Privatizing Mother Earth

Are we going to take better care of Mother Earth when we privatize it?

Is privatizing a model to ensure that we take better care of Mother Earth? When you look at the difference between the responsibility that people take for their own goods compared to everybody’s goods, it might be an opportunity.

Suppose that we sell the rivers to growers. Why growers? Because most growers live on a small budget and must take care of the land. If they took well care of their land, the water that goes from their land into the river would be clean.

But since the water is not their responsibility, we see the use of unlimited quantities of fertilizers and dangerous pesticides everywhere. We see illegal dumping of garbage, billions of plastic bottles and aluminum cans, and so on. Why should the grower clean this up? He doesn’t make money with it, so his costs drop if he shows no responsibility. His costs would rise if he would clean it. So, suppose we privatize the river to growers, allowing them to sell the water that is taken from it. Then suddenly they would take action to prevent pollution.

They would make sure that nobody took water out for a cleaning processes, contaminate it and spit it out back into the river. Users of water, amongst them you, would be paying for keeping the water clean. Making it your problem en ensuring your involvement.
Now, most of the people are only involved by participating to a World Water Day. But what can you really do? Very little.
So privatizing our rivers could be a great model to make them clean again. Is this model repeatable? Well, not through copy and pasting, but through logic measurements we can.

For instance, anyone who cuts a tree, being a company or a private person, has to plant two trees back. At the moment we use the concept of paying for your garbage when you dump it. But it is far more logical to pay the dump costs while buying the product, and receive that money back, with interest, when you bring it to a waste disposal. As soon as you have this principle all the poor in the world would start collecting wastepaper, cans, bottles, old cars, and so on.

As soon as we privatize these matters, and turn the stuff that we now call garbage into money making business models on collecting, things will change. Even the word for ‘Gar-bage’ will change: Gar-rich!

Pieter Hoff,
The Green Musketeer