Environmentalism as a social movement — страница 5

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George in the 1870s, have argued that taxes on income and profits represent taxes on productivity, innovation and creativity and that we should rather tax land rents and externalities such as pollution, consumption of fossil fuels and road congestion. Environmental property rights offer a means to shift taxation from "goods" to "bads" and rents. One example of free market attempt to protect the environment is The Nature Conservancy organization. It has been successful in protecting many sensitive, ecologically important places by simply purchasing them, although this practice has met with controversy in some areas. In some cases the lands are donated or sold to government agencies for management, while in others the Nature Conservancy itself manages these

preserves. Billionaire Ted Turner has a similar private program that has seen him buy up tens of thousands of acres of wilderness around the United States. There are a number of arguments against free-market environmentalism: Historically, Tort Law has been of limited efficacy for confronting environmental problems. According to the World Bank, "tort law, based as it is on the protection of individual rights and the need to prove specific injury, has not been a significant means of preventing environmental degradation." [5] Similarly, in "Law in Environmental Decision-Making" legal scholar Jenny Steele notes that in respect to protection of the environment, "a number of historical studies have assessed the extent of tort's impact in this respect, to

generally critical effect." [6] In the environmental law textbook, "Environmental Protection", Sue Elworth and Jane Holder argue that the most significant limitation of common law, including tort law "was, and continues to be that the protection of private property is the rationale of private law and its motivation...Environmental protection may be effected through the protection of property rights. But private law is said to act only to protect the individualized self-interested claim, which considerably constrains legal action. The main doubt about the ability of private law to provide an appropriate means of protecting the environment is that environmental problems demand collective action, there is therefore some resistance to the idea that individual

rights might contribute to collective progress towards environmental protection." [7] Class action, however, is every bit as capable of direct tort-based restitution as individual legal action. Not all aspects of the public domain are easily "privatisable" in practice. It may be impossible to establish property rights on things like air and water that circulate the globe, so stopping air pollution or global warming on an individual basis would be very difficult. Coasian environmentalists often support carbon trading schemes advocated by other environmentalist movements. The US Clean Air Act of 1990, for instance, set up a system of emissions trading for sulfur dioxide. The Kyoto protocol also seeks to establish a system of emissions trading for carbon dioxide and

other greenhouse gases. Rothbardians reject government-imposed emissions trading schemata, and instead maintain that pollution is by definition a matter of Lockean property rights being violated, and hence should be handled as a subject of individual or class action tort, as any other invasion of property. As long as there is an aggressor and a victim, there is a tort. Some believe that the conservation of endangered species is not necessarily achievable using the free market, especially where there is little economic value in the species in question. For example: there might be only limited profit to be made from a piece of land by maintaining it as the habitat of a rare beetle, whereas alternative economic uses for that land (which might be deleterious to the welfare of the

beetle) - such as building a parking lot on it - might yield a greater profit. Regardless of the broader ecological importance of the beetle, it is much more likely that the landowner will prioritize short-term profits to be gained from development, rather than a long-term benefit which may be of comparably little (perhaps even imperceptible on the surface) benefit to himself. Thus, threatened or endangered species could be lost by relying on the willingness of individual landowners to take a loss in order to protect them. A related philosophical objection is that free-market environmentalism is entirely anthropocentric and ignores the "innate" value of nature outside of human perception. (see ecocentrism). But even in the world of politics, someone must see and place a