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Here’s a letter to the Washington Post.

Editor:

Kudos to Dominic Pino for the reminder that those of us living in today’s industrialized, commercial economies enjoy nature only because nature for us has largely been tamed and sanitized by industrialization and commerce (“A hike through the woods feels natural. It’s anything but.” September 13). As Aldous Huxley wrote in 1928, reacting to William Wordsworth’s romantic attraction to nature,

The Wordsworthian adoration of Nature has two principal defects. The first … is that it is only possible in a country where Nature has been nearly or quite enslaved to man. The second is that it is only possible for those who are prepared to falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in the temperate zone, is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic…. Nature-worship is a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds. Admirable, but somehow, in too many instances, rather ridiculous in being so refined, so rootlessly high-class.*

More succinct, but no less accurate, were Will and Ariel Durant:

Word peddlers tend to idealize the countryside if they are exempt from its harassments, boredom, insects, and toil.**

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics” (available here).

** Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Voltaire (1965), p. 45.

The post We Enjoy Nature Because of Free Markets, Commerce, and Industry appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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