Techniques & Strategies in Environmental Conservation & Protection, General & Miscellaneous Environmental Policies, Environmental Conservation & Protection Policy, Humanity - Relationship with Nature

Down to earth II

Name: Down to earth II
Author: Matt Ridley
ISBN: 9780255363839

by Matt Ridley

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Overview

Much conventional wisdom about the environment is plain wrong. Acid rain has not destroyed forests, global warming is not inevitable, and the world is getting better, not worse, at feeding itself.Yet the environmentalists almost always peddle certainty and consensus. They also seem to have an instinctive bias against democratic solutions. Like any firm in a competitive market, green pressure groups are fighting for market share of media attention and donations. This, not concern for the truth, dictates many of their priorities. Environmental activists enjoy unrivalled access to politicians and bureaucrats because they demand more centralisation and regulation, enhancing the political bureaucracy. Yet history shows that local, individual and free-market solutions to environmental problems work, and government solutions make the problems worse. The British government has abandoned nationalisation of the economy, yet it wtill pursues stalthy nationalisation by designation and regulation of the environment with the fervour of Gosplan. The National Lottery, the Environment Agency, the Red Deer Commission, English Heritage - all have been used to tighten the State's grip, and loosen the individual's incentives for conserving the environment. Environmentalism is increasingly a besuited, desk-bound and paper-swamped profession, in which marketing specialists, lawyers and administrators succeed at the expense of true naturalists. It need not be like this. New technology and free trade can, for example, replace inefficient carbon-rich fuels with efficient hydrogen-rich ones, and extensive, land-hungry agriculture with intensive agriculture that leaves more space for nature. Those who love nature should recognise heavy government as the problem, not the solution.