Taking a Stand

by Rand Paul

  The left often forgets that the profits of capitalism have performed some of the greatest acts of conservation. The profits of capitalism have bought and put aside hundreds of thousands of acres to leave undeveloped. Many great capitalists have done this through history.

  The Rockefeller family donated the land that became Acadia National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Yosemite National Park, Grand Teton National Park at Jackson Hole, and Shenandoah National Park.

  Many more are doing it today.

  Ted Turner is said to be the largest landowner in the United States, with 2 million acres of land.1 He has placed much of it under conservation easements to prevent future development.2 Among other missions, his Turner Foundation expansively works to protect natural habitats in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Montana, New Mexico, and Alaska.

  Then there’s the local boy from Franklin, Kentucky. Brad Kelley is now said to be one of the largest landowners in the U.S.—he owns about a million acres. Very little of the land is developed. Instead he uses some of his acreage, a large parcel on the west coast of Florida known as Rum Creek Ranch, to raise endangered species, including tapirs, anoas (small buffalos), hippos, rhinos, bongos (antelopes), bentang (wild cattle), and a host of others, according to an interview he gave to the Wall Street Journal.3 He works with zoos and conservation groups with the ultimate goal of reintroducing the animals back to their native habitat, the article states.

  Capitalism is not the enemy of the environment. Capitalism shouldn’t be confused with materialism or consumerism.

  Capitalists are often the greatest and most innovative advocates for the environment.

  Think Bill Gates. It’s estimated that Gates has saved 6 million lives through health-care initiatives in Africa. His “reinvent the toilet” campaign seeks to bring sustainable sanitation to two and a half billion of the world’s poor. Also remember that Gates’s environmentalism, his amazing vaccination crusade in Africa, never happens without capitalism. Think of a world with only the tepid sputtering engine of socialism unable to provide the vast wealth that commonly goes back into protecting the environment. I’m reminded of this quote from Winston Churchill: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing. The inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

  Think of Donald Trump.

  Wollman Rink is an ice-skating rink that is an iconic fixture and has been the backdrop of movies such as Love Story for well over half a century in Central Park. By 1980 it had fallen into the disrepair of urban blight. The City of New York and its then mayor, Ed Koch, promised to renovate the rink. Six years after the mayor made his promise, in an entanglement of bureaucracy and big government lethargy, the reclamation project was in shambles, with little hope for completion. Enter Donald Trump. Though not quite the household name he is today, Mr. Trump then ran one of New York City’s biggest apartment construction and management companies. He was also just as brash then as he is now. He challenged Mayor Koch to let him take over the project. At first Koch said no, but public pressure forced the mayor to give the private builder a chance. Three months later, New Yorkers and tourists alike were skating in a beautifully renovated Wollman Rink, and nearly thirty years later it’s still one of the most popular and well-run destinations in Central Park.

  I know what you’re thinking: “Rand, Wollman Rink isn’t exactly saving the Amazon rain forest!” You’re right. Nevertheless, Trump’s efforts with Wollman Rink improved the surrounding natural area of the park. Some of the profit the rink turned—the first time it had done so—was given to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, which helps keep Central Park and other New York City parks beautiful. Trump’s rescue of Wollman Rink also exposed the ineptitude of government-run construction projects and the dominion over private enterprise it holds.

  The fact is, big government, democratic and totalitarian alike, has often failed to protect the environment. Think of the threat that is coming from totalitarian regimes in Russia and China who partner with industry to allow state-sanctioned destruction of the environment.

  Think of the recent history of rank and putrid rivers and bays in cities throughout the United States that became that way through government-issued permits that allowed vast dumping into our waters. A strict understanding of property rights would never have allowed such incredible pollution. Even a cursory understanding of how profit can sustain the environment can help keep the planet clean.

  Here’s what I mean: some nine billion pounds of litter end up in the oceans every year, and litter costs $11.5 billion each year to clean up.4 You need look no further than the sides of our highways and along the trails of our parks if you need a reminder. Look at the junk bobbing in our streams and lakes. If someone owned the lake, the beach, or the stretch of highway, or, even better, if you could determine the price of the lake or highway and what it’s worth to business, you could be absolutely sure that pollution would be kept to a minimum.

  Big companies are already doing this. Dow Chemical, in cooperation with the Nature Conservancy, the biggest nongovernmental environment organization in the world, is developing software that determines the monetary value of nature. So what’s the price of the honeybees that are disappearing, or the price of a polluted stream, or of a depleted forest? Well, software developed by Dow and the Nature Conservancy might be able to give you the answer. So a business that uses honey in its product would likely be willing to invest in ways to protect the honeybee. Connecting profit to environmentalism helps make protection of the environment sustainable.

  The idea is, if we can figure out a way for environmental concerns to be good for business, which this software seems to do, then bigger and more influential players will have a stake in keeping our land, water, and air clean. Take a guess what will happen. Our land, water, and air will be cleaner.

  A Role for the Feds?

  “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” Henry David Thoreau wrote. “It’s the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

  Without question, there is a federal role in protecting the navigable streams that flow between the states, and a federal responsibility to keep our lakes, bayous, and oceans clean. No one should favor policies that allow anyone to dump chemicals in the Ohio River, for instance.

  But in spite of the Clean Water Act and an ever-enlarging EPA, industry dumped 206 million pounds of toxic chemicals into America’s waterways in 2012 alone.5 I have argued that the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers have turned too much of their energy toward harassing private property owners and spent too little time policing our rivers.

  I support the Clean Water Act that says no one can dump pollutants in a navigable body of water. But bureaucrats went crazy in the last forty years, defining dirt as a pollutant and your backyard as a river. As a consequence, $100 million dollars is diverted from pollution control to people control, to harassing law-abiding citizens.

  A man in Michigan was given three years in prison for moving dirt on his own land because the government decreed it a wetland. Meanwhile, tanks alongside the Ohio River in West Virginia that hadn’t been inspected in decades dumped toxic chemicals into the river that contaminated the drinking water for months.

  The bureaucracy of the EPA keeps expanding, and as it does it squeezes our economy and limits our freedom, all the while allowing extraordinary pollution abuse to occur. You know where I stand on this. Protecting the environment should not be in the exclusive charge of the EPA. The states and localities should be first in line in defending the environment, and the courts should intervene immediately, if necessary, if anyone is polluting their neighbor’s property. Protecting the environment should not be a partisan issue.

  Common ground is possible. The intentions of many of the environmental protection measures of forty or fifty years ago were often good, and the initial outcomes helped to correct some problems that needed addressing. Our nation�
�s open spaces, waterways, and air need to be protected. We need to keep America beautiful, but we also need to keep America free and Americans working. This is the balance we must seek.

  Common ground is not only possible, it’s been done before. Republicans and Democrats worked together on legislation in the early 1980s that not only helped to protect 1.3 million miles of beautiful Southeastern American coastline but did so without impeding the free market. How did they do it? By taking away any federal protection for people who wanted to build on the coast. You want to put up a beachfront mansion? Be our guest. You want to construct an oceanfront tiki bar or T-shirt stand? Go right ahead. But don’t expect any storm disaster relief or flood insurance from the federal government.

  What happened?

  Some people went ahead and built. But for the most part the law kept hundreds of miles of barrier coastline pristine.

  It’s worth noting, for all the partisan extremists out there who roll their eyes at the mere mention of our fortieth president’s name, that Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law. He also protected our forests by approving forty-three wilderness bills during his presidency. The number the current administration has?

  Two.

  While I’m at it, I find it ironic that there are some who think that people who live in eastern Kentucky don’t care about their drinking water, a sentiment that made the rounds on the left. Reminds me of one of the first elected officials I met in Hazard, a friendly Kentucky town of about five thousand or so. Within the first thirty minutes of our tour, the official reached into a creek downstream from a coal holding pond, scooped up some water with his hands, and drank it. (I declined, more concerned about amoebas than pollution.) “People from around here care more about their water than anyone living in Hollywood or Washington, D.C.,” he explained. “But we also care about our jobs.”

  Unemployment in Harlan County, Kentucky, is about 18 percent, so you might understand the ire of Kentuckians when they are told that a crevice in the mountain is an “ephemeral” stream or that dirt is a pollutant and therefore the job must be terminated.

  Which really gets to the crux of the problem: distant partisans in faraway places and in exalted positions telling folks in eastern Kentucky what’s best for them. Most of these one-size-fits-all environment rules and regulations they promote do more overall harm than good. The impact they have on the environment is debatable. What’s not is the crippling effect they have on the economy.

  What’s more, the deck is stacked in favor of those companies that can afford teams of lawyers whose only purpose is to circumnavigate the byzantine regulations, leaving the biggest companies to survive the pesky rules while thousands of smaller companies are bankrupted by the compliance costs.

  There is an honest debate about what regulations are necessary, how they are applied, and by whom. There is an honest debate over whether dirt is a pollutant and whether your backyard is a navigable river.

  There is no debate about wanting to protect the environment.

  The Christian martyr and Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

  In my opinion, the most important development of the past decade, and the one that holds the most promise to keep our environment clean over the next few decades, is how we recycle and how we maximize our ability to use resources with the least amount of waste.

  A friend of mine, Nate Morris, started a company called Rubicon Global that is like an Angie’s List for waste and recycling. This virtual marketplace draws carters and recyclers big and small. This way local companies can compete with the larger waste-removal firms like Waste Management and Republic Services. In the past, large chains, like 7-Eleven, Home Depot, and Wegmans grocery stores, hired a local company to remove waste. With Rubicon Global’s virtual marketplace, recycling now often outcompetes the local landfill business and recycles instead of buries much of the waste. The result is competitive prices and more comprehensive service.

  Rubicon also provides consulting services that help clients reduce their waste through logistics advice and recycling suggestions and opportunities. For instance, instead of taking up space in a landfill, discarded Wegmans uniforms are shredded and used as filler for pet beds, and unused pizza dough is turned into biofuel.6

  Another friend, Charles Price, takes coal ash, a waste by-product, and makes it into concrete. Coal ash, or “fly ash,” is the noncombustible portion of coal. The coal ash business, a profitable business that recycles, is threatened by leftists who wish to designate coal ash as hazardous waste, which would put the coal ash recyclers out of business.

  Coal ash has the same chemical makeup as volcanic ash, and it has been used as an ingredient in good cement since ancient Rome. Ever wonder why the Parthenon is still standing? Volcanic ash is one of the answers. Concrete with coal ash is strong, reduces greenhouse emissions, and slows the depletion of a natural resource because you don’t have to replace it as often.

  Charles didn’t stop there. He recently started a million-dollar facility that turns sulfur removed from coal-burning smokestacks into fertilizer for a profit. It amazes me to see pollution turned into fertilizer—a human version of photosynthesis.

  Coal production is a big point for me. Environmentalists on the left are unified and highly vocal in their opposition, leaving no room for compromise or debate. They talk about coal companies “blowing the tops off of the mountains”7 of Kentucky. I challenge them to go out to eastern Kentucky and look at the pristine beauty of its countless rolling hills. They make it sound as if miners are laying waste to the land. What the miners are doing is working to put food on the table and roofs over the heads of their families. And they’re doing it in a section of this country where it’s hard to find any job, let alone a good one. We have to stop destroying families and lives by destroying jobs in the name of environmental protection that is based more in politics than in reality. The coal industry is not destroying the natural beauty of Kentucky. What it is doing is providing jobs, working within tight federal regulations, and looking for ways of cleaner production. Some extremists and alarmists forget the enormous benefits of electricity.

  People who live in the top ten electricity-producing countries live twenty-five years longer than people who live in countries that produce the least amount of electricity. While no one wants to excuse pollution, we should be conscious of the great advances that come with electricity.

  As our population grows we will need all forms of energy: coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar. Mark my words, it is a mistake for government to unilaterally bankrupt and essentially ban an entire segment of energy production.

  Likewise, we will need all approaches in farming to feed our growing population. I am fascinated by the successes of small farms that grow and distribute their products locally. My wife and I visit the local farmers markets in Bowling Green.

  Last year, my youngest son, Robert, and I traveled to the Shenandoah Valley to visit a sustainable farm owned and operated by Joel Salatin. Salatin is an author and a lover of liberty and the environment.

  Joel likes to say he was “planted” in the Shenandoah Valley. When he was just ten, he tended a flock of hens and would ride his bicycle to church and sell the eggs to the families there.8

  Today, he raises cattle, hogs, and rabbits without vaccines or antibiotics and uses only manure as fertilizer.

  He utilizes grass feeding to supplement his chickens and hogs. His cattle are entirely grass fed—he was at the forefront of this and local farming, too. He has mobile chicken coops that he designed, which he repositions daily. The process goes something like this: Joel moves the cows from pasture to pasture every day—they graze, mow the lawn, and move on. The chickens, in their mobile coops, are right behind them. The chickens gobble up the cow poop, then fertilize the grass to help keep the cycle going. The hogs have a beautiful home in the forest alongside the pasture where they feast on hickory nuts.r />
  Salatin has a dozen or so interns to whom he teaches the art of sustainable farming. Being an intern for Salatin is a sought-after position. He preaches what he practices, and his words have a soundness that comes from knowledge and experience. In his eighth book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, Salatin writes:

  Most modern Americans can’t conceive of living like this… The United States has too few farmers to merit counting on the national census form. As a culture, we don’t cook at home. We don’t have a larder. We’re tuned in, plugged in, addicted to electronic gadgetry to the exclusion of a whippoorwill’s midsummer song or a herd of cows lying down contentedly on the leeward side of a slope, indicating a thunderstorm in the offing.

  Like many libertarians, Salatin sees government regulation as written to benefit the large corporate farmer but nearly impossible for the small farmer to follow. He writes and lectures about the inequity of many of the government’s agricultural regulations.

  I hear the same stories from small banks, small medical practices, and small retailers. If there is one overwhelming truth in Washington, it is that regulatory costs are more difficult to bear for small businesses and often lead to big business gobbling them up. In fact, a dirty little secret in Washington is that big business often lobbies for environmental protections and regulations knowing their smaller competitors will not survive.

  Down the road a bit, Barbara Kingsolver wrote of her experience growing and living on local produce for a year. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, she describes the laborious process of planting and harvesting her garden. Her descriptions remind me of Ada Monroe, the heroine in Cold Mountain, and how hard she had to work in her garden to survive the Civil War.