Murray Rothbard's 1981 essay, "Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution," is predicated on the notion that any legal system consistent with a truly free society bars only those acts that involve either the use of force or the threat of the use of force against a person or his justly acquired property and that "justly acquired property" can, and often does, include a homesteaded easement to pollute in a certain way or to a certain extent.[1]

There are many questions that could benefit from an extrapolation of the conclusions Rothbard drew in this seminal essay. It is therefore particularly unfortunate that he did not have the opportunity to explore these areas further nor did he ever, as far as I am aware, offer a general assessment of the environmental movement itself from the libertarian perspective he so ably put forward in this and earlier papers on property rights and its relation to economic growth. While there is no question that Rothbard would have condemned most of the policy recommendations embraced by the leading environmental groups as inimical to a free society based on private property rights, he nowhere analyzed the rhetoric of the movement in terms of libertarian theory.

The following essay does not pretend to do more than partially fill this gap. It attempts to touch on one aspect of modern environmentalism and to examine it against the backdrop of the values associated with a truly liberal society. What I hope to do is to explore certain traits common to the rhetoric of the environmental movement that I find particularly inimical to rational discourse and that serve only to support untenable and fallacious conclusions and recommendations that, if accepted, would prove devastating to civilization. These center, first, around a profound misuse of the term "rights"; second, around the notion that men in primitive pre-technological societies live in harmony with the environment while modern man is antagonistic and destructive of nature's resources; and, finally, that technology itself is, by its very nature, toxic.

I. Rights

One of the more distasteful features of environmental rhetoric is the terminological confusion with which it is riddled, whereby certain grants of privilege are constantly confused with rights. The rights to which serious political discourse has traditionally referred are negatively conceived and refer to limitations on how governments may act towards their citizens or how citizens may act toward each other. This conception of rights is the one put forward in, among other documents, the Declaration of Independence, the American Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.[2] Rights so conceived do not require that others be forced to act in specific ways if I am to exercise my rights but only that they refrain from intervening in certain areas without my consent. Thus, my right to life does not entail that others are obligated to do everything within their power to keep me alive but only that they cannot kill me.

Unfortunately, environmentalists have a tendency to employ the term "rights," not in this negative manner but in its far more vulgar sense, to refer to some privilege that entails that others not refrain from acting, but positively act in certain ways. They are, of course, not alone in this. The last hundred years have witnessed a serious erosion in political discourse as politicians have increasingly invoked such terms as "liberty" and "rights" solely to elicit certain emotional responses in their hearers. This deterioration in political language has reached a point where it is now not uncommon to hear people speak of their "rights" to "higher education," to "quality health care," even to "truth in airline scheduling," and so on.[3] Environmental discourse, far from being immune to such imprecision, has embraced it. And environmentalists, especially those employed as government functionaries of one kind or another, regularly use the term to refer to privileges that entail an obligation on others to provide certain services. Thus, Principle 1 of the Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held at Stockholm in 1972 declared that "man has the fundamental right to … adequate conditions of life in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being."[4] Similarly, the 1987 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development refers to "the right of individuals to know and have access to current information on the state of the environment" and "the right to participate in decision making on activities likely to have a significant effect on the environment."[5]

Even when the term "rights" is employed by ecologists in what is seemingly its more traditional, negative sense, as, for example, when environmentalists write of "the right to live free from pollutants" it is often so used without any regard to the context in which these rights are situated. When one refers to "the right to a smoke-free environment," as numerous spokesmen of the anti-smoking campaign often do, surely it makes sense to ask "of just whose environment are we speaking?" While I might indeed have such a right to demand of others that they not smoke on my property, have I the same right when it comes to the property of others? But even put in such bald form, the majority of environmentalists would argue that, in most cases, I would indeed have such a right. Such rights obtain, they argue (and in this they are by no means alone), because most private property is not, in reality, private at all, since members of the public (either all members of the public, as is the case with, say, a department store, or certain specific members of the public, as is the case with a business office) are invited onto the property. By virtue of this fact, nominal private property is transmuted into commonly owned property, the disposal of which can justifiably be determined by political means. Indeed, most environmentalists have extended this notion of public ownership to the whole of the natural world. They write of the "common heritage of all humanity" and of "sharing the world's resources equitably."[6] It is as if each of us, when born, inherits our pro rata share of all the wealth of the world, the land and the oceans of the earth, and all that is on, above, or below it, without regard to the prevailing ownership of these resources. It is apparent that the term "right," as here used, designates something quite different from what is signified in the expressions "right to life," or "right to one's liberty." A "right" to a portion of the world's resources clearly obligates the civil authorities (and the population at large, who ultimately must fund the operations of the civil authorities) to certain positive acts. This is particularly true in this instance since one's "right" is, on examination, not an individual right at all, but rather a "collective" right (if such a perverse notion makes any sense at all) that, by its very nature, can be exercised only by some authority ostensibly representative of the collective.

The language of environmental science is particularly debased when the rights to which environmentalists refer pertain to non-humans. Even so eminent a jurist as William O. Douglas has referred to "the rights of nature,"[7] and this notion has been adopted by a host of other ecologists. These writers, in their attempt to emphasize the physical and biological interdependence of all life, have perverted the language of morals and politics to apply to all of nature, thus undermining all arguments that place man in a unique position with respect to the environment in which he lives.[8] As one ecologist has observed: "Humanity has no extraordinary moral claim or rights over the natural world."[9] Christopher Stone, Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, has proposed that "we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called 'natural objects' in the environment — indeed, to the natural environment as a whole."[10] The extension of rights to animals, it is argued, is nothing more than a continuation of the same movement that broadened the notion of rights to encompass all human beings, regardless of color or gender. Thus Peter Singer, one of the founders of the "animal liberation" movement and the person responsible for having first formulated the notion of "speciesism,"[11] writes that "the basic element — the taking into account of the interests of the being, whatever those interests may be — must, according to the principle of equality, be extended to all beings, black or white, masculine or feminine, human or nonhuman."[12] [13]

The "deep ecologists," of which Singer is a less extreme example, propose nothing less than that animals, plants, trees, even minerals, have rights that must be respected lest man violate the moral injunctions ultimately derived from natural law. Indeed, the extension of the ethical universe to such natural phenomena as mountains and rivers,[14] thus closes the circle with the most primitive forms of mysticism.[15] If we were to accept the claims put forward by what, in the movement, are called "the deep ecologists,"[16] that rights extend to all forms of life and, in some instances, to inanimate objects as well,[17] humanity would be frozen into inaction lest it trespass on the prerogatives of nature. What is particularly alarming is that this senseless conclusion, a clear reductio ad absurdum to most, is actually espoused by many prominent environmental spokesmen, whose antipathy for all human endeavor is one of the more repugnant aspects of their creed.[18] For these writers humanism is a term of derision,[19] which asserts the superiority of human life over animal and plant life and denies to non-human entities the rights that a properly construed morality dictates they possess.[20]

Lest it be supposed that an ardent emotional attachment to the world of nature is incompatible with an abhorrence for humankind, we would do well to remind ourselves that National Socialism also embraced both a comprehensive ideology and an extensive legislative program for the "protection of nature." Shortly after taking power the Nazi government sought to give legislative voice to the notion that modern capitalist society and its property relationships had uprooted man from his legitimate place in the natural, organic world. Laws aimed at protecting animals[21] and limiting hunting were soon followed by the law of 1 July 1935 for the protection of nature (Reichsnaturschutzgesetz). The preamble to the 1935 legislation, setting forth the rationale and intent of Nazi environmental legislation, displays the same romanticization of nature and disdain for the economic achievements of modern society that permeate current environmental literature.

Today as before, nature, in the forests and the fields, is an object of longing, joy and the means of regeneration for the German people.

Our native countryside has been profoundly modified with respect to its original state, its flora has been altered in many ways by the agricultural and foresting industries as well as by the unilateral reallocation of land and a monoculture of conifers. While its natural habitat has been diminishing, a varied fauna that brought vitality to the forests and the fields has been dwindling.

This evolution was often due to economic necessity. Today, a clear awareness has emerged as to the intellectual, but also economic, damages of such an upheaval of the German countryside….

The German government of the Reich considers it its duty to guarantee our fellow citizens, even the poorest among them, their share in the natural German beauty. It has, therefore, enacted the law of the Reich with a view toward protecting nature….[22]

"Protecting nature" was apparently perfectly compatible with a remorseless hatred of certain groups of humans,[23] particularly those, as Luc Ferry has pointed out, who were not rooted in the community, the "cosmopolites," whose heritage placed them outside the bounds of the social organism and who lacked connection with the soil. Ferry notes that

… the philosophical underpinnings of Nazi legislation often overlap with those developed by deep ecology, and this for a reason that cannot be underestimated; in both cases, we are dealing with a same romantic and/or sentimental representation of the relationship between nature and culture, combined with a shared revalorization of the primitive state against that of (alleged) civilization.[24]

II. The Myth of the Superiority of Primitive Communities over Technological Societies

Most ecologists, regardless of their other differences, agree that modern industrial society is environmentally destructive and spiritually empty while, on the other hand, pre-technological societies were far more able to live harmoniously with the environment. The mind of pre-technological man, these writers claim, is more attuned to compatible coexistence with the ecosystem than is the individuated, self-regarding mind of modern man. Man in primitive societies identify with the plants and animals around them, hold the land to be sacred, and are true ecologists.[25] Consider the following assertions made by some of the more popular environmental writers:

• "For the primal mind there is no break between humans and the rest of nature."[26]

• The deification of the earth "appears with such regularity … in every preliterate culture, that we may think of it as a basic, almost innate, human perception."[27]

• Tribal peoples "all share the affirmation that humans are part of a larger ecological community toward which they have certain responsibilities."[28]

No hard evidence is put forward to support these preposterous claims, which do little more than display the authors' immense ignorance of the complexity and range of differences in values and social structure that mark the huge number of disparate tribal societies.[29]

Martin Lewis, himself sympathetic to the goals embraced by the environmental movement, offers these statements as examples of the naive romanticization of primitive society in much ecological literature, which he describes as verging on "intellectual fraud."[30] Lewis advances abundant evidence that claims of this sort, far from having universal application to all primitive societies, in reality describe very few. Severe overhunting and overharvesting were the norm rather than the exception among tribal societies, many of which were highly destructive of nature.[31]

Consider the following example of this fanciful interpretation of pre-industrial society, whose conclusions tend to be embraced by most ecologists and which reflects the increasingly popular idea (fueled by ignorant and simple-minded depictions in the media) that all Native Americans regarded the environment with special veneration, with man and nature acting in balance and reciprocity, where the world was seen as a living being and where all living entities were respected. The article from which I quote appears in Environmental Ethics, the leading academic environmental journal, in 1990, and the following should give some indication of the conclusions put forward by the authors, Anne Booth and Harvey Jacobs:

Although they varied significantly between different cultures, Native American relationships with the natural world tended to preserve biological integrity within natural communities, and did so over a significant period of historical time. These cultures engaged in relationships of mutual respect, reciprocity, and caring with an Earth and fellow beings as alive and self conscious as human beings. Such relationships were reflected and perpetuated by cultural elements including religious belief a