i’d cut down my rainforest, too
by Jon Chun
Published: March 5, 2008
In 1739, Benjamin Franklin lobbied the Pennsylvania Assembly to remove the local tanneries from the urban centers because of their waste-disposal practices. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden and invited his fellow Americans to hug their nearest tree, shrub, mountain or stream. Still, the 19th century came and went with industrialists polluting everything they could get their hands on from London to the Mississippi River. People died, resources were exhausted, the Passenger Pigeon went extinct and nobody cared. Why?
Because they were poor.
Prior to the 20th Century, when faced with a choice between economic growth or conservationism, Americans almost always chose growth. Wouldn’t you? Or can you look your daughter in the eye and say, “Don’t worry sweetheart… you may live a bleak, semi-existence, but our sycamores will grow up to be big and strong.”
Yet the dawn of the 20th century brought a robust effort to protect America’s natural resources; beginning with the founding of the National Park Service by Woodrow Wilson and continuing today with a host of environmentalist who make sure that no new subdivisions are built on American soil.
O.K… I exaggerated a little there at the end.
The point is that today the heartless industrialists have gone green; with more and more multi-nationals tripping over themselves to prove that they haven’t left a carbon footprint anywhere since 2004. Spurred on by their success at home, environmentalists now look to the slaughtered rainforest in the third world as the new frontier.
However, the first world’s abhorrence of the third world’s apparent disregard for the environment is naďve at best and recklessly selfish at worst. To illustrate my point we need only look at our own history. Americans did not embrace conservationism because of a collective epiphany at Greenpeace’s annual conference. We chose to have a clean environment because we had plenty of jobs, food, homes and cars, and we wanted to go on vacation to Yosemite. We cannot expect the Third World to behave differently. So long as they face a shortage of the basic necessities, we cannot expect them to place a higher premium on breathtaking Amazonian vistas than they do on breakfast.
So should we idly stand by as they scrape away at the planet’s lungs? No. That wouldn’t be in our self interest; or in the interest of the Bonobo. Then should we tell them how sad we are that in the last 50 years 20% of the world’s rainforest have been cut down - and maybe have U2’s front man rename himself Bonobo? No. That would be silly and ineffective.
So what can be done?
Eliminate all trade barriers with the third world. Every quota, every tariff, every single impediment to trade. Then we repeal the federal subsidies to farmers and other industries that keep prices artificially high due to an unnecessary reliance on domestic production. Job growth in the third world will explode as Americans buy up less expensive foreign products (I’ll deal with your claim that such a policy would wreck havoc on the U.S. economy in another article) and the dwindling rainforest will rebound within a generation.
If we take the economic handcuffs off of the third world, America’s history will repeat itself from Zambia to Colombia. Despite what the environmentalist movement would have you believe, no National Geographic special or World Wide Concert will ever save more trees than a low level of unemployment along the Congo. Because people always choose self-preservation over conservation; nothing will have a more powerful impact for good on the survival rate of the Tundra Peregrine Falcon than a well-placed factory in the Dominican Republic.
In the end, what’s good for business will eventually be what’s good for the environment.
—
(email this article or post to social network)
—
