-Caveat Lector-
Vacationing at Taxpayer Expense
by Ryan McMaken
Last week, I wrote an article here on LewRockwell.com on the problem
of "roadless" forests and federally protected wilderness areas. In it, I
suggested that the people who benefit most from such set asides are
the same people who lobby for them in Washington: upper-middle and
upper class white people who have the leisure time and the money to
enjoy such amenities. I received angry responses condemning me for
being an apologist for land-raping corporations and heartless developers.
All who wrote were sure to point out what salt-of-the-earth folks they
are. Statistics would indicate that they were probably lying.
Government records of national forest and park lands indicate that users
have incomes considerably above the national average. People who
head up to the mountains with their fly rods, tents, horses, and hiking
boots are not exactly the same people who are working eighty hour
weeks to keep their small businesses from going under. Nor are there
a whole lot of inner city kids who take day trips up to Glacier
National Park up on the Canadian border. In these degenerate times
of self-hatred, the people who use national lands probably like
to fancy themselves as downtrodden schmoes, but they are wrong.
Leisure and travel are expensive commodities. Many people do not
possess these things in enough abundance to enjoy the taxpayer
supported public lands.
Given the history of modern environmentalism, this should not surprise
us. The modern politics of "conservation" and "preservation"
became popular in the 70’s when more and more Americans were
enjoying disposable income and more leisure time. As the immediacy of
economic viability receded for many people, more peripheral "quality
of life" issues became more important. Young people from the
middle classes began to band together in support of the new "green"
politics. These new greens were not concerned with the same things
as environmentalists of earlier eras. The old environmentalists
were concerned with issues that pertained directly to the immediate
health and safety of human beings. They were concerned with potable
water, breathable air, and toxic industrial waste. Most of these
issues directly impacted the lives of people who lived and worked
in urban centers and along waterways. They concerned themselves
with fairly obvious problems of filth, disease, and toxicity.
Modern green policies, on the other hand, deal with problems much less
immediate. They deal with arsenic levels in water that might give you
cancer fifty years from now, and they make a lot of noise about the
spotted owl and old growth forests. Such things benefit the lives of
remarkably few human beings. The people they do benefit are people
who get a lot of pleasure out of viewing wildlife while riding their pricey
mountain bikes who aren’t impacted by the lost jobs every time they
pass through some ridiculously strict regulation on the cleanliness of
water and air, or the development of forest land. Instead of keeping
drinking water clean of sewage or uranium, enhancing eco-recreation for
a singular class of people is the new motivation of preservation politics.
To witness this change in environmental priorities, one only needs
to look at the modern hubs of environmental activity. Places like
Seattle, San Francisco, and Boulder, Colorado are the places where
modern environmentalism flourishes. Populated by people who are
highly educated and highly paid, these places support a population
keen on travel, leisure, and pristine wilderness. Thanks to the tax
supports paid by all Americans, these people can engage in their
leisure activities at a reduced price. It’s a pretty sweet deal.
Not content to meddle with their own country, these people want to
extend their green agenda to foreign countries as well. Staging such
keen events as the "Battle in Seattle" the new greens support world-
wide controls on pollution and wilderness development. The
industrial countries have no problem with such controls, but the
third world isn’t quite so excited. Those environmental boors in
the third world want to trash the environment so they can escape
their desperate poverty and the scourges of disease, war, and rampant
misery. Of course, most greens know nothing of genuine disease,
war or misery, so they have hard time relating to those third world
peasants who are abandoning the clean air of the country to breathe
the filth in the city where they can afford to feed themselves.
For most of those peasants, it would be a step up just to live at
a standard of living equal to nineteenth century America where the
buildings were covered with soot from the steel mills and other smoke-
belching industries.
I should conclude by pointing out that I have nothing against people
who have lots of money and lots of leisure time. People who make
a lot of money generally do so because they provide a valuable product
or service. Such people have a right to enjoy any kind of recreation
they prefer. The problem arises, however, when such people think
that it is acceptable to use the power of government to enhance
their own leisure activities or to help them indulge in their personal
preference for undisturbed wilderness areas. By promoting their
preservationist agenda, the greens are saying that it is fine for
some hairdresser in Tennessee to pay taxes that support the
preservation of wildlife in a far off place that he or she will likely never
visit. In short, modern green politics is a wealth transfer from
the people who don’t benefit from such programs to those who do
benefit. As it so happens, the people who do benefit have
a lot more money than those who don’t. It’s socialism for the well-to-do.
For most greens, who never miss a chance to congratulate themselves
for their own supposedly boundless compassion for the poor, this
would seem to be a pretty disreputable endeavor. Nevertheless, they
manage to tell themselves that the low wages and lost jobs caused
by their green policies will in some way end up benefiting those
less fortunate than they. Of all the species that they are trying
to help, though, the one that they are helping the least is their
own.
February 4, 2001
Ryan McMaken lives in Denver, Colorado. He edits the Western
Mercury.
Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com
--
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should
we let them have ideas. -- Joseph Stalin.
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