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.”

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.

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.

Despite claims to the contrary, profits don’t cause microbes. And it’s not big “industry” farming that is the culprit. Small farms and family farmers can have just as much difficulty—if not more–eliminating pathogens.

E. coli just happens. And you can’t stop it. Deer, “wild” pigs, mountain lions, every kind of mouse, rat, ground squirrel, and whatever wild animal can carry virulent microbes. Same with irrigation water. Same with birds flying over the fields. And the barren buffer strips that some have proposed to keep these animals away don’t halt anything; they simply lead to water pollution.

Unfortunately, such foolish “wisdom” undermines good conservation efforts. For example, it discourages conservation at California vineyards. In the past, some have gone out of their way to use tail ponds to collect irrigation and rain water–and any dissolved pollutants–and then pump it back up hill for more irrigation. These tail ponds themselves become wetland habitats. Similarly, vineyards in the Temecula area, Viansa Winery, and others pioneered placing hawk roosting and nesting structures on their property to attract birds of prey to help control rodents, as well as placing nesting boxes for owls and falcons. Yet now the conventional “wisdom” is that such conservation efforts contribute E. Coli and should be dispensed with. In reality, such policies are surely more foolish than wise.

Photo: Escherichia coli bacterium, courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library.

For more detailed critique of the National Parks idea, see work by RJ Smith, such as this testimony, where he says:

For decades we have known about the deplorable fact that the National Park Service was far more interested in following a path of ever more land acquisition, and that caring for the lands they had was at best an afterthought. The administration of President Ronald Reagan and Interior Secretary James Watt attempted, mainly unsuccessfully, to stop additional land acquisition until the government could demonstrate that it could be a good steward of the lands it already owned.

Despite their beauty, the National Parks have not been an unalloyed good.  For the very reason that they explicitly reject private stewardship, they may even count as one of America’s worst ideas.

The last official record for Arizona was 1940. And the falcons began disappearing rapidly by the first decade of the 1900s. In 1887, there were five nesting pairs at Ft. Huachuca alone. But from 1896 to to 1899 not a single falcon was found there by another top ornithologist based at the fort.

So these birds were gone by 1940 in Arizona and probably by the 1950s in New Mexico and Texas. That was long before the widespread application of pesticides–especially in the Southwest. Obviously they had been declining and disappeared before the onset of the pesticide era.

Photo source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service public use digital library.

To his credit, it is not about whales.

Unfortunately, most of his analysis is on a similar intellectual plane. As PERC’s Terry Anderson recently pointed out on 20/20, the best way to save endangered species is to eat them.  Cows, chickens, and pigs will never be threatened species as long as we need them for food.

Rising demand for buffalo meat has given entrepreneurs ample incentive to boost that endangered animal’s numbers. It works on land. Why not at sea, too?

This story is quite ironic for two reasons. First is the green’s push for windmills is futile. It won’t save the world from global warming even if all the greens dire predictions about global warming were true, which of course is a huge assumption. Second, the greens are finally being caught in their own snares. CEI has shown over the years how the Endangered Species Act had been used to ensnare property owners all around the nation, costing billions of dollars, while it has achieved little to actually help species.

It’s time to look for new approaches in both areas. See globalwarming.org for information on that issue. On the species front, a much better approach would be to make species an asset not a liability by allowing people to own them and by removing punitive aspects of the law. Currently the act punishes anyone for doing anything (including farming, ranching, or construction) that might affect endangered species on their property. Accordingly, no one wants to have these species on their property! So rather than cultivate them, they make property less habitable for them. Even conservation efforts can be considered a crime. The punitive regulatory approach of the law is not good for species and not good for people. We made this case many years ago, but lawmakers continue to get it wrong.

Photo coursey of Raymond Shobe.

For example, when people have more spare change, they donate more to conservation groups that can privately manage lands to help save species. Wealth creation also means demand for better, cleaner energy sources. Despite what many greens seem to think, modern fossil fuels used in wealthy nations represent an environmental improvement over burning wood or things like animal dung as is done in developing nations.  In fact, rudimentary fuel sources create serious air pollution problems that have made respiratory illnesses a major cause of death in poor countries. Wealth also means the development of technologies that enhance our ability and will to control emissions, provide proper disposal of wastes, and purify drinking water. (For more on how poverty is bad for health and the environment  see here)

Ironically, most environmental activist groups seem to think that wealth creation—and profits—are the cause of environmental decline. Hence they fight these forces, opposing things like privatization of water because someone might make a profit. But their policies leave the world poor and lacking in things like clean water. And they also fight a main engine of growth: free trade. The failure of genuine environmentalists to understand this fundamental reality about wealth undermines their own cause because wealth depleting policies harm the environment.

Unfortunately, environmentalists not only misguided ones. Environmentalists fight wealth in the name of the environment, and lawmakers fight wealth in the name of the economy, as our stimulus policies reveal.

See CEI’s Environmental Source for more information on environmental quality issues.

While Earth Day has previously focused on traditional concerns like pollution and recycling, we think it’s also a perfect time to think about the challenges human beings themselves face around the world – like hunger, disease and poverty – and the many ways human ingenuity has helped drive them back.

Many thanks to CEI Studio Producer Drew Tidwell for his excellent work on the video.

Another Washington Post story suggests that “sustainability” –whatever it may mean — still can stir the cold hearts of capitalist managers.  Utopians have long been distressed by the differential working conditions around the world.  Poverty does have less pleasant impacts than affluence.  The problem is that associated with all egalitarian policies.

Our desire to improve the plight of the poor too often merely cuts away the rungs on the ladder out of poverty.

The environment is valuable and valued by many.  The difficulty is that we have relegated its “protection” and “management” to bureaucrats - and suppressed the evolution of property rights in environmental resources (wildlife, groundwater, fisheries).  These resources remain as common property resources - and we experience repeatedly the Tragedy of the Commons.  However, the most distressing aspect of the debate over environmental policy,  is that the view gaining prevalence from the Progressive side is decidedly anti-human, and anti-technology at its core.  

There are many features of the growing anti-human-relevant-science campaign.  

•  One is the selection of the fearful – the Malthusian wing of this movement that sees “technology” as change, as a move into an untested future and, thus, to be slowed if not banned.  These people champion the Precautionary Principle – a totally Luddite rule.  Has there ever been a market innovation (one that we hoped people would buy) that created more harm than good?
• The Economic Rational wing, which has championed “comparative effectiveness” and so on.  After all, they argue, it would be foolish and wasteful to approve a new drug or device that was not “cost effective for the median individual.”  A wonderful capture of the rational language but, of course, that approach argues that we can know in advance that a specific innovation will or will not prove beneficial (the French minitel system comes to mind).  Most – all – innovations appear first as clunky, expensive toys or (for a very few) necessities.  The purchasers are the ‘Early Adopters’ – often rich or eager to “be the first on their block.”  However, the freedom to create an infant market for a product that would be too expensive and too inefficient for most people made it possible for the thousand dollar 1940s television sets with tiny blurry pictures and very low quality to become the few hundred 34-inch flat screen marvels of today.  We will suffer in many areas for this loss but the greatest losses may be in the medical innovation area.
• The Government Research Must be Dominant school is characterized by those who sought on “scientific” grounds for removal of any restraints on stem cell research – not because such research was banned (private parties were largely free), but rather because it meant that their approved source of scientific funding – the government – was kept from the field.  Indeed, this group is much more ambitious – their effort to drive the market from the marketplace of ideas is one of the most threatening themes.  Research that has been funded by a company, individuals who have done consulting or worked for a company, groups who’ve received support from a company – all inherently more suspect that a government-funded scientist.  One can expect that such individuals and the research work they do will soon have to wear a yellow C (for corporate) patch on their clothes, appended on every page of their journal articles.  
• The Science Good, Technology Bad sub-class.  This refers to the observations of Joel Mokyr and others.  That it has been the close link between (largely) non-economic driven science and (largely) economic-driven technology that transformed the slow progress of most of mankind’s history to the exponential growth we have experienced in the last several centuries.  Brilliant individuals have popped up from time to time throughout history.  They expand man’s knowledge and some small use is made of that knowledge to improve man’s welfare.  In the Industrial Revolution, however, the growth of economic freedom created a more receptive and attentive audience for such knowledge.  Electricity would be discovered and Edison and others would immediately begin to think, “What is it good for?”  Then, in turn, they would go back to the science and note – “this worked OK but … why?” and those questions would both prompt and interest the science community in expanding knowledge in directions more likely to prove human beneficial.  The resulting positive “feed back loop” is critical to progress. This group would sever that link — Science Good, Technology Bad!!

As I have stated above, the environment is valuable, and its preservation is valuable to many.  Therefore, at CEI, one of the things we have tried to do in our work is not ridicule the environmentalists or argue that environmental values are irrelevant.  We simply make the point that the Malthusian goals - less people, less consumption, less technology - is far less inspiring that the view of mankind as the Ultimate Resource.  

I am proud of the work we have done, but we have much work to do to improve our marketing skills.  The other side of this debate seems rather adept at garnering popularity, and is much better funded.  My message to those who may share our views is that we needed to find ways to create a more effective and powerful alliance between the entrepreneurial elements of the business community and the free market community.  We face many problems.  Keep up the good work – and help find the scientist-entrepreneurs who have not succumbed to this insanity.  There must be a handful of people who recognize that the politicization of science by conservatives was stupid, but the politicization of science by the Luddites is suicidal.

Our press release described ways people might celebrate the achievements of humanity such as eating diner, seeing a film, driving around, keeping the heat on in your home—all things that Earth Hour celebrators, presumably, should be refraining from. In the cheekiest manner, we claimed that anyone not foregoing the use of electricity in that hour is, by default, celebrating the achievements of human beings. Needless to say, the enviros in the blogosphere didn’t take to kindly to our announcement.

Matthew Wheeland, an environmental journalist called the holiday “mind-blowingly strange” and pondered if Earth hour folks are including in their numbers people in countries that don’t have enough electricity to make the choice to turn out their lights. Of course, they don’t have the choice to acquire electricity whereas anyone can choose to stop using human technology if they wish.

In fact, one might even say that they are seething about it–lighting up the various green-oriented blogs with comments such as this sarcastic gem from Jon Petherbridge:

Human achievement hour. Another great idea. I’ll remember how great we all are as I watch the heat mirages rising from the surrounding hoods as my arm hangs out the window during my next July traffic jam.

Or maybe I’ll remember it the next time an American attack aircraft blows up a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least in that example we don’t have to feel bad for the dead Afghanis as they have a sexist culture that we are morally obligated to obliterate, quite literally if necessary. I reckon I’ll celebrate human achievement hour when everybody’s divorced or bisexual and drinking coca-cola in traffic jams on their way to work folding sandwiches for the lawyers and the bankers who we will worship for allowing us to support them by paying on our credit cards.

Go human achievement hour. Pile it on. Diversify, equalize, refinance and over qualify.

I’m feeling better already.

I love and will not give up my electric toothbrush.

They are also attempting to erase any attention directed at HAH, such as the Wikipedia article.

Of course, there are people out there who appreciate what we are trying to say. For example, Rajesh in India writes on his blog:

Coming from India where we routinely suffer power cuts due to mixed-market policies of the government, I found this post from The New Clarion fantastic…Lets use the wavelength of both light and philosophy to keep darkness at bay.

Green and private conservation are fine. We have no problem with an individual (or group) that wants to sit naked in the dark without heat, clothing, or light. Additionally, we’d have no problem with the group holding a pro-green technology rally. That’s their choice. But when this group stages a “global election” with the express purpose of influencing “government policies to take action against global warming,” we have every right as individuals to express our vote for the opposite

If our Human Achievement Hour is at all a dig against Earth Hour, it is so only by the fact that we are pointing out what Earth Hour truly is about: it isn’t pro-earth, it is anti-man and anti-innovation. So, on March 28^th I plan to continue “voting” for humanity by enjoying the fruits of man’s mind.

As this article over at the Ayn Rand Institute points out, the more “eco-friendly” you try to live, the more apparent the contradictions in that green philosophy become.

Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being–every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture–is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives comes from altering nature for our own benefit.

From the perspective of human life and happiness, a big “environmental footprint” is an enormous positive. This is why people in India and China are striving to increase theirs: to build better roads, more cars and computers, new factories and power plants and hospitals.

But for environmentalism, the size of your “footprint” is the measure of your guilt. Nature, according to green philosophy, is something to be left alone–to be preserved untouched by human activity. Their notion of an “environmental footprint” is intended as a measure of how much you “disturb” nature, with disturbing nature viewed as a sin requiring atonement. Just as the Christian concept of original sin conveys the message that human beings are stained with evil simply for having been born, the green concept of an “environmental footprint” implies that you should feel guilty for your very existence.

It should hardly be any surprise, then, that nothing you do to try to lighten your “footprint” will ever be deemed satisfactory. So long as you are still pursuing life-sustaining activities, whatever you do to reduce your impact on nature in one respect (e.g., cloth diapers) will simply lead to other impacts in other respects (e.g., water use)–like some perverse game of green whack-a-mole–and will be attacked and condemned by greens outraged at whatever “footprint” remains. So long as you still have some “footprint,” further penance is required; so long as you are still alive, no degree of sacrifice can erase your guilt.

The only way to leave no “footprint” would be to die–a conclusion that is not lost on many green ideologues. Consider the premise of the nonfiction bestseller titled “The World Without Us,” which fantasizes about how the earth would “recover” if all humanity suddenly became extinct. Or consider the chilling, anti-human conclusion of an op-ed discussing cloth versus disposable diapers: “From the earth’s point of view, it’s not all that important which kind of diapers you use. The important decision was having the baby.”

Environmentalists like talking about sustainability. The lifestyle that’s the most unsustainable is radical environmentalism.

During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne’s northern fringe, Warwick Spooner — whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze — criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council’s help or permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for the bushfire season. “We’ve lost two people in my family because you dickheads won’t cut trees down,” he said.

It’s called bushfire season for a reason: the bush catches fire. If you want to reduce the effects, you cut back the bush. Policies that stop this are criminally dangerous.

It’s a similar story here in the US. Every year wildfires cause more damage than they should because landowners are restricted from clearing land because of a variety of environmental policies. See here for the disturbing details of one such case from the 1990s. Here’s how I summarize the American approach to wildfires in my book:

When Californian farmers adjacent to the national forests found the kangaroo rat, which graces the Endangered Species List, on their property in the 1990s, they soon found that the rat had destroyed their livelihoods. They were unable to develop their properties in any way without paying a fine for every acre of land they owned, even if they only wished to develop a small portion of it and even if the rat habitat would be unaffected. So they sold their land to property developers, who were easily able to afford the fees. As a result, homes stood next to national forests where previously there had been a buffer zone of farmland.

Meanwhile, the forest service was unable to carry out controlled burns in those forests adjacent to the homes because the underbrush they wished to clear was also home to, you guessed it, the kangaroo rat. Even building a firebreak could get landowners into trouble under the Endangered Species Act. This problem was already apparent. After similar fires in 2003, California’s Blue Ribbon Fire Commission, created by then governor Gray Davis and whose members included Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein as well as state legislators of both parties, concluded that “habitat preservation and environmental protection have often conflicted with sound fire safety planning.”

Liberal environmentalist dogma, however, prevented any action being taken to ensure that sound fire safety planning was enabled, far less that logging companies be allowed to do their bit to protect landowners and the environment. Instead, the contradiction was allowed to stand and when the fires swept through California, the environmental “protections” of the Endangered Species Act led directly to the destruction of the very habitats and animals they were meant to save.

Congressmen should know about these problems and the best available solution. In September 2000, the late and much lamented Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage of Idaho, chair of the Forests and Forest Health Subcommittee of the House Resources Committee, held hearings on private conservationand the lessons the nation could learn from exemplary private landowners.

Skeet Burris, a South Carolina tree farmer and the American Tree Farm System’s “National Tree Farmer of the Year,” was asked if he practiced controlled burns on his private forestland. He replied that he did because it was necessary to protect the health of his pines and that fire was an integral part of the ecosystem of the southern pine forests. He said he burned about one third of his forest annually.

Chenoweth-Hage asked if, before he began his burns, he waited until there was a huge fuel build-up, a long drought, and an especially hot spell with low humidity and high winds. To some laughter, Burris responded that such a policy would be insane. When he was told that such conditions were characteristic of prescribed burns on the national forests, he explained that he couldn’t afford to take such risks.

His forests and home were all that he owned and that his children and grandchildren would inherit. Furthermore he couldn’t risk his controlled burn destroying his neighbors’ forests and homes because he would personally be held liable. There would be no taxpayers to foot the bill, no transfer to another forest, no early retirement on a taxpayer pension, no other golden parachutes. As the landowner he would personally bear the costs— and that drove his behavior.

As R.J. Smith says: “As long as man is part of nature, we can only have a sound and healthy environment by the exercise of caring stewardship and management. For guidance in that we must now look to the nation’s successful private conservationists.” Liberal environmentalism, on the other hand, has set the
forests ablaze.

Instead of repealing or reforming these regulations, the stimulus bill included $500 million for “wildland fire management.”

Photo credit: AP Photo/Mark Pardew, reproduced under Creative Commons License