What’s Wrong with Libertarian Environmentalism

In an essay in Critical Review a few years back, Jeffrey Friedman had a go at explaining what’s wrong with libertarianism. His sixty-page argument can be summed up in a single sentence: “Philosophical libertarianism,” he wrote, “founders on internal contradictions that render it unfit to make libertarians out of anyone who does not have strong consequentialist reasons for libertarian belief.”

The conflict between the philosophical and consequentialist sides of libertarianism is nowhere more sharply on display than when applied to environmental issues. This commentary explores the dilemma of libertarian environmentalism and the ways–none of them entirely successful–in which its practitioners try to escape it.

What kind of libertarianism?

The kind of libertarianism that Friedman had in mind is the orthodox version that finds its clearest expression in the works of Murray Rothbard. In his 1973 manifesto For a New Liberty, Rothbard explains the essence of the doctrine:

The libertarian creed rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else.