Improving Ecological Consciousness: A How-to Guide

In Richard Kahn's "Toward Ecopedagogy", we find an angry Marxist using large words to try to prove that capitalist society has somehow done everyone (and the environment) wrong. He proposes a new way of societal order where children are taught the value of the environment and the wrongness of capitalism. However, there does not appear to be much reason or thought behind his argument, only big words that Kahn himself made up, (spell check is telling me to add "Ecopedagogy" to my dictionary).

I propose that there does not need to be any drastic change to the educational system to improve ecological or human well-being, but changes to society are indeed in order. The only necessary teaching is the importance of the free market and protecting property rights.

"Advances in capitalist lifestyle and practice are then directly responsible for
grave exacerbations of widespread poverty and suffering, species genocide, and
environmental destruction," Kahn informs us (without citation).

However, free-market capitalism is quite possibly the best thing that could happen to the environment, the only problem being that no country on Earth has had a fully free market. Governments today fail to properly enforce well-defined divisible, and defendable property rights that could greatly increase entrepreneurs' ecological consciousness.

Private ownership of property makes the owners directly accountable for anything that happens to their land- be it good or bad. This prevents a "tragedy of the commons" scenario so often used to criticize capitalism, since the land is owned by one individual or company. Intelligent, sustainable use results in land that remains valuable. The other benefit of private ownership is that when negative externalities arise in using a land (for example, a farmer whose fertilizer runs off into a river) there is someone directly responsible for the creation of the externality (someone to go to in order to fix the problem) and there is someone who is directly affected by the externality (someone who has incentive to fix the problem). With the incentive to protect the environment put directly into the peoples' hands, ecological concerns become primary in profitable thinking.