During recent visits to my family’s woods in northern Wisconsin, I have methodically snipped, pulled out, and recycled a half-mile of long-abandoned barbed wire. By doing so, I hope to help the biotic communities on either side of the old fence line to reconnect. The work is great exercise, and deeply satisfying.
I have not yet figured out who installed the wire or when, but the stuff was invented by Lucien Smith in 1867,
A year ago, I wrote about how a true-cost steady state economy would deal with water pollution. Last August, the alarming green slime at the west end of Lake Erie was so bad that it shut down Toledo’s water supply for half a million people. Who would pay the tremendous damages caused by the green slime? Certainly not the industrial agricultural interests who were responsible for about two-thirds of the problem!
Water pollution is not just a technical problem. It’s an emergent property of our flawed economic system.
If we don’t like the expense of government regulation and bureaucracies, then we’ve basically got three choices. And only two of them have a future.
Here’s a crazy but true fact: negative externalities are the norm — not the exception — in our current economic setup.