The Best Things In Life Are Not Free Any More
There is an old song entitled "The Best Things in Life Are Free". Well, the best things in life are not free any more. Clean air, clean water and the song of a bird (with all that this implies about our ecosystems) used to be free. Now these things cost money. If we want to have them, we have to spend.
Woody Allen has described Nature as basically "one big restaurant". This is true but Nature is not a free lunch. There is no free lunch. We have been taking and taking from Nature and spending little on renewal and restoration. So, as the saying goes, we can pay now or we can pay later but if we pay later it will cost a whole lot more.
In her song "The Big Yellow Taxi", Joni Mitchell says "Say to the farmer, put away your DDT now, give me spots on apples but save me the birds and the bees.". I rhetorically ask, would you buy apples with spots and even pay more for them if it meant that we could save the birds and the bees? What about paying more for all of our agricultural products if we could eliminate pesticides and bring back the viability of the family farm? Would you pay more for shrimp if it meant we did not have the wasteful slaughter of "by-catch", which is a result of large scale, industrial fishing? Would it be worth a few more pennies for our paper if we could get rid of dioxins and furans? I hope that the answer is yes, because the best things in life are not free.
Do coal-fired generating plants produce cheap electricity? Or is it actually very expensive but the price tag has a long string in space and time? Is dumping dangerous chemicals into the Love Canal, where it then seeps into the Niagara River, a cheap way to dispose of chemicals? No, it is actually extremely costly in human and financial terms. We need to do true cost accounting in all of our economic activities. Our cost-cutting society is living in a destructive dream world.
Robert Bateman
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