Confessions of a former leftie

HIDESIGHT

I was once the perfect Leftie. I believed government should control all resources. People couldn’t be left alone to do as they please: they were too greedy, the market too capricious, resources too precious and the planet too fragile.

We needed a central plan directing all resource use. Government had banished depression and cured poverty. It was now needed to save the planet.

My mission was to study biological science and ecology to ensure the central plan was based on proper science and would work.

I paid my way through university driving trucks. I felt bad that I loved the truck’s throaty roar. And the bigger the truck the better. But I knew the trucking industry was a sunset business. We would shortly all be living on government-directed communes compelled to live within the earth’s ecological limits. There would be no trucks.

The change in my thinking occurred bit by bit. One summer I worked on the West Coast as part of a team measuring regeneration of native forests. The bounce back of forest, including native fauna, was extraordinary. Sustainable logging was clearly feasible.

But even back then green politics dictated no logging no matter the science. Logging was deemed bad and had to be stopped. And, sadly, it was.

Disillusioned, I headed overseas. I discovered Calcutta to be a joyous, thriving place. The mass of humanity was nothing like a colony of Paramecia overshooting the carrying capacity of their Petrie dish. The population biologists’ analogy justifying radical depopulation was false.

I worked on North Sea oil rigs. I came to recognise that it’s the human mind that makes resources: resources are not a physical given. And the human mind has no limit to its creativity. Just as our knowledge can endlessly expand, so too can our resource base.

We have more resources available now than ever before. And there’s no reason to suppose that we won’t have even more in the future. I realised, too, the price system’s power to encourage conservation and further production. In a market, the physical exhaustion of a resource is an impossibility.

Wasn't delivering

I travelled to Eastern bloc countries to see central control and planning in action. People queued for food that to me was inedible. State control and central planning couldn’t even deliver on the everyday things I had always taken for granted. It certainly wasn’t delivering on resource conservation and ecological integrity.

Back in New Zealand I broadened my studies to natural resource management and became a university researcher. I was part of a multi-disciplinary team working on optimal depletion models for coal.

The models were complex, the maths challenging and the punch-cards computers impressive. My driving concern became our lack of knowledge about basic biological systems and the programmed certainty of the models.

I realised the key was to learn through thoughtful trial and error. We needed feedback loops to eliminate mistakes and to grow knowledge. That doesn’t happen with a central plan.

But it happens continuously in a market through profit and loss and what is desperately required to protect natural systems is the evolution and expansion of the common law. I realised the green movement has no grasp of biological systems, nor conception of social institutions.

Strangely, the green approach to the planet is an engineering and technical one. It’s not an evolutionary systems approach.

Greens are just old-fashioned control freaks. Their thinking doesn’t match the biological system for which they say they care.

If it did, they would be libertarian, not fascist, and ecological, not state planners.