EARTH DAY CELEBRATES HATRED OF MAN

by Michael Berliner
Executive Director, Ayn Rand Institute

Next to the corruption of concepts, environmentalism is probably the most important tool used by statists in their unrelenting drive to destroy your freedom and to eventually gain total control over your life.

What is the environment and by what standard does one judge whether it is good or bad?

The environment is nothing more than the physical surroundings in which you live.  If those surroundings promote your life and well-being, then they are good; if they are hostile to your survival, then they are bad.   If you were about to be mysteriously transported to another part of the planet, where would you rather be sent:  to a remote, deserted jungle, untouched by man--or--to a prosperous American community?  Which of these two environments would be a threat to your life?  The answer is obvious: the jungle, the part of the world untouched by man.  That part of the world reshaped by man--that prosperous American community--would provide a far more beneficial environment for you.

As Berliner correctly observes, the "fundamental goal of environmentalists is not clean air and clean water...," it is to forcibly prevent you from reshaping nature to your needs and, in doing so, prevent you from improving your surroundings.   Thus, environmentalists are, in fact, an enemy of man's attempt to improve his environment.

Now, what is the most important requirement needed in one's surroundings to ensure you have an opportunity to secure your own well-being?  Freedom, freedom from the initiation of force (or its threat).  But what is being pushed by these statists in the name of the environment?  The state's initiation of force, force to prevent you from using your property as you see fit, to prevent you from improving your surroundings and your life.

The function of government is to protect the individual against the initiation of force; its function is not to protect trees, but to protect your freedom and rights.  In a free society, you are responsible for protecting and improving your physical surroundings, your environment.  And when it comes to such matters as clean air and water, these things are secured through the strict enforcement of property rights, not through the confiscation and/or regulation of your property as statists do today.

Fulton Huxtable
May 3, 1998