🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian Yoder writes:

>But how much is that impact "worth"?  Who decide how much an acres of forest
>is worth?  Greenpeace?  Earth First? Users of lumber?  Backpackers?  Timber
>companies?  My point here is that the kind of system you seem to be advocating
>is NOT a way of informaing the market...it is a way of putting the market
>under the control of a political process.

Issues about the long-range health of ecosystems and the biosphere *must*
be handled by a political process, and cannot be left up to market processes.
The whole reason that there *are* political processes is that not every issue
is amenable to a market solution, or that the market solution is unacceptable.
Markets cannot decide such things as what longevity and probability of 
survival we as a society ought to establish for the species and ecosystems 
for which we are responsible -- 100 years at 75%, 1000 years at 95%, or 
whatever. That is necessarily a political question. 

The entire idea -- that the Republicans have been drumming hard (and 
cynically) for in their campaigns for the past 12 years -- that "political 
processes" are somehow illegitimate -- is anti-democratic in the extreme; 
really, even a bit anti-American. It is dangerous because it encourages
foolish people to crackpot simplistic notions like those Brian spouts.  
"We the People" have every right to protect our environment well beyond 
what is possible by market mechanisms alone -- just as we don't expect to
have to pay off thieves and thugs to protect ourselves against *them*. 

Protection of people against violent crime is a legitimate function of 
government, as opposed to markets, and so is protection of the environment
-- whose health we and our descendents depend on -- against degradation. 
It falls under the Constitutional heading of "providing common defense and 
promoting general welfare" and is one of the principal reasons for 
government. Nor is there anything very new about it. Even Victorean England
saw the need for public sewers to fight cholera. The principle is not much
different -- only here we need to protect the vital ecosystem functions of 
the entire planet against further destruction, rather than to build some 
engineering system. In either case government action is equally legitimate.

It will even be legitimate for government to act to prevent *violence* and
*excessive exploitation* towards the living communities with which we share
this land, for purely ethical reasons, and not only for obvious human 
self-interest, once "We the People" have grown in moral capacity enough to 
see the importance of this. Once we see the fact that our interests arise
from, and may never legitimately subvert, those of the whole living community
of Earth, we will take this step, just as today we (most of us) can see e.g. 
that it is never legitimate to let the "interests" of one race or sex subvert
those of the whole social community, and we recognize that government actions 
are sometimes needed to correct such injustice.

------------
Alan McGowen