Remembering Earth Day

I really prefer Don Boudreux's take on Earth Day from Cafe Hayek....

Capitalism Day
Don Boudreaux

On this Earth Day, I celebrate capitalism -- the institution that, far more than any other, has made human lives clean, safe, dignified, and culturally rich. Capitalism is also responsible for giving people the wealth and leisure to permit them to mis-perceive nature as loving and bountiful, and to enjoy nature in a way that few of our pre-industrial ancestors could ever have enjoyed it.

So, on this Earth Day, I offer you here my essay, inspired by the work of Julian Simon, entitled "Cleaned by Capitalism." Here are the central paragraphs:

Before refrigeration, people ran enormous risks of ingesting deadly bacteria
whenever they ate meat or dairy products. Refrigeration has dramatically reduced
the bacteria pollution that constantly haunted our pre-twentieth-century
forebears.
We wear clean clothes; our ancestors wore foul clothes.
Pre-industrial humans had no washers, dryers, or sanitary laundry detergent.
Clothes were worn day after day without being washed. And when they were washed,
the detergent was often made of urine.
Our bodies today are much cleaner.
Sanitary soap is dirt cheap (so to speak), as is clean water from household
taps. The result is that, unlike our ancestors, we moderns bathe frequently. Not
only was soap a luxury until just a few generations ago, but because nearly all
of our pre-industrial ancestors could afford nothing larger than minuscule
cottages, there were no bathrooms (and certainly no running water). Baths, when
taken, were taken in nearby streams, rivers, or ponds, often the same bodies of
water used by the farm animals. Forget about shampoo, clean towels, toothpaste,
mouthwash, and toilet tissue.
The interiors of our homes are immaculate
compared to the squalid interiors of almost all pre-industrial dwellings. These
dwellings’ floors were typically just dirt, which made the farm animals feel
right at home when they wintered in the house with humans. Of course, there was
no indoor plumbing. Nor were there household disinfectants, save sunlight.
Unfortunately, because pre-industrial window panes were too expensive for
ordinary families and because screens are an invention of the industrial age,
sunlight and fresh air could be let into these cottages only by letting in
insects too. Also, bizarre as it sounds to us today, the roofs of these
dwellings were polluted with all manner of filthy or dangerous things. Here’s
the description by historians Frances and Joseph Gies, in Life
in a Medieval Village, of the roofs of pre-industrial cottages:

Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in
marsh country reeds or rushes. . . . Thatched roofs had formidable
drawbacks; they rotted from alternations of wet and dry, and harbored a
menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds; and above all they
caught fire. Yet even in London they prevailed.

Peace and free trade.


So when you read about people (aka environmental whackos) that want to move us back to times of prosperity and happiness, remember what those times were really like.