Environmentalism and the Austrian Response
If, in modern discourse, there are certain subjects that draw the great minds from both economics and philosophy to the same debate, then as a student majoring in both economics and philosophy, I am in a unique position to examine this debate. Recently the philosophy of environmentalism has experienced a surging popularity and the tenets of this philosophy have begun to affect popular opinion, government policy, and the marketplace. To Austrian economists, the environmentalist philosophy represents the gravest existent threat to mankind. To environmentalists, the free market individualism supported by Austrian economists is a threat to the entire world. Rarely have two philosophical and economic viewpoints been so diametrically opposed.
In order to compare and contrast these two opposing worldviews, we must begin with their foundational assumptions. If a common premise can be found, an examination of the philosophies’ differing understandings of that premise may prove fruitful.
All philosophies have unspoken premises at their foundation. These are the underlying assertions which one must, as a rule, accept in order to understand the more complex formulations of the philosophy. These premises are usually taken on their face; they are presumed by the practitioners of the philosophy to be obvious (not requiring explanation or support), or sometimes even axiomatic (so fundamental as to not necessitate any support at all.)
Environmentalism, according to Scott F. Aikin, an environmentalist philosopher, “is not unique in having unquestioned assumptions driving whole research programs.”(Aikin, 2008)However, he continues, environmentalism is unique in its consensus on a number of key “issues.” What follows is a list of the premises of the environmentalist philosophy:
“…that nature is valuable, that human failure to recognize that value is bad, and that the promotion of human awareness and respect for nature is good. At issue for the most part in the area is the nature of environmental value, how humans fail to recognize it, and the prospects for promoting human acknowledgment and respect for it.”(Aikin, 2008)
The most important assertion, of course, is the first listed by Aikin, that “nature is valuable.”
This is not a revolutionary assertion at all. It’s intuitive, readily accessible to the most uneducated of laymen. Nature is, in a sense, the source of man’s nourishment, his food and water, the materials with which he builds shelter, the electricity he uses to light his home, the rubber in the tires of his vehicle, the fuel which propels it, and on and on. Even the air he breathes is ‘natural.’ In fact, the fate of a man outside nature is the fate of man in space without a spacesuit: certain death.
That nature is in some way valuable—this is the premise which Austrians and environmentalists hold in common. Since the tenets of environmentalism seem to follow from this premise more readily than the tenets of Austrian economics, why do Austrians oppose environmentalists? Are Austrian economists irrational?
The answers lie in the (real) question. The point of contention between Austrians and environmentalists is not, “Is nature valuable?” but is, instead, “Is nature intrinsically valuable?”
Environmentalists answer “Yes!” They believe that things in nature, whether plants, or animals, rocks or sunsets, are valuable in and of themselves. Even when all men are dead and gone, an idyllic pasture and the sheep that graze on it still have value. According to environmentalist Elisa Aaltola, “Animals are not only valuable instrumentally or indirectly, but in themselves.”(Aaltola, 2005) Using the fundamental assertion of environmentalism as a base, Aaltola proceeds to examine the various approaches men could use to include lions, dogs, tigers, bears, and bacteria in the realm of ethics—even examining various hypothetical situations in which the negative rights of animals supersede the negative rights of men.
The view of nature as valuable in itself also leads environmentalists to the complementary premise that man is in the process of destructive consumption. We have, after all, a limited amount of resources like oil and coal and iron, which nature has provided for us and which we cannot create. Every act of consumption reduces the supply of nature-given resources and also destroys a thing which was innately valuable as it was. So man is constantly, in every act of survival, destroying the intrinsic values around him. According to Nadivah Greenberg:
“Consumption is a profoundly critical aspect of environmental depletion and degradation. Social norms and behavior regarding consumption are integrally linked to a smorgasbord of manmade[sic] environmental issues including fossil fuel dependence, global warming, the disposal of production-process and household waste, and clean water and skies, to name but a few. To put this differently, consider the following: what man-made environmental changes arenot due to consumption?”(Greenberg, 2006)
Greenberg betrays his unthinking conviction that nature is intrinsically valuable by assuming here that man-made environmental changes are automatically “degradation”—that is to say, destructive--and then continuing on to characterize consumption as wrong because it is supposedly the main reason for our destruction of the sovereign, intrinsically valuable natural world.
So the quandary of environmentalism is that, while environmentalists see any act of man to change nature as destructive and evil, man must change nature to some extent simply by existing, even if the sole measure of the change he affects is the disruption of grains of sand as he walks into the sea to drown himself in a sacrifice for the good of Mother Earth.
To the question of whether nature is intrinsically valuable, Austrian economists answer a resounding “No!” According to Carl Menger, nature only has value to man. If not for man nothing would have “useful value.” (Menger, 1950) A statement of a thing’s value implies that there is “someone who values,” and this someone is man.
In order for a thing to become a good and thus have value for man, it must meet four prerequisites: first, a human need must exist. Second, the thing must be capable of contributing to the satisfaction of that need. Third, humans must recognize that the good can satisfy their need, and fourth, they must have “command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need.” Apart from those four prerequisites, nothing in nature has any value at all. (Menger, 1950)
This supposition, that a thing’s value is inherent in man’s valuation and not in the thing itself, is verifiable, according to Reisman. He points out that the resources we use have actually become resources due to discoveries made by man. (Reisman, 2002) Prior to the last century, uranium, for example, was not considered a valuable good. In the Stone Age, iron deposits were not considered valuable. Only when man gained sufficient knowledge to use these resources to satisfy his needs did they become valuable.
According to the Austrians, natural resources are created by man. When man discovers the useful properties of a thing and gains the power over it sufficient to direct it to his purposes, he creates a valuable resource or good. So, according to Reisman, what nature provides man is not a coal deposit in West Virginia, or an oil deposit in Saudi Arabia, but “matter and energy—matter in the form of all the chemical elements both known and as yet unknown, and energy, in all of its various forms.” (Reisman, 2002) Only the limits of human knowledge and power, according to Reisman, keep us from counting the entire universe, or at the very least, the entire planet, as our pool of natural resources. And since every generation begins with all the knowledge of the previous generations and then adds to it, human knowledge and power over nature can only expand—there is no end to the extent of resources we can bring under our command to satisfy our needs.
In perhaps his most insightful refutation of environmentalism, Reisman points out that the only thing destroyed by our “degradation” of nature is the imaginary intrinsic value of things imbued in them by environmentalists. Thanks to the law of physics which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed,
“Apart from what has been lost in a few rockets, the quantity of every chemical element in the world today is the same as it was before the Industrial Revolution. The only difference is that, because of the Industrial Revolution, instead of lying dormant, out of man’s control, the chemical elements have been moved about, as never before, in such a way as to improve human life and well-being. For instance, some part of the world’s iron and copper has been moved from the interior of the earth, where it was useless, to now constitute buildings, bridges, automobiles, and a million and one other things of benefit to human life.” (Reisman, 2002)
This analysis has shown how decidedly different two philosophies can be, even when the basis of the difference is seemingly semantic. Environmentalists end up viewing all the things that we do for survival as inherently destructive, and Austrians end up viewing nature as merely a collection of tools for satisfying the needs of men. For Austrians, every act of man to change nature for his survival represents an improvement of the environment, not a destructive act. For environmentalists, every man or woman who acts to change the environment without due regard for the intrinsic values being disturbed by such an action is committing a grave sin against Mother Nature. How the reader feels about this particular dichotomy will, of course, depend upon his reading of the premise: “Nature is valuable.”
References
Aikin, Scott. 2008. The Dogma of Environmental Revelation. Ethics & the Environment 13, (2): 23-34. Via Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.libsrv.wku.edu/
Aaltola, Elisa. 2005. Animal Ethics and Interest Conflicts. Ethics & the Environment10, (1): 19-48. Via Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.libsrv.wku.edu/
Greenberg, Nadivah. 2006. Shop Right: American Conservatisms, Consumption, and the Environment. Global Environmental Politics 6, (2): 85-111. Via Project Muse,http://muse.jhu.edu.libsrv.wku.edu/
Menger, Carl. 1950. Principles of Economics. Accessed in the online library ofhttp://www.mises.org, 2009.
Reisman, George. 2002. Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises. The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 5, (2): 3-15. Via The Ludwig Von Mises Institute, http://www.mises.org/