The basic premise of sustainable development theory is that the supply of all resources is limited across time. While this has been challenged, let’s accept the premise for the sake of argument.

The goal of sustainable development is to preserve “enough” of a resource for future generations. But how much is enough? And for how many generations? While a meteor, or some other catastrophe, may wipe out the human race, we must assume infinite future generations.

But this assumption leads to problems. If we figure that resources are finite and consumption is not, then we have to recognize that any level of consumption will eventually mean that some future generation will have to do without. Logic would seem to demand that we consume nothing at all. And this would apply not only to our generation but to every one that follows. Thus the very people for whom we would be preserving the resource are themselves required not to use it. But if they have no right to use the resource, then our consumption of it today could not possibly be considered “stealing” from them. (The advocates of sustainable development, coming from the apocalyptic Green movement, never consider the role of prices and market incentives, which prevent any needed resource from being depleted.)

Would we actually improve the life of future generations? As illustrated by my grandmother’s use of coal, this may not be true. In fact, we could diminish the well-being of future generations by limiting consumption today. Coercive limiting of petroleum consumption would no doubt make us poorer than we would have been. It would also reduce the well-being of our children and their children. Yet technological changes will no doubt reduce our need for petroleum, as it has been doing for decades. In other words, forced conservation would lower our living standards, and that of following generations, in order to preserve a resource that we’ll need less and less of in the future—and maybe not at all.

Moreover, forced reduction in consumption today may well stifle the very technological innovations that would eradicate the need for petroleum. Innovation requires investment, and investment requires wealth. If we reduce wealth we reduce investment and, in all likelihood, innovation. We may actually increase the consumption of a resource over the long term by reducing its usage in the short term.

The “right” set of environmental regulations just a couple of decades ago could have prevented development of fiber-optic, cellular-telephone, and Internet technology. As a result, vast quantities of copper, paper—and trees—would still be required today for communication.

Of course, no one misses a technology that never was. It is only by looking backwards that we can see what effect such policies would have had on us had they been foolishly implemented by our parents or grandparents.

Other Stifling Effects

Sustainable development would stifle innovation in other ways as well. It is supposed to guarantee “equal” access to resources today, tomorrow, and a hundred years from now. The idea is to prevent resource crises. Yet crises often bring new technologies into existence. Price controls in the United States artificially stimulated demand for oil during the 1970s and caused shortages. When deregulation later increased prices (temporarily), consumers demanded new technologies to reduce consumption. Cars built before the crisis consumed more fuel per mile than those built since. (Higher prices also summoned new supplies.)

Thus, in a free market, crises contain the seeds for their own solutions. Often the solution dramatically reduces demand for the resource in question and sometimes eliminates demand entirely.

But the ebb and flow of markets cannot be allowed to operate under sustainable development, which requires state control. This inevitably means that price and profit signals will become distorted, causing both consumers and producers to miscalculate the availability of resources and forcing them into patterns contrary to their actual well-being.

Sustainable development is one of the most perilous theories around. It can’t even answer the basic questions it raises. It can’t tell us what resources to sustain. It can’t tell us for whom they should be sustained. It can’t tell us how long such sustainability should be maintained. It merely makes unsupported assertions and calls for centralized state control of economic resources, preferably on a global scale.

Apparently, small is beautiful to the Greens, except when it comes to government. Then “the bigger the better” is the rule. While “sustainable development” sounds good, it actually is a hollow phrase with little or no meaning but with some dubious, if not dangerous, implications.

Notes

1. This, of course, is the “one lesson” immortalized by Henry Hazlitt: “the art of economics is looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy: it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Economics in One Lesson (San Francisco: Laissez Faire Books, 1996 [1946]), p. 5.
2. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8.

“The threat of an environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”^[1]
—Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow, 1991

In Colton, California, a fly has brought economic development to a screeching halt. This San Bernardino County town of 45,000 was already in bad shape from the closing of a military base. The foreclosure rate is among the highest in the state, and the city council is considering putting up the civic center as collateral to raise funds.

Unfortunately for its human residents, Colton is also home to the Delhi sand fly, which is listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as an endangered species. To protect the fly, state authorities have blocked construction of a new hospital and industrial park that would have brought in over $171 million in investment and thousands of new jobs. In fact, any major development is impossible because of the fly.^[2]

The incident in Colton is just one example of the increasingly acrimonious conflict between property owners and environmental bureaucrats. It could even turn out to be the opening shot of an all-out environmental war. On one side are ordinary citizens, farmers, and ranchers who are struggling to preserve their property, freedom, and way of life. On the other side are environmental bureaucrats who are issuing increasingly draconian regulations and orders.

The Environmental Elite

In the early 1970s, the environment became the focus of enormous media attention. At least some of the problems were real, if often exaggerated. Untreated sewage was being discharged into coastal estuaries. Toxic runoff from farms and factories was killing fish and birds. Like many Americans, I was concerned. During the mid-1980s, I even worked briefly for the Natural Resources Defense Council—a private environmental advocacy organization.

Today, the political climate has changed radically. Environmental groups—including the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, and Worldwatch Institute—have become extremely influential and powerful. Greenpeace alone boasts some six million members. The Sierra Club and Worldwatch Institute have “adviser” status with the United Nations. These environmental groups have become the most powerful lobby in Washington, D.C., and at the U.N.

The result: authoritarian environmental political agendas—not science—are increasingly determining policy. There has also been a frightening change within the environmental movement. For many, the goal is no longer clean air and water, and a safe environment for human beings. Instead, for many environmentalists, the goal is to protect “sacred Mother Earth”—meaning every bug, rat, fern, and species other than man.

Extreme environmentalists are not shy about admitting their goals. As Reed Noss states in his article “Rewilding America,” “the collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans.”^[3] Indeed, for many, man is the enemy.

This attitude was made crystal clear by Maurice Strong, secretary general of the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. Just the year before, Strong had declared: “It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class—involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, ownership of motor vehicles and small electrical appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.”^[4]

Some extreme environmentalists want to take us back to the Middle Ages. E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, says the world was much better in medieval times, when people rarely traveled beyond the village in which they were born. Rudolf Bahro, founder of the German green movement, wants us all to live in small communities and to eliminate our cars, airplanes, computers, and most other modern devices.

Other authoritarian “defenders of the earth” would like to reduce the human population to prehistoric levels. Warren Hern says “the human species has become a malignancy, an ‘ecotumor’ that is growing out of control.”^[5] David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, agrees. “We are a cancer on nature,” he declares.^[6] Earth First!’s motto proudly declares its ultimate goal: “Back to the Pleistocene.”

How do they propose we get there? National Park Services biologist David Graber suggests, “Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”^[7] Many extreme environmentalists are determined to end industrial civilization, one way or another.

The Rio Summit and Green Marxism

In June 1992 over 20,000 people from around the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The working session of the conference was the “Earth Summit,” attended by representatives from 178 nations and hundreds of U.N. nongovernment organizations (NGOs).

The chairman of the Earth Summit was Norway’s Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was also vice president of the International Socialist Party.^[8] Brundtland readily admitted that the Earth Summit agenda was based on the party’s platform. True to form, an endless parade of socialists, extreme environmentalists, and representatives of authoritarian regimes chastised the United States for “consuming too much” and exploiting the Third World. Their solution: redistribution of our wealth through global taxes and outright expropriation. The enforcement mechanism: a beefed up United Nations with new powers to jail “environmental criminals” and seize their property without trial.

This authoritarian program was spelled out in the conference’s Rio Declaration, Earth Charter, and Agenda 21—an 800-page agreement with 115 specific proposals. According to the late Dixy Lee Ray, Agenda 21 seeks to establish a mechanism for transferring wealth from the citizens of the United States to the Third World. “Fear of environmental crises” would be used to create a world government and U.N. central direction.^[9]

Henry Lamb, in his article “The Year of Decision,” writes that Americans fail to realize that their enemy is the “hoards of NGOs [who are] cheering the proposals pushed by international statesmen at world conferences designed to achieve with verbosity what could not be accomplished with bombs.”^[10]

Implementing the World Environmental Regime

The primary mechanism for implementing Agenda 21 and the other extreme environmental goals of the Earth Summit are international treaties. The U.N. has passed over 300 environmental treaties, and many have been ratified by the United States.

Under the U.S. Constitution, once a treaty is ratified by the Senate, its provisions supersede all other laws—federal, state, and local. Article VI, Section 2 of the Constitution clearly states that “all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land.”

A treaty that gives a foreign power control over U.S. territory is obviously a very serious matter. At the least, you would expect extensive media coverage and thoughtful debate. But in reality, these treaties have been virtually ignored by the mainstream press and often rubber-stamped by congressmen who have never read them. As a result, few Americans have even heard of the World Heritage Treaty or the Biodiversity Treaty, or dozens of less ambitious treaties. Yet these treaties are about to have a profound effect on every aspect of your life; from where you live and work, to what you eat, to whether you will be allowed to own a car. Here are two examples:

The World Heritage Treaty. This treaty imposes a total ban on human use of protected areas. It was signed in 1973 by President Nixon and subsequently ratified by the U.S. Senate. It creates the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, charged with “protecting” any building or land designated by the committee as a World Heritage Site.^[11] No subsequent U.S. approval is required, and a recent attempt in the Senate to require congressional approval was defeated.

Typically, U.N. “protection” of land means a total ban on virtually any human use other than limited tourism. Banned activities include mining, logging, farming, and permanent human habitation. The EPA and its state counterparts are the lead enforcement agencies.

In the United States, 47 designated “bio-sphere reserves” are now under partial or complete control of UNESCO and the U.N. World Heritage Committee. “Protected sites” include the Statue of Liberty, the Everglades National Park, Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park, and Yellowstone Park.^[12]

Existing and proposed biosphere reserves in the United States now include millions of acres. The Yellowstone Bioreserve alone has over 22 million acres. But even that pales in comparison to the proposed Ozarks Highlands Biosphere, which will include 54,000 square miles.^[13]

The total U.S. area currently under U.N. “protection” constitutes over 200 million acres, nearly twice the area of the state of Idaho.

Human use of U.S. land in and around U.N. Biosphere Reserves is being severely limited or banned entirely. Following the designation of the Yellowstone Bioreserve, the New World Gold Mine—located five miles outside of Yellowstone—was forced by the EPA to suspend all operations. In and around the Adirondacks State Park in New York—part of the North Bioregion—landowners have been told by environmental authorities that they can’t make any additions to their homes and have been forced to abandon farming practices they’ve used for generations.

The Biodiversity Treaty. This treaty makes violating U.N. environmental decrees a criminal offense, punishable by prison and confiscation of assets without trial.^[14] It was signed by President Clinton in 1993, but never ratified by the Senate. Clinton says ratifying it is his “top foreign policy objective.”

Under the treaty, NGOs would work with U.S. agencies like the EPA to ensure “sustainable development”—which in practice means no development, and certainly none that hasn’t been approved by U.S. and U.N. environmental bureaucrats.

Although the Biodiversity Treaty is still unratified, it is nevertheless rapidly being implemented throughout the country by executive order. A critical step took place in January 1996, when President Clinton signed Executive Order 12986 giving the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources immunity from lawsuits in the United States.

The IUCN is the major administrative agency for the U.N.’s global environmental agenda. It includes representatives from over 800 state and federal government agencies and nongovernment organizations in 133 countries. The IUCN’s master plan for the United States is the Wildlands Program, which is presented in U.N. Global Biodiversity Assessment (Section 10.4.2.2.3). The goal of this incredible program is to turn 50 percent of the United States—including thousands of existing towns and communities—into an “eco-park” in which most human use is prohibited. According to Science magazine, the Wildlands Project calls for “23.4% of the land [in the United States] to be returned to wilderness, and another 26.2% to be severely restricted in terms of human use. Most roads would be closed; some would be ripped out of the landscape.”^[15] As Marilyn Brannan, associate editor of Monetary & Economic Review, commented, “It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this is a radical agenda designed to control not just the land, but all human activity as well.”^[16]

Section 10.5 of the Global Biological Assessment states that in 20 to 50 years, all citizens living within reserves will be “relocated.” Tens of millions of people would be involved in this relocation.^[17]

John Davis, editor of the Wildlands Project journal, Wild Earth, explains the ultimate objective: “Wilderness recovery must start now but continue indefinitely—expanding wilderness until the matrix, not just the nexus, is wild. . . . Does [this] mean that Wild Earth and the Wildlands Project advocate the end of industrial civilization? Most assuredly. Everything civilized must go.”^[18]

Fortunately the Biodiversity Treaty faces strong opposition. But that doesn’t mean we can relax. As noted, Clinton (like other presidents) has been circumventing Congress by enforcing his policies through executive order, regulation, and by strong-arming local governments. That’s what’s happening now with the Biodiversity Treaty and Agenda 21.

Sustainable Development

If you search under the keyword “sustainability” on the Internet you will find hundreds of thousands of listings, including sites for dozens of local sustainability councils. Maurice Strong’s “Earth Council” is the global coordinator for sustainability.^[19] Many local governments are acting as if Biodiversity Treaty and its plan for a “sustainable” U.S. economy were the law of land.

For example, in October 1996 Mayor Willie Brown announced his new “Sustainability Plan” for San Francisco, which calls for eventual elimination of all cars and trucks from the city. The plan states that “Ultimately, in a sustainable San Francisco, almost all trips to and within the City will be on public transit, foot or bicycle as will a good part of trips in the larger Bay Region. Walking through streets designed for pedestrians and bicycles will be more pleasant than walking through those designed for the automobile. . . . Old, obsolete highway segments of the automobile era will be demolished. . . . Only through the cooperation of an enlightened San Franciscans [sic] will the City become a leading global citizen.”^[20]

Brown’s plan doesn’t explain how people are expected to get to the city without cars. It doesn’t explain how the 900,000 people living in San Francisco will be supplied with food and other merchandise without trucks. It doesn’t explain how anyone will even be able to move a sofa or refrigerator from one house to another (by oxcart?). And San Francisco is just one of 40 U.S. cities that now plan to eliminate cars and trucks in the name of sustainability.

Many biodiversity councils have been established. For instance, the Chicago Region Biodiversity Council is a coalition of 34 federal agencies, cultural organizations, and environmental groups, which the Chicago Tribune calls “an ambitious and unprecedented effort to restore what nature created, not piece-by-piece, but on a regional scale. . . . The idea is to create a network of native natural areas not just in [Illinois] forest preserves but in city and suburban neighborhoods and on corporate campuses. Lawns and parkways could be replaced by fields of prairies, wildflowers, and boring detention ponds could be replaced by living wetlands.”^[21]

Of course, the lawns they are planning on eliminating are those of people like you and me. And the parkways they want to turn into flowers are our major means of transportation. Earth First! could hardly ask for more.

The shocking reality is that without most of us even being aware of its existence, a deadly alliance of authoritarian environmentalists and utopian city planners has been moving full speed ahead to roll back industrial civilization.

Fighting Back

As awareness grows of the power grab in the name of the environment, resistance is mounting. In 40 states, nearly 100 bills have been introduced to curtail environmental overregulation. In the last five years, 23 states have passed laws strengthening property rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that if environmental regulations destroy the value of a person’s property, it is a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment and the owner must be compensated.^[22] And pending before Congress, the Property Rights Act would compensate property owners who lose 35 percent or more of the value of their property because of government regulations. A variety of organizations is fighting the global, environmentalist power grab. While, admittedly, compensation would come from the taxpayers, the real import of these measures is that government takings would be constrained.

The authoritarian environmental movement is global, powerful, and well organized. Many Americans are being required to surrender their liberty in the name of “the environment” without a shot being fired. If a crazed foreign despot tried to force the American people to give up their cars, homes, businesses, standard of living, and freedom in the name of socialism and the glory of the state, he’d be hanged. But when the new environmental totalitarians demand precisely the same policies in the name of “saving the earth,” millions of Americans applaud.

Once the American people are aware of the full dimensions of the authoritarian environment agenda to take away their cars, air conditioners, factories, and homes, they will surely reject this totalitarian environmental agenda and return to sanity.

We can have both a safe, livable environment and freedom and prosperity, but only if we expose and reject the environmental authoritarian movement to destroy industrial civilization.

Notes

1. Quoted in “Behind the Green Curtain: The Globalist Radical Environmental Agenda,” McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, October 1997, p. 7.
2. “Endangered Fly Frustrates Town Eager for Business,” Contra Costa Times, June 6, 1997, p. A-10.
3. Reed Noss, “Rewilding America,” Eco-Logic Magazine (Environmental Conservation Organization) November/December 1995, p. 20.
4. Earth in Focus, No. 2, UNCED, p. 2.
5. Ramon G. McLeon, “Humans are ‘Planetary Malignancy,’ Scientist Says,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 1, 1994, p. A-3.
6. Quoted in “Only Man’s Presence Can Save Nature” (unsigned article), Harper’s, April 1990, p. 48.
7. Dave M. Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 22, 1989, p. 9.
8. Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo, Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense? (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1993), p. 5.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. Henry Lamb, “The Year of Decision,” Eco-Logic Magazine (Environmental Conservation Organization), January/February 1996.
11. Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO, 1972, and signed by 150 countries. Additional information may be obtained from the website: http://www.unesco.org/whc/intro-en.htm.
12. A complete listing appears on the UNESCO Website.
13. Tom Uhlenbrock, “Residents Fear Huge U.S./U.N. Land Grab,” Wake Up Call America, July/August 1997.
14. McAlvany.
15. “The High Cost of Biodiversity” (unsigned article), Science, June 25, 1993, p. 1868.
16. Marilyn Brannan, “The Wildlands Project Unleashes Its War on Mankind,” Special Report by the Monetary and Economic Review, March 1996, p. 6.
17. See United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 8a-3; United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment, Section 10.4.2.2.3; U.S. Man and the Biosphere Strategic Plan (1994 draft); U.S. Heritage Corridors Program; “The Wildlands Project,” Wild Earth, December 1992; and “The High Cost of Biodiversity” (see endnote 15).
18. Quoted in William Norman Grigg, “Battle for Sustainable Freedom,” The New American, April 29, 1996, p. 8.
19. Brannan.
20. “Sustainability Plan for San Francisco,” Office of the Mayor, San Francisco, October 1996.
21. Quoted in “Insider Report,” The New American, May 13, 1996, p. 11.
22. Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S.C. 111 Set. 2886, 1992.

The mantra of “sustainable development” is constantly on the lips of the international agencies and nongovernmental organizations helping lesser-developed countries. The concept seems innocuous enough; after all, who would favor “unsustainable development”? But the fundamental premise of the idea—that economic growth, if left unconstrained and unmanaged by the state, threatens unnecessary harm to the environment and may prove economically ephemeral—is dubious. Indeed, the policy prescriptions that are generally endorsed by those concerned about sustainable development are inimical to our best environmental and economic interests. This is so for three reasons:

• If economic growth were to be slowed or stopped, it would be impossible to improve environmental conditions.
• The bias for command-and-control regulations on the part of those endorsing the concept of sustainable development will only serve to make environmental protection more expensive; hence, we have to “purchase” less of it.
• Strict pursuit of sustainable development, as many environmentalists mean it, would only do violence to the welfare of future generations.

The debate surrounding sustainable development is important because it advertises itself as a comprehensive governing philosophy for the 21st century. Indeed, Vice President Al Gore has called the need for environmental protection the best “central organizing principle” of the modern state. This is heavy stuff. It puts sustainable development in the pantheon of other “central organizing principles” proposed for the state over the years—such as rule by class or race and absolute rule by majority. While environmental protection is certainly important, making it the government’s chief principle would concentrate tremendous power in the hands of those who believe only they can best direct human affairs. The results of such experiments have been less than spectacular and usually counterproductive, to say the least.

What Is Sustainable Development?

Despite its institutionalization, sustainable development is rather difficult to define coherently. The United Nations Commission on Economic Development (UNCED), in its landmark 1987 report, Our Common Future, defines it as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”^[1] But that definition is hopelessly problematic. How can we be reasonably expected to know, for instance, what the needs of people in 2100 might be? Moreover, one way people typically “meet their own needs” is by spending money on food, shelter, education, and whatever else they deem necessary or important. Is sustainable development, then, simply a euphemism for the creation of wealth (which, after all, is handed down to our children for their subsequent use)? True, there are human needs—such as peace, freedom, and individual contentment—that cannot be met simply by material means, but sustainable-development advocates seldom dwell on the importance of those nonmaterial, non-“resource-based” psychological needs when discussing the concept.

Thus, sophisticated proponents of sustainable development are forced to discard as functionally meaningless the UNCED definition. Otherwise, the UNCED definition can be read as a call for society to maximize human welfare over time. An entire profession has grown up around that proposition. It is known as economics, and maximizing human welfare is known not as “sustainable development” but as “optimality.” Can it really be that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was the world’s first call for sustainable development?

Economists David Pearce and Jeremy Warford, two of the world’s more serious thinkers about sustainable development, disclose that by sustainable development, many advocates mean “a process in which the natural-resource base is not allowed to deteriorate.”^[2] This is generally known as the “strong” definition of sustainability. The “weak” definition allows the natural-resource base to deteriorate as long as biological resources are maintained at a minimum critical level and the wealth generated by the exploitation of natural resources is preserved for future generations, which is otherwise “robbed” of their rightful inheritance. Weak sustainability, then, can be thought of as “the amount of consumption that can be sustained indefinitely without degrading capital stocks.”^[3]

Unfortunately, both “strong” and “weak” definitions of sustainable development pose problems as well. As Robert Hahn of the American Enterprise Institute points out, the narrower the definition, the easier it is to pin down, but the less satisfactory the concept.^[4] That does not, however, reduce the concept’s utility as (in the description of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s James Sheehan) “an overarching political philosophy merging the twin goals of conservation and controlled economic development.”^[5]

The Pitfalls of “Strong” Sustainability

What is “the natural-resource base” we are directed not to draw down? Resources are simply those assets that can be used profitably for human benefit. “Natural” resources, then, are a subset of the organic and inorganic material we think of as constituting the biological “environment,” since not all of that material can be used profitably.

What can be used productively by man changes with time, technology, and material demand. Waves, for example, are not harnessed for human benefit today and thus cannot really be thought of as a “natural resource.” But the technology to harness the movement of waves to generate energy certainly exists, and the day when the cost of doing so is lower than the cost of alternative energy sources is the day when waves become a “natural resource.” Uranium, to cite another example, would not have been considered a resource a century ago, but is most certainly thought of as such today. Petroleum was not an important resource 100 years ago, but today is thought of as perhaps the most important one to modern society.

Thus, what is and is not part of any society’s “natural-resource base” changes. Conserving today’s base does not ensure that tomorrow’s is secure, and drawing down today’s does not necessarily mean that tomorrow’s is in jeopardy.

Moreover, the relative abundance of a society’s natural resources can change dramatically with technological advance. For example, there are 6,784 trillion fewer barrels of oil in the ground today than there were in 1981, the year in which relative oil scarcity was greatest.^[6] At first glance, then, one might think that the natural-resource base has deteriorated. Yet oil is more abundant today than it was 17 years ago. After adjusting for inflation, the price of a barrel of Saudi crude has declined by 62 percent and U.S. crude by 64 percent since 1980.^[7] The reasons for this increased oil abundance are several-fold. First, new technologies have emerged that make oil discovery and production far more efficient and thus less costly. Second, greater efficiency in using resources (a reaction to previous run-ups in petroleum prices as well as ongoing technological advances) has helped reduce the amount of oil necessary to produce a unit of goods or services and, hence, the relative abundance of the energy-resource base. Indeed, according to the U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration, the amount of petroleum and natural gas necessary to produce a dollar’s worth of GDP has declined by 29 percent since 1980. The story is not unique to petroleum; all resources have become far more abundant—not more scarce—throughout the twentieth century (and indeed, throughout recorded history).^[8]

If sustainable development, then, is understood as an admonition that the aggregate size of the natural-resource base (absent any consideration of demand) should “not be allowed to deteriorate,” then it is not particularly helpful. It posits wrongly that absolute (as opposed to relative) scarcity is the primary threat to the economy and human society at large. And the theory is oblivious to the ongoing process of resource creation. As economists Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse explained in their classic work, Scarcity and Growth, as resources become more scarce, people will anticipate future scarcities, prices will be bid up, incentives will be created for developing new technologies and substitutes, and the resource base will be renewed.^[9]

Wild-Eyed Optimism?

Is Barnett and Morse’s optimism regarding “just in time” delivery of new technologies and resource subsidies justified? Well, historical experience would certainly seem to justify their optimism. Those who find the theory counterintuitive betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the genesis of resources. Natural resources do not exist independent of man and are not materials we simply find and then exploit like buried treasure. On the contrary, they are created by mankind. As resource economist Thomas De Gregori points out, “humans are the active agent, having ideas that they use to transform the environment for human purposes. . . . Resources are not fixed and finite because they are not natural. They are a product of human ingenuity resulting from the creation of technology and science.”^[10]

The late David Osterfeld thus concluded that “since resources are a function of human knowledge and our stock of knowledge has increased over time, it should come as no surprise that the stock of physical resources has also been expanding.”^[11] Obsessing on conserving present resources is akin to a farmer obsessing over conserving eggs rather than the chickens that lay them.

The sustainable-development imperative betrays an ill-considered bias for natural as opposed to man-made capital. In truth, the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by “banking” those resources for future use. Daniel Boggs has criticized the “rhetoric [that] says we didn’t inherit from our parents, we are borrowing from our children.”

Argues Boggs: “This is usually designed to make us ashamed to use anything. Logically, it should also make us hate our parents for using up some of ‘our’ oil, or iron, or whatever. Yet, our parents did build this world for us.” He went on to point out that previous generations “created the resources that far more than replaced, in truth, what they used. And I am confident that we can do the same for our children. I would certainly rather have medicines and satellites and other technology than a few more billion tons of some rock or another.”

It comes down to free choice, Boggs said. “We each can set our own economic time horizons. If we really think our grandchildren will be better off with shut-in oil wells than shares of IBM, we can buy them up and shut them in. But others should be free to make their own decisions.”^[12]

Doubt from Within

There is growing doubt within the ecological community about whether stocks of natural capital are naturally constant at all. “Strong” sustainability assumes that ecosystems naturally evolve towards some equilibrium and eventually stabilize. But within the academic community, the lack of empirical evidence supporting that assumption has led to a wholesale questioning of the equilibrium paradigm.^[13] The consequences are significant.

• If ecosystems do not tend toward stabilization, then policies intended to promote “sustainable” capital are unnatural and without ecological merit.
• If resource stocks are not functionally and structurally complete, then “sustainable management” of those stocks will prove suboptimal, and
• If ecosystems do not tend toward stability, then calculations about the economic or ecological value of natural capital are impossible on a macro level.

Uncertainties surrounding the nature of ecosystem evolution and the means by which resource stocks can best be maintained have two main implications for policy analysts. First, conclusions about whether or not certain economic activities are “sustainable” is more problematic than some would like to think. As sustainable-development theorists Robert Costanza and Bernard Patten concede, “A system can only be known to be sustainable after there has been time to observe if the prediction holds true. Usually there is so much uncertainty in estimating natural rates of renewal, and observing and regulating harvest rates, that a simple prediction . . . is always highly suspect, especially if it is erroneously thought of as a definition.”^[14]

A second implication is that preserving indefinitely certain ecological states is less a matter of ecological necessity than social preference. Geographer M.J. Harte of the University of Waikato, New Zealand, notes that the issue of natural capital necessarily involves people’s preferences. Without that dimension, Harte says, “economists cannot claim that any one ecological state is superior to another because their recommendations are not clearly supported by ecological theory and practice.”^[15] For Harte that means the “contribution to human well-being” should be given weight at least equal to environmental considerations in decisions about development.

The “strong” variant of sustainable development is thus built on an erroneous theoretical foundation that cripples its usefulness to policy analysts.

And finally, while sustainability can be an important consideration for certain economic or social arrangements, it does not necessarily follow, as economist Wilfred Beckerman notes, that sustainability should be the overriding criterion for public policy. After all, there are innumerable human undertakings that are highly desirable—even necessary—but unfortunately not indefinitely sustainable. We must distinguish between sustainability as a purely technical concept and optimality, which is a normative concept. Many economic activities that are unsustainable may be perfectly optimal and many that are sustainable may not be desirable, let alone optimal.^[16] I.M.D. Little and J.A. Mirrlees observed rightly that “Whether a project is sustainable (forever?—or just a long time?) has nothing to do with whether it is desirable. If unsustainability were really regarded as a reason for rejecting a project, there would be no mining, and no industry. The world would be a very primitive place.”^[17]

Nobel-prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek concurred, pointing out that we have only sustained development as a society by refusing to embrace the policy prescriptions of “sustainable development” advocates. “Industrial development would have been greatly retarded,” Hayek wrote, “if sixty or eighty years ago the warning of the conservationists about the threatened exhaustion of the supply of coal had been heeded; and the internal combustion engine would never have revolutionized transport if its use had been limited to the known supplies of oil.”^[18]

The Incoherence of Intergenerational Equity

It is fashionable in certain intellectual circles to argue, as does Edith Weiss, professor of international law at Georgetown University, that future generations have as much right to today’s environmental resources as we do, and that we have no right to decide whether or not they should inherit their share of those rights.^[19]

Yet the idea that those not yet even conceived have tangible rights to resources is dubious to say the least. First, it is philosophically inconsistent. Those disembodied beings are said to have rights, yet the moment they are conceived, they are legally held to have no rights whatsoever. Leaving aside the ethics of abortion, to be consistent, those who defend the rights of future generations must by the same logic oppose abortion (a position few environmentalist activists hold, given their allegiance to population control). Once individuals are conceived, we do not maintain that they have a right to all the resources of their parents. If, for example, a retired couple spends $50,000 on a trip around the world, we do not argue that the couple has violated the resource rights of their children. Thus, individuals are said to have absolute resource rights before conception, no resource rights (indeed, not even the right to life) from conception to birth, and then only limited resource rights until death. If the theory of intergenerational equity is to be taken seriously, this obvious lurching arbitrariness will need to be expunged.

The concept of intergenerational equity, moreover, is hopelessly incoherent. If the choice to draw down resources is held exclusively by future generations, then are we not some previous generation’s “future” generation? Why is the present generation bereft of that right? If the answer is that no generation has the right to deplete resources as long as another generation is on the horizon, then the logical implication is that no generation (save for the very last generation before the extinction of the species) will ever have a right to deplete any resource, no matter how urgent present needs may be. If only one generation (out of hundreds or even thousands) has the right to deplete resources, how is that “intergenerational equity”?

Furthermore, the notion of resource rights for future generations is premised on the argument that one has a “right” to forcibly take property from someone else in order to satisfy a personal need. Although that is an argument best left unexplored here, suffice it to say that such a claim is so expansive and fraught with peril that few philosophers have taken it seriously.^[20]

The Meaninglessness of “Weak” Sustainability

What if we embrace the “weak” definition of sustainable development—allowing natural resources to be depleted as long as they are maintained at a “minimum critical level” and that the proceeds of their use be preserved for future generations? Weak sustainability is certainly a more reasonable proposition, but that’s largely because it is functionally indistinguishable from the economists’ concern with maximizing human welfare. As economist David Pearce—a strong proponent of “weak” sustainability—concedes, sustainable development “implies something about maintaining the level of human well being so that it might improve but at least never declines (or, not more than temporarily, anyway).”^[21]

The two apparent qualifications of “weak” sustainability are really no qualifications at all. If we understand “minimum critical level” as the natural-resource base necessary to sustain human life, then one certainly does not maximize human welfare by consuming resources beyond that point. If, on the other hand, it means that each and every natural resource—regardless of its utility to mankind—be preserved at some “minimal critical level,” then, without reference to costs and benefits, the concept is simply anti-human and inimical to the interests of future generations.

As a thought experiment, assume that the only way we could have preserved the American bison at a “minimum critical level” was to leave the Great Plains largely untouched by agriculture. Would the sacrifice of what was to become the world’s most productive cropland in order to protect the great buffalo herds have been in either the economic or social interest of future generations? A policy paradigm that refuses to consider the costs or benefits of such decisions is incapable of making a moral argument about the interests of future (human) generations. But to include cost and benefit calculations in such decisions brings us right back to the economic concept of “maximizing welfare.”

The admonition that the proceeds of such tradeoffs be preserved for our children is redundant. Since all wealth is eventually inherited by future generations, there would appear to be no rationale for a special state-supervised “account” to be established for their benefit.

Sustainable Development: An Intellectual Rorschach Test?

In sum, it is hard to overemphasize the wrong-headedness of sustainable development as a useful policy construct. As two distinguished scholars of the economic development—Partha Dasgupta and Karl-Goran Maler—point out, “most writings on sustainable development start from scratch and some proceed to get things hopelessly wrong. It would be difficult to find another field of research endeavor in the social sciences that displays such intellectual regress.”^[22]

If sustainable development is the answer, what is the question? Society has managed to “sustain” development now for approximately 3,000 years without the guidance of green state planners. The result is not only a society that is both healthier and wealthier than any other in history, but a society with more natural resources at its disposal than ever before. One could reasonably argue that the best way to sustain development—or to maximize human welfare—is to protect economic liberty and confine state authority to protecting life, liberty, and property.^[23] That is, the best way of sustaining development is to reject “sustainable development.”

Notes

1. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 8.
2. David Pearce and Jeremy Warford, World Without End: Economics, Environment, and Sustainable Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 8.
3. Robert Costanza, “Ecological Economics: A Research Agenda,” in Structural Change Economics, vol. 2, pp. 335–42; cited in M.J. Harte, “Ecology, Sustainability, and Environment as Capital,” Ecological Economics, vol. 15, 1995, p. 158.
4. Robert Hahn, “Toward a New Environmental Paradigm,” Yale Law Journal, May 1993, p. 1750.
5. James Sheehan, “Sustainable Development: The Green Road to Serfdom?” Competitive Enterprise Institute, manuscript, March 1996, p. 1.
6. Annual Energy Review, U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, http://tonto.cia.doe.gov/aer.
7. Energy Information Administration.
8. Julian Simon, ed., The State of Humanity (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), pp. 279–442.
9. Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963).
10. Thomas De Gregori, “Resources Are Not; They Become: An Institutional Theory,” Journal of Economic Issues, September 1987, pp. 1243, 1247.
11. David Osterfeld, Prosperity versus Planning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 99.
12. Daniel Boggs, Presentation at Global Issues Seminar, Harvard University Center for International Affairs, October 7, 1986, p. 14.
13. See for example, J.J. Kay, “The Concept of Ecological Integrity, Alternative Theories of Ecology and Implications for Decision-Support Indicators,” in Economic, Ecological, and Decision Theories: Indicators of Ecological Sustainable Development, ed. P.A. Victor, J.J. Kay, and H.J. Ruitenback (Ottawa: Canadian Environmental Advisory Council, 1991), pp. 23–58.
14. Robert Costanza and Bernard Patten, “Defining and Predicting Sustainability,” Ecological Economics, vol. 15, 1995, p. 194.
15. Harte, p. 162.
16. Wilfred Beckerman, Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996), p. 145.
17. I.M.D. Little and J.A. Mirrlees, “Project Appraisal and Planning 20 Years On,” Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics (World Bank, 1990) p. 365, cited in Beckerman, p. 146.
18. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 369–370.
19. Edith Weiss, In Fairness to Future Generations (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Transnational Publishers, 1989). For a summary and sympathetic critique of Weiss, see Paul Barresi, “Beyond Fairness to Future Generations: An Intragenerational Alternative to Intergenerational Equity in the International Environmental Arena,” Tulane Environmental Law Journal, Winter 1997, pp. 59–88.
20. See Gerald MacCallum, Jr., “Negative and Positive Freedom,” Philosophical Review, July 1967, pp. 312–34; Roger Pilon, “Ordering Rights Consistently: Or What We Do And Do Not Have Rights To,” Georgia Law Review, vol. 13, 1979, pp. 1171–96; and David Kelley, A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998), forthcoming.
21. David Pearce, Economic Values and the Natural World (London: Earthscan Press, 1993), p. 48; cited in Beckerman, p. 147.
22. Partha Dasgupta and Karl-Goran Maler, “Poverty, Institutions, and the Environmental-Resource Base,” World Bank Paper no. 9 (Washington, D.C., 1994); cited in Beckerman, p. 143.
23. See generally Osterfeld as well as David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and James A. Dorn, Steve H. Hanke, and Alan A. Walters, eds., The Revolution in Development Economics (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998).