This month's Law & Liberty Forum features a series of essays explaining the need for a "New Environmentalism" and what such an environmentalism might look like. Steven Hayward has the lead essay. I authored a response, as did Richard Morrison and Allan Carlson. Hayward will have a reply next week.
Hayward's essay begins outlining the need for change:
Is it possible that we have reached a turning point for environmentalism? Perhaps we have already reached it, but don't fully recognize it yet?
Let's start with a basic axiom: the environment is too important to be left to environmentalists. Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, which can be said to mark the birth of the modern environmental movement, environmentalism has been wedded to a narrow and often fanatical policy architecture that can accurately be described as demanding billion-dollar solutions to million-dollar problems, almost always choosing strategies that maximize political and legal conflict. The result is a kludgy regulatory regime and ongoing political gridlock. Sometimes, policy delivers perverse results in the form of worsening some environmental conditions.
