I want to push back against that a little.
I agree that some elements of the current environmental movement seems more interested in micromanaging your life than doing anything meaningful for the environment, but there's a lot of elements of it which are totally reasonable and good.
If we let some people get their way, the entire continent would look more polluted than Beijing. There was an image posted a while back of a slaughterhouse that turned the river it was next to into a nightmare of fat and entrails and rejected animal carcasses, and it wasn't until someone with the power stepped in to do so and forced them to stop it that the river was recovered for the public's use. That sort of abuse is a liberty issue as well. If companies can just destroy our shared environment and at the end of it just go out of business that's a problem.
This is one of those cases where a balance needs to be found between the rights of the people as a whole to the enjoyment of the waterway in a pristine form and the rights of the individual trying to enjoy their own property by running a factory of some sort. I don't think the question should be "environmentalism: yes or no?", but a more nuanced "where is the line that best balances the rights of the people and the rights of individual property owners?"
And on a completely different tangent, the fact that they lock down our factories but allow products built in factories that are more than happy to destroy the global ecosystem is a problem as well. You just end up with impoverished locals, enriched foreigners, and a country "somewhere else" that slowly dies by being the painting of Dorian Gray for our own environmental sins.
I agree that some elements of the current environmental movement seems more interested in micromanaging your life than doing anything meaningful for the environment, but there's a lot of elements of it which are totally reasonable and good.
If we let some people get their way, the entire continent would look more polluted than Beijing. There was an image posted a while back of a slaughterhouse that turned the river it was next to into a nightmare of fat and entrails and rejected animal carcasses, and it wasn't until someone with the power stepped in to do so and forced them to stop it that the river was recovered for the public's use. That sort of abuse is a liberty issue as well. If companies can just destroy our shared environment and at the end of it just go out of business that's a problem.
This is one of those cases where a balance needs to be found between the rights of the people as a whole to the enjoyment of the waterway in a pristine form and the rights of the individual trying to enjoy their own property by running a factory of some sort. I don't think the question should be "environmentalism: yes or no?", but a more nuanced "where is the line that best balances the rights of the people and the rights of individual property owners?"
And on a completely different tangent, the fact that they lock down our factories but allow products built in factories that are more than happy to destroy the global ecosystem is a problem as well. You just end up with impoverished locals, enriched foreigners, and a country "somewhere else" that slowly dies by being the painting of Dorian Gray for our own environmental sins.
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So let's change it around a bit. Instead of "the public", let's say "the other property owners whose enjoyment of a property is harmed by the actions of the one person".
I think of that one property development in New Jersey that ended up being the former location of a company's secret toxic waste dump. Besides the homeowners being harmed by brutal toxic waste, their property is entirely useless after it was discovered. Best of all, the company that dumped the waste had long since gone out of business so it just sucks to be them. I think it was the federal government who picked up the tab ultimately for that, which is no better -- great, people who didn't have anything to do with New Jersey ended up helping pay for a new house for someone because someone else dumped toxic waste in a spot.
I think of that one property development in New Jersey that ended up being the former location of a company's secret toxic waste dump. Besides the homeowners being harmed by brutal toxic waste, their property is entirely useless after it was discovered. Best of all, the company that dumped the waste had long since gone out of business so it just sucks to be them. I think it was the federal government who picked up the tab ultimately for that, which is no better -- great, people who didn't have anything to do with New Jersey ended up helping pay for a new house for someone because someone else dumped toxic waste in a spot.