Our environmental policies are increasingly more costly and less effective, and they are jeopardizing both the environment and liberty while enlarging distant bureaucracies. There is a better way, argues Becky Norton Dunlop, co-author of the American Conservation Ethic, a work that has since been incorporated in Heritage Foundation's Environmental Conservation: Eight Principles of the American Conservation Ethic. Dunlop discussed the eight guiding principles that should drive environmental policy in the U.S. at a recent Conservative Women's Network gathering.
Principle 1: People Are the Most Important, Unique, and Precious Resource. Human well-being, which incorporates such measures as health and safety, is the foremost measure of the quality of the envirnoment. A policy cannot be good for the environment if it is bad for people.
Principle 2: Renewable Natural Resources Are Resilient and Dynamic and Respond Positively to Wise Management. Renewable natural resources—trees, plants, soil, air, water, fish and wildlife—and collections thereof, such as wetlands, deserts, forests and prairies, are the resources upon which we depend for food, clothing, medicine, shelter, and innumerable other human needs. Indeed, human life depends on both the use and conservation of these resources. Such resources are regenerated through growth, reproduction, or other naturally occurring processes that cleanse, cycle, or otherwise create them anew. These characteristics make it possible to use renewable resources now while ensuring that they are conserved for future generations.
Principle 3: Private Property Protections and Free Markets Provide the Most Promising New Opportunities for Environmental Improvements. Ownership inspires stewardship: Whether for economic, recreational, or aesthetic benefit, private property owners have the incentive both to enhance their resources and to protect them. There is also a direct and positive relationship between free-market economies and a clean, healthy, and safe environment. Markets reward efficiency, which is environmentally good, while minimizing the harm done by unwise actions. Conservation policies should be decoupled from regulation or government ownership.
Principle 4: Efforts to Reduce, Control, and Remediate Pollution Should Achieve Real Environmental Benefits. The term "pollution" is used to describe fatal threats to human health, as well as to describe physically harmless conditions that fall short of someone's aesthetic ideal. Human health and safety, as well as other interrelated aspects of well-being such as economic well-being and liberty, should be the primary criteria by which we evaluate environmental measures.
Principle 5: As We Accumulate Scientific, Technological, and Artistic Knowledge, We Learn How to Get More From Less. American agriculture has demonstrated that seeking more efficient means of production often yields unintended environmental benefits. To ensure that such technological breakthroughs continue, Americans must continue to accumulate scientific, technological, and artistic knowledge—a process fueled by restless competition in the free market.
Principle 6: Management of Natural Resources Should Be Conducted on a Site- and Situation-Specific Basis. Resources management should take into account the fact that environmental conditions will vary from location to location and from time to time. A site- and situation-specific approach avoids the institutional power and ideological concerns that dominate politicized central planning. Where laws and regulations to achieve environmental goals must be set, they should be meaninfgul, measurable, and objective and should contain bright legal lines—rather than bureaucratic requirements—as to how such standards are to be met.
Principle 7: Science Should Be Employed as One Tool to Guide Public Policy. Science should inform societal decisions, but ultimately, such decisions should be based on ethics, beliefs, consensus and other processes. A federal or state law is a determination to force compliance with a code of conduct. Commitments to use the force of law should be made with great caution and demand a high degree of scientific certainty.
Principle 8: The Most Successful Environment Policies Emanate from Liberty. Americans have chosen liberty as the central organizing principle of our great nation. Consequently, environmental policies must be consistent with this principle. Freedom unleashes the forces most needed to make our environment cleaner, healthier, and safer. It fosters scientific inquiry, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, rapid information exchange, accuracy, and flexibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment