Letters to the editor.

• Position: Letter to the editor

Gus diZerega writes:

I read Robert Nelson's "Economics and Environmentalism: Belief Systems at Odds" in the summer 2012 issue with great interest. I respond now as a longtime Hayek scholar who admires markets as spontaneous orders and is also religious and an environmentalist. I have a stake in every group Nelson discusses. The gulf he describes is not as unbridgeable as he suggests and, more important, is located elsewhere and obscured in his analysis.

Environmentalism and Religion

Nelson describes environmentalism as opposed to the economic position that nature is simply a fund of resources available for human use. Environmentalists think nature has value over and above its utility to human beings and that these values should sometimes trump its utility.

This view is almost universal in human history. I think it is found in every religion on the planet, save some Protestant traditions. Within Christianity, orthodoxy even describes nature as a dimension of God, not simply as His creation.

Nelson cites Bron Taylor's Dark Green Religion as an example of environmentalism as secular religion. Taylor takes an insight common among humankind for as long as we have records and emphasized by environmentalists of every sort and places it in a secular framework. It is the insight about nature's value, not Taylor's particular view of it, that gives environmentalism its power.

Nelson also argues that environmentalism is a kind of secular Calvinism, disparaging material well-being as "making things worse" for depraved humans, who are a "cancer" on the world. Some environmentalists do fit this description. Most do not.

Consider Aldo Leopold, perhaps the most influential thinker among American environmentalists. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold describes the widespread public dismay when the last passenger pigeon died. Here, he writes, is "something new under the sun": beings who care about other beings of no utility to them. No more powerful empirical description of what distinguishes human beings from the rest of nature exists anywhere. And it is good. His view is hardly a Calvinist-flavored description of human depravity.

Economics and Religion

Nelson equates economics with the "religion" of progress, with its many expressions from Marx to Progressives to modern free-market advocates. But here again I think he confuses a part with a whole.

Free markets emerge from people's contractually exchanging property rights. These rights do not define themselves, and their content must come from outside of economics. Property rights define fields of possible relationships that owners may enter into with others and with the property owned. As such, a property right reflects a moral view of what human beings should legitimately be able to do. I can own my cat, but I may not own a person. I once could, however. I can buy his labor time, but what that purchase actually amounts to changes over time. I can cut up my sheet of paper, but...