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CHAPTER 10:
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Environmentalism is a broad social movement
that is concerned with environmental protection,
conservation, and sustainability. It may
seem odd to include environmentalism in a book about
political and economic systems, but in the twenty-first
century, the goal of environmental protection drives
a significant amount of public policy. In the context of
liberalism, the government’s role is to protect individual
rights. Environmentalism often wants to extend similar
governmental protections to other species and even to
inanimate objects like lakes and sand dunes. Certainly
the natural environment has value, but that value does
not necessarily mean that bears, wolves, and sand dunes
should be extended the same constitutional protections
the government gives to people. Markets and property
rights can protect valuable environmental amenities just
as markets and property rights produce value in other
goods and services. 1 The purpose of the present study is
not to debate the issue of environmental protection, however,
but to show how, when injected into the political
process, environmentalism leads to cronyism.
Modern advocates of environmentalism can trace
ENVIRONMENTALISM 65