Investors Business Daily
Article Title: "No Man's Land "
Section: Issues & Insights  
Date: 6/15/2005  
 
 
Property Rights: Cave bugs - cave bugs! - now have more protection under the law than humans. This is the bizarre world where environmentalism has taken us.

Plans by developers in Travis County, Texas, to build office, apartment and retail complexes were snuffed out Monday, when the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of GDF Realty Investments v. Gale Norton, secretary of the Interior.

The plaintiffs had gone to court claiming the 1973 Endangered Species Act that prevented them from building was wrongly applied in this case because the cave bugs are found only in Texas and have no impact on interstate commerce.

"It's neither interstate nor is it commerce," is how Paul Kamenar of the Washington Legal Foundation put it, explaining why property rights advocates felt the Constitution's Commerce Clause should have prohibited use of the Endangered Species Act in this case.

No matter how ineffective the act has been (and so far, it hasn't saved a single species), environmentalists hold dear to it.

It's obvious that radicals have hijacked the movement, and that their objective is to block anything that (a) promotes commerce and capitalism, (b) increases profits, (c) allows for the conspicuous consumption of resources, (d) creates wealth, (e) fosters independence from government and, perhaps above all, (f) protects the rights of landowners to pursue any or all of the above.

"The distinguishing feature of Communism," said Karl Marx, "is not the abolition of private property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property."

Of course, efforts to save endangered species are more acceptable than a campaign to abolish bourgeois property. An official policy to strip people of their possessions doesn't hold the same appeal as protecting the handsome Florida black panther. Or even Cave Bugs.

Not that we want to color every environmentalist red. Nor do we wish to demean sincere attempts to prevent the fouling of the Earth and wanton destruction of animal and plant life. No one, including the companies most demonized by the green lobby, is so blind and rapacious. Companies that are big enough to be the targets of the political left didn't get that way without foresight and awareness.

What we resent is the movement's economic foolishness and prevailing attitude that all life is equal in importance. We've heard too many times that man is just another beast of the field, no more magnificent that a serpent that crawls on its belly. Now we learn he's no better than tiny bugs that dwell in limestone sinkholes.

It should bother us all that some will move heaven and Earth to protect the lowliest creatures, both beautiful and ugly, but could never find a reason why, say, a Terry Schiavo should be allowed to live.

The goal of the environmental movement has been widely accepted by the public as legitimate. But sometimes we wonder how much that would change if the public ever learned what the real goal is

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