03 March 2007

How Conservatives are Environmentalists

Slide 9 of the lecture notes for third-year environmental economics at Melbourne University says the following:
Environment regarded as a luxury good: for poor people who are struggling with starvation, environmental issues take a backseat. As people become richer, quality of the environment becomes important to them.
But is this really the case? Rich people who drive luxury SUVs seem to go against this statement. What does the word "environment" mean? I think it means "the area in which something exists and lives." It is the external things around you. This doesn't really say anything about how the environment is, just that the environment is external to you. For example, for one person, saving the environment may mean that a lake should be filled with nothing but clean water. Another person may consider water a pollutant and not value the aesthetics of that water in the lake and so he may consider clean water in a lake as an environmental problem.

If we generalize, environment then can mean things other than trees, lakes, wild animals, etc, and can also include things like people, society, and community. A person may not like prostitution because he may consider sexual activity as social pollutant. Therefore, those conservatives who have traditional values are environmentalists as well. It's just that instead of valuing trees, mountains, and lakes they value religion and family. We are talking about different things but the same concept. If you drop a ball from one meter and then drop a ball from ten meters you are talking about different things (because of different dropping distances) but you are talking about the same concept (gravity). Same thing applies here. Many conservatives are environmentalists just as the green environmentalists are, it's just that they value different things, but they still value something external to themselves and that is why the conservatives want to get into other people's businesses and stop them, say, having homosexual sex in the same way that some green environmentalist wants you to stop cutting down your own tree.

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