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Free Marketeers on the Edge: a Response to McCoy and Atwood
Author(s) -
ORR DAVID W.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
conservation biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.2
H-Index - 222
eISSN - 1523-1739
pISSN - 0888-8892
DOI - 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2005.00214.x
Subject(s) - citation , library science , computer science
I appreciate the instruction in economics provided by Professors McCoy and Atwood and their efforts to fathom the deeper sources of my errors therein. If I understand them correctly, they write from within that particular persuasion of the dismal science called “free market environmentalism,” which holds that, if we just assign clear property rights for natural resources and don’t interfere with what folks with money want to do, everything will work out OK, for Adam Smith once told us so. Actually he did not, but that is for another time. The curious debilities of that view become clear when McCoy and Atwood ask, “What is wrong with a human boom and bust cycle? Is our species to exempt itself from normal ecological processes?” For McCoy and Atwood, the answer is that nothing is wrong with humankind going bust because “even if we are on the brink of disaster, backing away from the precipice may involve costs we are not willing to pay. Tradeoffs are inherent in any decision.” In other words, if it is too expensive to back away from the edge of disaster, we ought to follow the brave free marketeers over the cliff. And exactly what “tradeoffs” are those lying at the bottom of their precipice able to enjoy? They do not say. But if things do go bust for Homo sapiens perhaps they can find solace, as McCoy and Atwood do, in the idea that “there will still be bacteria (and) ecosystem processes. . . will continue.” I am somewhat less comforted by that prospect than they. One wishes to ask if they consulted with their families, friends, or even their students who may be less willing to give their all for the doctrine of “tradeoffs.” The sterile language of indifference, cloaked in the presumptions of doctrine, hide human consequences and suffering for which there are no adequate words. But having no words to describe the consequences of shoddy ideas, one can have no price to put on it, and having no price, one can have no property rights, hence no stake in anything like a market transaction in human survival.