The fact that this great man was little known is no surprise.

Americans are too willing to lap up the last serving of culture,from Polliwood. Sports stars & celebrities receive notarity far in excess of their social contribution.

In addition the majority of journalists aid and abet the dumbing down of the news while they continue their slobering love affair for the Change Messiah whose brand of Change masquerades as a Socialistic redistribution of wealth cum Emission Trading. Of course they would not educate us about a scientist who wouldn't think of unethically using science as a scam to undermine the free market.

We cannot eat any of the foods mentioned in the article, corn,rice,wheat, due to allergies and diabetes. But I know that they use grains as feed for cattle, so it is still needed.

Yabby
What you say is true, and yes it is nonsense to talk of ‘biodiversity’ in dollar terms. Economic calculation works only on what is exchanged against money. First-order values, ends in themselves, must be valued directly in their own right; no need to use the means of economic calculation.

However this does not advance the argument past the original problem.

The issues of sustainability cast the environmentalist argument in terms of human utility. But it must be resolved in those terms. It must not be permitted to slide back into the mystic appeal to alleged values higher than human values, which, as seen, only resolve into misanthropy and desire for power.

The original problem of human utility is how to use resources so as not to waste them in satisfying human wants in order of urgency. The environmentalists’ sustainability argument is valid but not sound. We should not waste resources. But this does not mean that centralized coercion-based decision-making is less wasteful than voluntary decentralised decisions based on liberty and property.

There are two major flaws in the environmentalist method of presuming to decide at the species level, from a God’s-eye point of view as it were.

First, this is not the level at which the relevant values, decisions, and actions are in fact taking place. All the relevant decisions, including by corporations such as governments, NGOs and private companies, are taking place by and through individuals. All human action is decided by individuals subjectively judging the marginal utility of individual actions. No-one is given to decide for the whole of mankind – especially if others don’t agree with them!

Secondly, it is a universal fact of human action that people prefer a given satisfaction sooner rather than later; otherwise we would never eat. To value the human utility of a given resource for an unknown hypothetical stranger a million generations hence, equally as for a hungry person now, is just as economically incoherent, as pitiless and unconcerned about real human values and real human action, and just as messianic as the misanthropes.

“But” the environmentalists might say, “We’re not talking about sustainability *indefinitely*”.

But of course that’s exactly what they are talking about, otherwise the same objection would apply to their solution.

“No” they might say, “We only mean what every sensible person must agree, that resources shouldn’t be wasted so our foreseeable posterity will miss out.”

But this is to do no more than re-affirm the importance of the economic concept of profit, namely, the quantity of product that can be consumed without impairing the capacity of the original productive resource, the capital, to provide product so as to satisfy human wants later.

Welcome to the real world! Flattering themselves that they are path-finding a new economic system, environmentalists are merely flailing, and failing, to re-invent the wheel.

Certainly a world in which the economic problem of scarcity were permanently solved would be wonderful. But this is essentially the same mystic concept as the Christian belief in Paradise. Our world is one of permanent change, and natural scarcity. Such a stasis is not of this world. Gibbon famously said the Christians ‘defended nonsense with cruelty’; and the environmentalists’ attempt to attain their nonsensical mystic stasis by coercion is evil.

It is not an argument against liberty and property that people are imperfect, and knowledge progresses by making mistakes. Perfection is not an option either way.

There is no evidence or reason to think that vesting decision-making instead in bureaucratic powers motivated by rules and regulations, who pay no price for getting it wrong, and lack even the faculty of economic calculation, will produce anything other than a worse result both economically and ecologically.

*There is no evidence or reason to think that vesting decision-making instead in bureaucratic powers motivated by rules and regulations, who pay no price for getting it wrong, and lack even the faculty of economic calculation, will produce anything other than a worse result both economically and ecologically.*

Peter I actually agree with you on that one. Most Govt officials,
if given the power, do little but feather their own nests.

So I seek win-win solutions for all. Thus my promotion of the concept
that all women in the third world, should have access to family
planning, as first world women do.

The rest of your 2 posts really seems to agree that the well known
"tragedy of the commons" is correct. I certainly agree with it,
that is why I think nature will have to sort it out in the end,
we humans are too stupid to do it wisely or fairly.

I won't be around to care, but if we trash the place completely,
I still think that it will have been a shame. "Quaint planet,
pity about those humans" The earth will keep spinning with
ants and cockroaches on board, whether we are here or not.

Jefferson - to address what you've written:

I agree generally with your criticism of those who experience a moral panic at what they think is global over population and have frequently suggested that if they feel the world has too many people then their only ethical choice is to do the right thing and reduce the population by one - themselves. Oddly enough, they find this suggestion shocking.

Centralised production and distribution of food as we know is a disaster. The Russians always had a fine line in food queue jokes.

I thought the point of Shiva's article was that high(petroleum based) energy farming technologies displaced ecologically appropriate technologies with consequent flow on effects. The disruption or dislocation of the social relations of production has knock on ecological effects that she outlines.

As to the absence of private property rights in water resources being at the root of the problem: the idea that individual rights ought to prevail over communal rights in part derives from Hardin's thesis of the 'tragedy of the commons' which theory is ahistorical. The fate of the commons, in England initially and elsewhere since, is that it has been enclosed by individual interests and communal access has been denied. It is not that commons are over used but that individual interests prevail over common interests and the issuing of individualised water rights is but one step in that process.

There is no generalised scarcity. The world is wealthier now than ever. Distribution of wealth and equity are at the root of the problem.

Greater production in a world where particular groups think they are entitled to live like Pharaohs will only lead to the further engrossment those groups. India, like China, is not short of those whose desire for wealth, luxury and privilege is unending.

Cheers.