One of the most pressing issues of our times is the environment. Global warming, deforestation, so on and so forth. It is widely held by the Left that this is the fault of corporations exploiting the plant genetic resources of the third world and overproducing, for the consumption of the Western bourgeois. In general, the only retort that the right has been able to muster has been to question global warming.
Now I don’t know whether global warming is true or not but that is certainly not the question: deforestation threatens to destroy the livelihoods of millions of human beings, in the rainforests and jungles of the world, from Borneo to Amazon. The very same principles of deforestation, though, occur all over the world; from Asia to Southern America.
Let’s examine exactly how the process occurs. A logging company wants to sell timber to a furniture company. They go to the respective Government of the country they plan to extract the resources from, and they probably pay a hefty bribe – it doesn’t matter either way, they get the rights from the Government to log the land, or they buy the land outright to be deforested. Anyone with a basic belief in Liberty will soon be able to spot the slight problem with the argument that this is a fault of the free market.
That land was not the Government’s to give away.
The local natives who live on that land and have to put up with the destruction of their natural habitat by Governments and logging corporations are right to wonder what right the Government had to sell their land away. The people of Borneo have been living off the land in the form of rice paddies and other forms of agriculture for hundreds and hundreds of years. You might call them savages, and perhaps, savages they may be (although it was fashionable to them to resist by force of arms the coercive taxation schemes of petty despots and monarchs long before the American revolution), but it was their property, and it was not the State’s to sell, and not the Corporation’s to deforest.
It is the basic right of homesteading: that because land is scarce, property rights come from the use of that land for productive purposes. If someone takes over some land and puts it to use it becomes their property. Homesteading is basically the cornerstone of Western civilisation and laissez-faire Liberalism.
How would you like it if you spent eighty years growing a really nice tree in your back garden only for the State to sell your back garden to a logging corporation who swiftly fells the tree. Why, you ask, did this happen? “For the benefit of national development of the economy and the greater good?” The real truth is that Governments never benefit the national development of an economy when they abuse property rights. And if it were the case that the Government could “benefit the development of the national economy” by taking people’s property and selling it to environment-destroying Corporations – whose to say they can only sell land? Why can’t they come and confiscate your computer, or your books, or your bed, or your football posters – they are, after all, your property, which you have a sovereign right to own.
And economically, you might claim that a system of enforced land property rights would be intolerable – it would vastly increase the costs of production, after all, and make timber and anything related to wood much much more expensive. This theory is problematic. The Government owns the land and it rents it out or sells it to corporations at whatever price it thinks is right – yet, you and I know for sure that in every system in human history where the Government has rationed scarce resources, there has at some point or another been a shortage.
If we consider the concept of long run supply and short run supply, usually this is not as devastating as I am going to claim it will be, because the system can be changed and the good that is in a shortage can be produced more. Of course, this isn’t an argument for price and wage controls – the Government can never have the full market information to correctly set prices without achieving some kind of horrific market distortion. Nonetheless, in this area, it’s even worse: why?
Because the amount of land on the Earth can not grow. We can not produce a hundred square acres more of forestry every day like we could produce a hundred more radios a day. Yes, ok, land can be reclaimed from the sea and trees can be planted, but there is every indication that at the current rate that forested land is being rationed by the Government to logging corporations, we will be out of trees far sooner than the effects of any large-scale tree planting. Make no mistake, if there is a shortage in trees because they have been incorrectly rationed, there will be no more trees. And then prices will skyrocket, far higher than under any other alternative. That, unfortunately, though, is the predictable future for this planet.
If we want our children to inherit sustainable forests, we must enforce a free market in land: the people who live and work on the land must be given ownership rights rather than the Government. Only then will the correct market rationing exist and as close as possible to an equilibrium can occur in the amount of trees planted compared to the amount of trees chopped down. A tribe who have worked on and lived off a hundred square acre plot of land are not going to chop it all down in an instant. That is not their way. And even if it was, who’s to say that the land would be the Government’s to seize? Is the State obliged to seize all “strategic resources?”
And any land not used by locals can be sold off to the Government to the highest bidder. Whether this is greenpeace or a logging corporation is irrelevant. No logging corporation will immediately use up all its resources if it understands that the price of future land is going to be much higher. In conclusion, a sustainable system of logging and forestry management is impossible only when the Government controls and rations the land upon which trees, or any other natural resource, are found.
Without disagreeing with you on the role that the state plays in destroying the environment, I do have three other thoughts:
1. To what extent was this deforestation inevitable due to population growth, no matter what the state was doing? Some quick googling produced the following figures. In 1960, the population of Borneo was 1.25 million. So in 1950 (the year of your first panel in the graphic), it would have likely been even less than that. The 2005 population of Borneo was over 15 million. So in the ensuing period, the population increased fifteen-fold! That is truly rapid growth. You blame the government, but wouldn’t we expect the sort of deforestation you depict under any form of social organization, given that sort of population pressure?
2. You ignore the central role that externalities play in any consideration of environmental economics. The costs incurred from deforestation are not completely internalized into the price that the natives would earn from selling the land. The inevitable result is that the natives would sell more land than is optimal. It’s quite conceivable that governments might actually charge a higher price for the land than the natives would, and might, therefore, be closer to some sort of optimal level of deforestation. Of course there is no guarantee of this, and nobody should expect a guarantee.
3. I think you need to reread the literature on environmental degradation and global warming. You’re treatment of what “the Left” thinks doesn’t really match my understanding or experience. Certainly there are some out there who think that – but I think you’re trumping up a very small and quite irrelevant minority in an effort to discredit environmentalists. And I think you know you’re trumping up that minority position for the rhetorical advantage that it provides.
I take that population figure back.
Further googling revealed that that 1.25 million figure was for “British Borneo”, which is smaller than the entire island.
My question still remains – population obviously will have grown, and that will have taken its toll on forests no matter what the policy of the state was. But the numbers seem to be less salacious.
Here’s a rough attempt to reevaluate that: I haven’t found Borneo’s population in 1950, but I have found Indonesia’s. Indonesia’s population in 1950 was 35% of it’s population in 2005. If we assume a comparable growth rate for Borneo, and Borneo has 15 million people in 2005, then in 1950 they had something around 5.25 million.
The same point applies: when the population triples at the same time that heavy industry and modern amenities become available on the island, wouldn’t we expect deforestation, regardless of what government policy is?
First, on population. I don’t know if that figure is entirely correct. As far as I’m aware, population growth in Borneo has been more than exponential. The population of the Malaysian state of Sabah was 300,00 in the 60s, now it’s 3 million, for instance: alot of this comes from immigration because, in Malaysian Borneo at least, there is a gigantic immigration … how shall we say, crisis.(because I don’t personally know whether it’s a problem or not. The problem is clearly Malay imperialism. Uh, nevermind…)
For a start though, no public authority on that entire island knows how many people live under its jurisdiction and I doubt whether they ever did, or will ever do. The disparity of suggestions between the Government and nationalist native organisations as to how many illegal immigrants there are differs in the hundreds of thousands.
But yes, you’re right, the population has been booming. I’m not certain this is necessarily to do with deforestation though. At least in Malaysian Borneo, major cities are on the coast and that’s where the immigrants go. Deforestation is for land or for lumber, and I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t have both of those things, I’m just saying we should have it properly rationed, and that’s where the crux of it is. A system of rationing needs to be in place. That system of rationing ought to be, in my opinion — as a non-utilitarian — the most just system of rationing, and then secondly the most efficient form. I happen to think that private rationing is both more just and more efficient than Government rationing. It’s possible that with the right evidence, I may change my mind on the latter, but it doesn’t change the former position.
Maybe I do need to re-read it. And yes, it is a minority position. I don’t see what that has to do with anything, though, rhetorics or otherwise. I’m just positing an alternative way of looking at things that doesn’t place the blame on capitalism.
That “reread it” point was probably a little too harsh. I’m simply saying that I think you’re presenting a caricature.
Yes – whatever the populations figures actually are there is real growth. I’m not sure it matters if they’re all on the coast. Coastal populations still need lumber and they still need to grow food. So whether the market or the government handled the job, we’d still expect to see deforestation in response to that sort of population growth. It’s inevitable, and perhaps not necessarily even problematic.
So how do you, personally, consider negative externality problems when you think about these issues? Generally speaking I agree with you – the market is the most just and most efficient way to ration goods. I don’t think you have to be a non-utilitarian to think that. Generally speaking, this is a rule of thumb for utilitarians too. However, of all the many cases where that holds true, some of the most important “yes, but”s come up when you consider natural resources in the environment: i.e., the case that you’ve introduced here. What do you think about those negative externality concerns? Does that alter at all your understanding of how the market would fare for a resource like this?
Pertaining to the homesteading ideals, what effect does this have on the “slash-and-burn” techniques that many traditionally-hunter/gatherer communities have resorted to in the last several decades? Environmentalists have become very concerned about this method, and its devastating effects on the soil and the entire ecosystem. Some governments have been trying to cut back on this agricultural method, but surely more government control over land, that you are proposing should be considered the property of those who have used it for years, would not mesh with a libertarian viewpoint?
Monty,
If you are interested please read: http://www.economicthought.net/2009/09/forestation-through-the-free-market/