I WRITE in response to a column published Feb. 25 in The Cavalier Daily titled "Acts of Tree-Son." At the heart of the call for ever-growing regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency is a narrative of exploitation: The poor, underdog environment is constantly under assault by an evil army of human corporations.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. We should recognize that the myth of sustainability is just that - a myth. Human beings are not going to last forever, and resources are not going to renew themselves. You yourself will, ultimately, die. Even the sun, our most limitless resource, will burn out eventually.
What are we to do in the meantime? Preserve resources just for the sake of preserving them? If we do not use what is provided, other people will. Why do future generations have greater claim on the Earth's bounty than we? Are potential humans somehow better than current humans? No. Oil in the ground helps nobody, but oil dug from the ground can sustain us until we figure out a way to live without oil. The truth is that human beings are dependent on the planet, not the other way around. We seem to forget that we need soil to produce our food, and fuel to warm us in the winter. The more humans there are - 6.7 billion and growing - the more resources we need. Who is going to provide these goods for us? Certainly not the environment itself; there are just too many humans out there.
It occurs to me that the students who deride and protest logging companies are the same students who live in buildings made of rock blasted from mountaintops; charge their cellular phones at night with energy from burned coal; and wear clothes mass-manufactured in factories. Even The Cavalier Daily newspaper is made from cut-down trees. Rather than take personal responsibility for their economic actions, too many students would have government officials attempt to save us from ourselves. Every plastic solo cup you drink from, every mile you drive in your car is a personal choice. If Americans want someone to blame for environmental degradation, they need only look in the mirror: Lumber is only profitable because you regularly pay for it.
Please note that I do not suggest that free enterprise is perfect, or can fix every problem. National defense and, as of now, a patch for the ozone layer cannot be provided by private citizens alone. Similarly, free enterprise does not excuse greed, arrogance and the like. But every day and dollar students spend here at the University is a day and dollar they do not spend in the real world stopping abuses. If people - specifically, you - really think cutting down trees is bad then under a free enterprise system nothing is stopping you from getting a bunch of donations of time and money, moving elsewhere, and personally ending logging or any other perceived flavor of exploitation. If you cannot or will not do that, perhaps trees are not as valuable as you think they are. Either way, there is no reason for the government to get involved.\nThe truth is that EPA regulations and newspaper articles, while psychologically uplifting, do not solve the real-world issue of environmental degradation. According to the Global Footprint Network, the United States consumes about 4.5 times the sustainable level of resources per person. That is not a challenge you can meet by simply reusing your to-go boxes at Newcomb, or saving a forest or two. Only the Engineering School, not the politics department, can save our way of life.
Ultimately, there are only two ways to allow human activity to persist in the future. Either we all become Buddhist, drastically cut our level of consumption, and stop having so many babies, or we devise ways to get more output per unit of resources. As attempts to do the former have so far failed, it behooves us to embrace the real-world, non-government entrepreneurs who provide us with the necessities of life. We must provide these private citizens with every incentive to accelerate technological progress. This cannot be done if entrepreneurs' resources are spent complying with regulations from Washington or Richmond - regardless of how noble the politicians' intentions are.
It is high time we stop kidding ourselves about what makes our economy run. Free enterprise, including the free enterprise of loggers and miners, is the only system ever designed that grows our technology - that is, our ability to make things with fewer resources - faster than our population. We must embrace this activity as necessary for our way of life because, at the end of the day, technological progress is the only difference between the United States and Easter Island.
Robert Bobbitt is a second-year College student.
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