A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review.  Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

Ryssdal contrasted Brand’s earlier support for the back to the land movement with his current belief that big cities are better for the environment.

“Not only big cities, but big slums … that’s how [poor people in the developing world] are getting out of poverty.  They’re emptying out a lot of the subsistence farms that have been tough on the landscape all over the world, moving into towns for opportunity, building jobs for each other.  They’re also moving up what’s called the energy ladder, toward more and better grid electricity.  By and large the cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

On his support for biotech crops, Brand said,

“Already, the crops we have now, the herbicide-tolerant and the insect-resistant crops … [are] getting what amounts to higher yields. You can raise more food on less land, and all of that is good for ecology in general and the climate particularly.”

Challenged that critics call them Frankenfoods, Brand replied,

“The idea there was that Dr. Frankenstein was doing something against nature, and that somehow the genetically engineered food crops are against nature.  And as a biologist, I’m just baffled by that line of argument because agriculture has been in that sense against nature for 10,000 years. That we’re finally able to do more precise tuning of the crops is a huge gain, not a loss.”

In honor of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, it’s worth recalling a mention of Ostrom’s work by a previous Economics Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith, then at George Mason Univeristy, whom I interviewed for CEI’s newsletter, the Planet (then Monthly Planet). Here’s the 2002 Economics Nobel Prize winner, on the future 2009 winner:

One of the best pieces of work on public choice was done by Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Governing the Commons. She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

The entire interview is available in two parts. (Turn to page six of each issue; the Ostrom discussion is on page nine of part two.)

UPDATE: Vernon Smith comments on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Forbes today:

Previous Nobel laureates such as Ronald Coase (1991), William Vickrey (1996) and Leonid Hurwicz (2007) have also made significant contributions to investigating these big questions, but Ostrom brings a distinct style in applying her skill in different methodologies. She blends field and laboratory empirical methods, economic and game theory, the really important ingredient of scientific common sense, and she constantly challenges her own understanding by looking at new potentially contrary evidence and designing new experiments to challenge her understanding of the emergent historical rules and the theory used to explicate them.

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, a new book by British author Tristram Stuart, will soon be hitting shelves in the UK and the US. It’s is a detailed indictment of the massive amount of edible food that industrialized countries throw away, both in the factory and at home. “In America, around 50 per cent of all food is wasted,” the Telegraph summarizes, “while over here [in the UK], we dump 20 million tons of food every year. Put all this together and—to make a wearisomely predictable but inescapable point—you could easily feed the world’s hungry several times over.”

The Movement Behind the Man

Both the book and its author have close ties to a new kind of conservationism, colloquially known as “freeganism.” Members of the movement cut down on waste—and make a point at the same time—by living partially or entirely off of food they find in other people’s trash. Lars Eighner described the practice in his famous essay “On Dumpster Diving,” and freegans like Stuart have turned that efficiency into advocacy. The Guardian described their message: “If we waste less food, we’ll need less land to grow it on, and hence will cut down fewer trees; we’ll use less water to irrigate that land and less carbon to transport and process the food it produces.”

One man's trash is another man's lunch.

That message is catching on. A Welsh millionaire and professional sculptor has taken up the freegan lifestyle, inspired by his experiences with discarded electronics in Japan. A new website, freegan.info, notifies the community about big scavenging opportunities like college move-outs.

The relentless drive for efficiency has motivated some excellent innovations. Stuart himself claims to make cottage cheese from leftover custard donuts. Food banks have expanded, particularly in the US, to help grocery stores donate their unsold extras to the homeless. At the same time, Stuart leaves some questions unanswered. Waste criticizes stores and factories for overstocking their products, but as the Financial Times points out, overstocking can make good economic sense. How can what looks like a complete waste of private property be the daily routine of a profitable, competitive industry?

Questions like that aren’t particularly important to culture and lifestyle, and they’ve rightly taken a back seat to more pressing issues, like how to make cottage cheese. Inevitably, though, freeganism and other conservation movements are growing out of private life and into public policy. In the halls of government, those nagging questions of efficiency are critically important, and the economic underpinnings of this cultural movement will demand some scrutiny.

As it turns out, Stuart makes a common but crucial mistake. He ignores the invisible. With all the focus on obvious waste—dumpsters, landfills, and so on—it’s easy to forget that our most precious resource is something we never find in those places. And no, I’m not talking about air.

The Question Restated

Paying less for a better product.

When we recall the industrial successes that have shaped modern life, we usually think of new inventions—plastics, automobiles, and so on. The greatest victories of industry, however, came not from new products but from making old products cheaper. Most of what we consume today—food, clothes, housing, refrigeration, steel, light, and so on—has been available for centuries. Our products are usually nicer, but the biggest difference is the price.

It’s not immediately obvious why our goods should be so cheap. After all, the nails I buy in a hardware store are made with machines vastly more expensive than the forges and hammers blacksmiths once used. They’re also shipped farther, and their quality is more consistent. By all rights they should cost more than they used to, but instead they cost orders of magnitude less. Why?

In Nature, Much Goes To Waste

Although a wire nail requires more machinery, electricity, and gasoline than the cut nails and hand-made nails that came before it, it demands much less of one crucial ingredient: human effort.

The most important resource in the world is us. Our labor and our time. Our blood, sweat, and tears. Things that still take a lot of human effort to make are expensive. Nearly everything else is cheap, because we’ve figured out how to get it without working so hard.

What capitalism has done for you lately.

If we look at the history of America’s GDP per capita, a rough estimate of how much stuff the average American made each year, we can see that process in motion. The typical worker in 1790 had a harder job with longer hours, yet he produced forty times less than he would today. Forty times less. Compared to the modern workforce, early American workers wasted more than 98% of their time and energy.

As human effort has become more productive, it has also become more expensive. Many early conservation practices—using the entire buffalo, so to speak—no longer make sense now that the proverbial buffalo is cheap and the labor to process it is expensive. This is what Tristram Stuart is missing when he criticizes our overstocked grocery stores and factories. True, their garbage is red ink on the balance sheet, but getting rid of it requires learning more about what customers will buy and applying that knowledge at every stage of production. That costs precious time and effort, which are too valuable to waste on a problem that overstocking solves so cheaply.

Once again, the answer to our question is Henry Hazlitt’s most important lesson. The challenge of economics is to mind all costs, both the obvious, like a pile of garbage, and the invisible, like an hour misspent.  Human effort is our dearest resource, and we should be happy to spare it even at great material expense. Conservation movements all too often neglect these human costs, and if our governments make the same mistake, we’ll find ourselves a good deal poorer with no idea why.