You cannot do only one thing.- Garrett Hardin
Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.
Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.
To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.
The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.
The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.
The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum.
The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.
Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.
No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience.
Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
