Environmentalist

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.

Incommensurables cannot be compared.

Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.

An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion.

However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious.

In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.

You cannot do only one thing.

A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.

Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart.

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.

It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.

Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.