Ronald Bailey Asks: Is Capitalism Ultimately Unsustainable?
Human activity is remaking the face of the Earth: transforming and polluting the landscape, warming the atmosphere and oceans, and causing species to go extinct. The orthodox view among ecologists is that human liberty—more specifically economic activity and free markets—is to blame. For example, the prominent biologist-activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University recently argued in a British science journal that the environmental problems we face are driven by "overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens' aggregate consumption." The Ehrlichs urge the "reduction of the worship of 'free' markets that infests the discipline" of economics. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey asks in an essay over at The New Atlantis if liberty and the natural environment are, in fact, antithetical.