Ronald Bailey Asks: Is Capitalism Ultimately Unsustainable?

Human activity is remaking the
face of the Earth: transforming and polluting the landscape,
warming the atmosphere and oceans, and causing species to go
extinct. The orthodox view among ecologists is that human
liberty—more specifically economic activity and free markets—is to
blame. For example, the prominent biologist-activists Paul and Anne
Ehrlich of Stanford University recently argued in a British science
journal that the environmental problems we face are driven by
“overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use
of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and
socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo
sapiens’ aggregate consumption.” The Ehrlichs urge the
“reduction of the worship of ‘free’ markets that infests the
discipline” of economics. Reason Science Correspondent
Ronald Bailey asks in an essay over at The New Atlantis if
liberty and the natural environment are, in fact, antithetical.

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