Reader Photo: ‘Market-based’ environmental laws can’t beat government mandates

To the editor: Joshua Galperin provides a refreshing and much-needed take on the current environmental movement in this country. (“‘Desperate environmentalism’ won’t save the environment,” Oct. 29)

Far too many mainstream environmentalists are willing to accept what they can get instead of fighting for what we need. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mainstream community’s willingness to allow market-based approaches to pollution to take the place of proven, mandatory controls.

While Galperin specifically references cap-and-trade schemes as an example of wrong-minded thinking, many are not aware that our water protection laws are also being significantly undermined by similar schemes. Industry-driven water pollution trading, with the support of many politically expedient environmentalists, is quietly taking root across the country.

While looming climate change threatens our very existence, it’s the desperate environmentalists’ unwillingness to stand up and force changes to our industry-captured political climate that makes real solutions so much harder to obtain.

Scott Edwards, Washington

The writer is co-director for food and water justice at Food and Water Watch.

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To the editor: Galperin’s plea to his students to not compromise their ideals overlooks basic fundamentals of our culture and economy.

As the price of our damage to the planet continues to mount, we need to remind ourselves, in the words of John Ruskin, that “there is no wealth but life.”

Ruskin also wrote, in 1861: “A strange political economy; the only one, nevertheless, that ever was or can be: all political economy founded on self-interest being but the fulfillment of that which once brought schism into the policy of angels, and ruin into the economy of heaven.”

The chickens of self-interest are coming home to roost, and the price that we and future generations will pay is immense. Will a collective enlightened self-interest move us to action before it is too late? Can we avoid the curses of generations yet to come?

Let us think and act bigger each day, and hope that the professor’s students will do the same.

Keith Pritsker, Valencia

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