The Bosque Boys

P.J. O'Rourke:
"A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force."
(1994), All the trouble in the world. The lighter side of famine, pestilence, destruction and death. Sydney (Picador), 204

More people living in the mountains means more noise, waste, etc. IN THE MOUNTAINS. Presumably it means less of those same things in (let's say) Denver where those people came from.

Also, restrictions on development in the name of preserving the environment causes tremendous damage to the Common Good.

Thousands of people living in Denver are unable to afford housing because the supply has been artificially restricted. Homeowners (more organized, more connected, more 'free' time on their hands) enlist the government on their behalf to prevent development near them, not only new home construction, but also high density housing, mixed-use retail/housing, etc. This protects and inflates their wealth, makes it more difficult for first-time buyers to enter the market and build their family wealth, and restricts renters to established, poorer communities, in inner city Denver.

What exactly is a pristine view in a national park worth to these people? Poll THEM and they would no doubt prefer to purchase their own home.

If other people want a pristine natural environment, let them pay for it. There are plenty of examples such as country clubs, yacht clubs, ski resorts, hunting and fishing expeditions, etc., where private individuals have paid to preserve a version of the natural landscape and then "rent" the experience to customers. So why does the government need to be involved?

The so-called "environmental crisis" is now pretty well established as a fact of our age. The problems of pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland, loss of topsoil may still be ignored or scoffed at, but they are not denied. Concern for these problems has acquired a certain standing, a measure of discussability, among most scientific, academic, and religious institutions.
This is good, of course; obviously, we cant hope to solve these problems without an increase of public awareness and concern. But in an age burdened with "publicity," we have to be aware also that as issues rise into popularity they rise also into the danger of oversimplification. To speak of this danger is especially necessary in confronting the destructiveness of our relationship to nature, which is the result, in the first place, of gross oversimplification.

The "environmental crisis" has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of "raw materials," and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technical means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining, even as mining itself has become more technologically powerful and more brutal.

And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as "environmental" problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. This oversimplification is now either a matter of corporate behavior or of behavior under the influence of corporate behavior. This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations.

RE: Matt Bates. My point regarding the mountains is that the qualities that draw individuals to the mountains will be destroyed if individuals are allowed to move to the mountains with no restrictions, thereby destroying what they loved. My major point is that an individualistic market approach contains within itself the seeds of tragedy if individual desire is regarded as an absolute good. On the environment, it seems to me, we must approach the issue from a Common Good perspective.