Environmental ethics evolving Second in a series

The current economic slowdown is more than just another down tick in the business cycle. The labored breathing is the sound of an economy in structural change and simultaneously reeling from the burdens of excess:

• Excess by a Congress that spends $3 for every $2 it takes in;
  
• Excess taxes
  
• High corporate and consumer debt and suffocating regulation.
  

A major structural change is the cumulative impact of excessive and costly environmental regulation. Example: Much new investment by U.S. industry during the past 10 years, including the application of new technology, has been deployed to mitigate environmental problems and to comply with environmental regulations -- not to develop new products or increase workers' incomes or returns to investors.

Polls show few oppose environmental cleanup and prevention measures. A dirty environment hurts everyone and damages the economy. But there is increasing awareness that the costs of some environmental regulations are excessive; that regulations eliminate jobs and sometimes shut down factories, farms, ranches and mines.

Item: The Clean Air Act is extracting $25 billion a year from the productive economy, yet many provisions of the law ignore alternatives, including cheaper and better ways to deal with auto pollution, acid rain and other problems.

Item: Increasingly mixed evidence about so-called global warming suggests cause for concern, but not the alarm sounded by some politicians pushing proposals insensitive to the economics of family and community life.

But an environmental backlash is in the wind. So, let's hope that somewhere between the apocalyptics and disaster lobby on one side and ostriches and rednecks on the other, a new "progressive environmentalism" is taking shape.

The elements of progressive environmentalism seem to include the following propositions and principles:

• People are as important as plants and animals
  
• Some critters are more important than others. With limited resources, choices have to be made.
  
• Endangered communities deserve as much attention as endangered species. Inflexible and rigid regulation can destroy communities where people live. Communities also deserve a chance.
  
• Public policy that would reduce choices available to people and communities should be driven as much by science as by public opinion polls and budgets. Current efforts to raise grazing fees on public lands in the West, for example, are driven more by a frantic search for new revenues and to improve the competitive position of Eastern livestock producers than by conservation.
  
• Technology is part of the solution for arresting and even reversing environmental degradation where it exists. Technology is not the enemy, as some would have us think.
  
• Markets can help conserve because markets create value and incentives for protection. We don't see "Save the Cows" bumper stickers because cows are protected by market forces. Buffalo in the U.A. and elephants in Zimbabwe are thriving because they are now in a market economy.
  

So, a rise of "progressive environmentalism" that is pro-human, pro-science and pro-enterprise may help bring more balance to the essential task of environmental protection.