150 years after people: In Boston, the Prudential Centre collapses into the lush gardens that have overrun the city.

Therefore, if such criterion is nonexistent, we could take the assertions of environmentalists to their ultimate logical consequences.  The History Channel has a series of documentaries that shows what would happen to Earth if all people disappeared at once.  In the first six months, wild animals would already be living in cities.  Within a year, flora would already be taking over urban areas, and within five years streets and roads would have disappeared underneath this entire thicket. After 25 years without humans, the concrete and steel structures begin to fall into ruin without the conservation work of humans, and after 200 years only the most resistant structures made of reinforced concrete will remain standing.  Another 500 years, and even those will succumb, and after one thousand years almost all of our civilization's evidence will have disappeared and cities will have once again become large forests.  Is this the ideal world which environmentalists want to impose upon humanity?  If not, then why not?  At what point do they pretend to stop advocating aggression against other people's property in the name of preservation?

There are those who claim that preservation laws are essential in order to maintain human life; in case humans did not have their freedom of action curtailed by a superior and altruistic entity, they would consume all natural resources and leave the planet's environment hostile to life.  These environmentalists fail to recognize that a system of the inviolability of property rights, which is oriented by free market prices in order to allocate resources, is the best manner with which to guarantee a sustainable environment and the well being of the people (read more about it here and here).  And in regards to the claim of the necessity of preserving non-renewable resources, Rothbard makes the following analysis:

Coruscant -- a city occupying an entire planet

And the absence of the use or threats of physical violence in order to preserve the environment also does not mean that an inverse scenario would occur to life after people -- an overcrowded world and completely altered by human action, something like the planet Coruscant, the capital of the galaxy in the Star Wars saga, in which its entire surface is covered by a city.  In a free market, the simple satisfaction which people obtain in appreciating a natural landscape would be sufficient to maintain numerous areas intact by its proprietors.  However, if a world like Coruscant resulted in the absence of aggression, it would obviously be very welcome.

Even so, who stands to win with such conservation laws?  Beyond the bureaucratic parasites that have their jobs guaranteed by these politics and the enemies of capitalism who rejoice in seeing liberties be curtailed and the well being of others be diminished, there exists other beneficiaries, such as land proprietors.  I refer once more to Rothbard's explanation:

In this way, when, for example, the IBAMA (The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) restricts or completely prohibits the cutting of trees in the northern region of Brazil, it is guaranteeing as a consequence a monopolistic gain to the producers of wood in the southern region, artificially making their products even more scarce and, therefore, more expensive, diminishing its social utility.[6]  With all of this exposed, it rests on the environmentalist movement to work out a solution on the contradiction of its objectives with the ones of the global warming alarmists, which claim that CO2 emissions are responsible for the higher temperatures on the planet, whereas a world without any humans would inevitably have more animals -- and, as mentioned here, a small dog is responsible for a larger emission of CO2 than an automobile.  Which of the two objectives will they choose:  the earth with no humans or the earth with a "stable climate"?

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[1] A typical conservationist complainer was J.D. Brown who, in 1832, worried over the consumption of timber: "Whence shall we procure supplies of timber fifty years hence for the continuance of our navy?" Quoted in Scott, National Resources, p. 37. Scott also notes that the critics never seemed to realize that a nation's timber can be purchased from abroad. Scott, "Conservation Policy."

[2] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. Ch.3 P. and M.

[3] As Scott aptly asks: Why agree "to preserve resources as they would be in the absence of their human users?" Scott, "Conservation Policy," p. 513. And further: "Most of [our] progress has taken the form of converting natural resources into more desirable forms of wealth. If man had prized natural resources above his own product, he would doubtless have remained savage, practicing 'conservatism.'" Scott, Natural Resources, p. 11. If the logic of tariffs is to destroy the market, then the logic of conservation laws is to destroy all human production and consumption.

[4] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. Ch.3 P. and M.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Another example taken from Rothbard: "The timber owners also understood the gains they would acquire from forest "conservation." President Theodore Roosevelt himself announced that "the great users of timber are themselves forwarding the movement for forest preservation." As one student of the problem declared, the

 Ibid. Notes in the original.

Translated by David Klein