Environmental Perspectives: Moving Toward a Market-Oriented Middle Ground

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy

Journal Abbreviation

Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y

Abstract

Environmental law is dominated by the orthodox environmentalist perspective. The orthodox perspective often treats the minority views expressed in this article as anti-environmental. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but there is little subtlety or nuance in environmental politics. Though the situation is somewhat better in the legal academy, there is still a long way to go before reasoned discussion is more common than political advocacy. An article on this topic entitled “Protecting the Environment from Orthodox Environmentalism” was published several years ago in this journal.1 The theme was that orthodox environmentalism made it difficult to evaluate the consequences of the first decades of modern environmental regulation, and it marginalized alternative approaches to accomplishing environmental protection. The orthodoxy may have broken down in small ways over the past fifteen years, but for the most part, mainstream environmentalists consider markets the enemy of the environment. There is a parallel orthodoxy among hardcore free-marketeers who insist that markets will solve every social and environmental problem. It is largely an ideologically polarized debate with no middle ground. This article proposes a middle ground that is substantially to the right of the midpoint between the two extremes.

First Page

64

Last Page

68

Publication Date

2004

Comments

The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Fall 2024 issue is titled "Private Law: The New Frontier for Limited Government" and covers The Twenty-Third Annual National Student Federalist Society Symposium on Law and Public Policy (2004).

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