Capitalist Solutions

Promoting capitalism as the only moral and practical social system for man!

Response to the Consultation Document Review of Nature Conservation Policy

By Simon Patkin, Director , Capitalist Solutions

I am writing to oppose this proposal, especially the moral foundation on which it is based. It is harmful to human life and detrimental to future progress within Hong Kong.

Imagine that you have a knock on the door and a person presents you with a warrant alleging that you are trying to harm a cockroach colony in your kitchen and that rats are being hounded out of your flat because they have no “sustainable” breeding habitat. Further they demand a list of spiders currently known within your home and that moves be taken to ensure that the number of spiders is maintained. This would include preparing a list of spiders in your flat on a monthly basis and allowing the NGO to enter your flat anytime to verify what you say is correct and to ensure a free flow of flies for the spiders to catch. The NGO would be paid for his “work” and the alternative to compliance and payment would be a long stretch in jail for alleged “environmental crimes”.

Clearly this would be a gross violation of your right to property and ultimately your own right to life. It is no different when an eco-fascist tries to goose-step his way onto a large private property or land to push the interests of bugs, dirt, weeds, trees and fish over the rights of the landowners and the shareholders in the company that own that land.

It means that landowners can’t build a new housing project because a Romer frog might be displaced, that a new job-providing factory cannot be built because a few weeds might need to be pulled up, that a new bridge linking Hong Kong and Zhuhai can’t be constructed because a few fish might have to look for a new home or that transport for hundreds of thousands of people is delayed because some ugly spoon-billed birds would no longer have undeveloped marshes to live in. It would not even be necessary for the eco-fascist to provide any evidence of these occurring, just his feelings that it might cause damage, thus overriding the onus of proof principle.

The moral premise is that man must shape his environment to survive. That pro-life principle means re-shaping land in order to build new housing, reclaiming land in order to build new offices and building new transport hubs as the population expands. Man cannot survive without these things, he would ultimately just die out. Surprisingly this is what some environmentalists actually want.

The anti-life philosophy of many environmentalists can best be summed up by some quotes from these people. According to some of the listed references Earth First has said “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. It has the potential to end industrialism, which is the main force behind the industrial crisis.” Or take one biologist with the American National Parks Service who is listed as saying, “… Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

This sums up the environmentalist’s anti-life mentality quite well.

Picking up on another error within the consultation paper, there is no basis in reality for the term stakeholder. It is a word invented by environmentalists and used by them and PR companies to try to dilute property rights of companies and their shareholders. It is an attempt to vary the concept of shareholder by introducing a similar sounding name for people who should have no claims on another’s property. A property owner and a collective can’t own a property at the same time. No one should accept the ideas put forward by environmentalists that privately owned land is actually a natural asset owned by all, just because some like the view of the land, or they feel deprived. This is a collectivist\socialist error used to trample property rights. You can’t have A and non-A at the same time.

Further, land has a value to individuals, not a society (which is just a collection of individuals) and each individual has a different amount of esteem for a particular value. A value as such requires a valuer, an alternative and an ultimate standard of value. I will not discuss these in too much detail, except to say that all values should be judged against the ultimate standard of life. I.e. human life is the ultimate standard of value, by which all other actions and values should be judged, and each judgment depends on the own valuer’s context and alternatives available. (See Note 1 for further references and follow up reading) For example a school has a value to a teacher as a place to work to provide income to sustain their life, a student to gain knowledge for later work, a parent as a place to help develop their child and an employer as a provider of educated young trainees to help run their business in the future. A school would be placed much lower down the hierarchy of values for a single person in their twenties, a married couple who do not plan to have children or an elderly person in a nursing home. They all have more important goals in their own lives.

It is the same for land. A piece of land might have value as a place to live, or a place for someone to watch birds. The bird lover and the person who wants somewhere to live can each put forward an offer to purchase the land. However the bird lover has no right to expect the person wanting to live on that land to give up his right to buy the land, or to surrender control of that land to an NGO who values birds over human life. Further, just as it is wrong to balance out the claims of a bank robber with those of a bank, it is also wrong to balance out the rights of property owners with those of NGO’s who value bugs, weeds, dirt, trees and fish over human life. The right to property is an absolute, which should not be tempered with anytime someone feels a species is being threatened. (It should be noted that environmentalists in the US tried to stop development on a particular piece of land on the basis that it might harm spotted owls, despite the fact that no spotted owls had been seen in a particular area for many years.)

Moving on, I would particularly like to object to any propaganda campaign to implement these proposals. This is money spent on promoting false and harmful ideas and will only help further fuel radical environmentalist. As one brazen environmentalist has openly admitted, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts that we have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being right.” Is this is what government propaganda will help perpetuate, scary scenarios with the choice between being truthful and being effective?

Finally it is up to companies that will be affected by this proposal to reject it outright. Whilst companies should be free to finance environmental projects that are good for their long-term interests or leave a place as it is if there is minimum cost to a new development, they should not agree to any regulation by the government and steadfastly refuse any NGO that seeks to disrupt their development projects. They should not pretend this is any kind of partnership, but clearly let the government and NGO’s know that this is just the use of force to override the rights of their shareholders. They should however not be lawbreakers. If they have no choice and the law forces them to let NGO’s onto their land or give up certain property rights, then they must not grant any moral sanction to these NGO’s and do the absolute bare minimum to protect their officers from the threat of fines or jail.

At the same time and as a matter of moral principle (and therefore practicality) they must now stop donating any shareholders’ funds to NGO’s that seek to dilute the rights of their shareholders. If this suicidal tendency can be curbed, then environmentalist NGO’s will be starved of funds to harass the companies that bring great pro-life benefits to our everyday lives.

These proposals should be scrapped and the recent anti-progress environmentalist laws restricting development of new or existing land repealed.

Notes

Note 1 – For a more detailed explanation of values and how to understand them, please see chapter, 7 Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff.

References – Books

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, especially the following sections:

Chapter 7 – Life as the essential root of value and Values as objective

Chapter 8 – Productiveness as the adjustment of nature to man

Chapter 10 – Individual Rights as Absolutes

References – Websites

http://environmentalism.aynrand.org/

Especially

In moral defence of forestry by Peter Schwartz http://environmentalism.aynrand.org/forestry.shtml

Environmentalism vs Human Life by Andrew Bernstein http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/speeches/earthdayconf2001.shtml

References – Taped Lectures

'Corporate Environmentalism' and Other Suicidal Tendencies" (1994) – audio tape (Second Renaissance Books) by Richard Salsman

The Case Against Environmentalism: Moral, Economic and Scientific – audio tape (Second Renaissance Books) by Richard Salsman, Peter Schwartz and others

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