‘Free lunch’ policy on ecology fails

Press, 25 September 1987, Page 2

‘Free lunch’ policy on ecology fails

By OLIVER RIDDELLL in Wellington

Reconciling ecological principles and the mar-ket-led economic policy framework is worrying the Ministry for the Environment.

In its briefing papers to the Government the Ministry said an important debate was occurring on this topic among individuals and groups concerned about environmental, social and economic policy. The Ministry was doing some fundamental thinking on the subject. Ecological principles had been defined as:

everything is connected to everything else; everything must go somewhere; Nature knows best; there is no such things as a “free lunch.” These views were in many ways very close to an economics view of the world, the papers said. The central concerns of economics were about choice. Values and belief underpinned choice but economics did not have its own value system and, as a discipline, was not concerned with determining values.

In both economics and ecology the view that

there was no such thing as a free lunch held true. If someone was having a free lunch then someone else had to pay for it.

The “free lunch” idea had led to harvesting of resources without care about what happened to them. That was the cause of problems such as international whaling or crayfishing at the Chatham Islands, the papers said.

The papers said that the message from international whaling and its consequences was that Nature paid the price of the free lunch.