For The New Atlantis, Ronald Bailey makes the case that economic interests, when pursued under a system of liberty, will not adversely affect the environment, that “liberty and a flourishing natural environment reinforce one another, the good of one encouraging the good of the other.”
Human activity is remaking the face of the Earth: transforming and polluting the landscape, warming the atmosphere and oceans, and causing species to go extinct. The orthodox view among ecologists is that human liberty — more specifically economic activity and free markets — is to blame. For example, the prominent biologist-activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University recently argued in a British science journal that the environmental problems we face are driven by “overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption.” The Ehrlichs urge the “reduction of the worship of ‘free’ markets that infests the discipline” of economics.
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