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114 — 4 — Tending Nature with the Invisible Hand The Free-Market Environmentalists Combining the spark of innovative ideas with the fuel of individual entrepreneurship gives us hope that we can break the regulatory fist of command and control and replace it with a greener invisible hand. —Terry Anderson and Donald Leal, 2001 Out of the 1960s came some of the first attempts at an antistatist -friendly environmental philosophy. Stewart Brand was a counterculture wunderkind with graduate training in ecology, a strong libertarian streak, and a penchant for grand visions, and his environmentalism was decidedly different from the old-school agenda of conservation and preservation . For the enigmatic Brand—an anticommunist ex-serviceman who supported the war in Vietnam as well as a counterculture activist—government could not be trusted to save the environment or improve the lives of its residents. Instead, he put his faith in a grassroots do-it-yourself ethic that eagerly embraced small-scale technology and regarded things like wilderness preservation as secondary goals at best and misanthropic distractions at worst. Inspired by figures like E. F. Schumacher and Buckminster Fuller, Brand established the Point Foundation and published the legendary Whole Earth Catalog to spread the gospel of appropriate technology, mindful consumption , and individual, not governmental, responsibility for living light on the planet.1 Historian Ted Steinberg links the current-day “green capitalism” of Paul Tending Nature 115 Hawken, Amory Lovins, Thomas Friedman, and the like to Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, but they are only part of its parentage. A century ago in Chicago, urban activists argued that the city’s waste and pollution problems should be solved by methods as profitable to local businesses as they were rational, a view challenged by others who argued that such reform ought to put people before profits. In the 1950s Resources For the Future was among the first groups to explore the potential of market incentives in protecting scarce resources, and today “green capitalism” quickens the pulse of many a business-minded environmentalist. The rise of free-market environmentalism in the 1970s, however, marked the first attempt to forge a broad environmental philosophy consistent with American conservative/ libertarian political principles. How successful it has been, or ever can be, is a matter of debate, to put it mildly. Critics have hammered it mercilessly, most of its prescriptions have never been tested against real-world environmental ills, and its advocates remain at the fringes of American environmental politics. But, effective or not, like Barry Goldwater and conservative antifluoridationists, free-market environmentalists exemplify the fascinating ways in which antistatism and environmentalism affected each other in postwar America.2 Fundamental to free-market environmentalism is the idea that regulatory approaches to environmental problems have been a disaster, not only by failing to protect the environment but also by wasting taxpayers’ money, alienating those subject to regulations, and unduly restricting their rights. The federal government has been especially bad at managing public lands, so it follows that both taxpayers and the environment alike would be better served by an approach that abandons “command and control” regulation and government management as much as possible and replaces them with well-defined, defensible, and transferable property rights, market incentives , and common law.3 Human beings are inherently selfish, free-marketers argue, and are motivated primarily by what they perceive to be their own interests, which are usually financial in nature. They also act based on the relative quality of “information” they acquire about the choices before them; how they act is a function of their perceived interests weighed against the discernible costs and benefits of their various options. The best way to acquire information on costs and benefits is in the marketplace, where prices serve as an objective yardstick for self-interested humans to decide which activity, action, or 116 Tending Nature resource would best serve them. In other words, incentives and information are what matter for altering human behavior, and the problem with government is that it tries to play the role of an objective good guy acting in the name of the public welfare. Because government operates outside the market and rarely suffers directly from the consequences of its decisions, as a private individual or company would, its incentives are “distorted.” Thus government necessarily makes all kinds of environmental decisions that are neither economically rational nor environmentally sound. Instead, it is among individuals in the free market where incentives, information, and environmental values will best be aligned, and to recognize this, say...

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