The marginal environmentalist

     To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in under mining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

— Theodore Roosevelt

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This quote by Teddy Roosevelt is often interpreted through the lens of environmental conservation. In it, he attacks the exploitative practices of many firms at the time and speaks of the peril in which they place their future generations. During his presidency, he implemented many aggressive policies to fix the problems he saw in American society. Besides limiting the power of trusts during that era, he championed environmental conservation by expanding the national park system and designating large swaths of land as protected. This way, he hoped to balance the extraction of resources America needed then with the needs of America in the future.

    But wait, there’s more. Considering this perspective through the lens of economics, we see another trade-off appear. Instead of thinking about the environment as something that’s meant to preserved, we see it as a common pool of resources. Representing the sum of all human wealth (past, present, and future), earth’s resources presents an interesting dilemma. We can either consume our resources, satisfying the needs and wants of today, or we can focus on saving (investing, really) our resources for our future generations. Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC), is a concept in economics that represents this push-pull relationship between what we do with each additional resource. The higher our MPC, the more of earth’s resources used now, our quality of life (in the short-run at least) goes up, and general welfare increases. Inversely, the lower our MPC, the more of earth’s resources are saved, more is invested in the welfare of future generations, the likelihood of our children’s success increases, and the human species lives for another X number of years.

    The wealthier a person is the lower the MPC, having met all of their “base needs”, accumulation of wealth and the making sure they stay affluent becomes a chief concern. People facing poverty, on the other hand, have a very high MPC. When you're struggling to eat now, the last of your worries is if you can find a meal a year from now. We see this logic also extend to the status of countries, with more developed countries being able to focus more efforts on conservation of resources and their carbon footprint. Developing countries, like India, Brazil, Indonesia, and many others, can’t afford the luxury of focusing on their environmental impact. Is it fair then to force a global standard of environmental conservation upon all countries? Organizations like the UN, claim to solve this issue through exemptions and subsidies for developing countries in regard to climate policies, yet is the burden being shared equally? Is it the developed world's responsibility to front the costs of other’s poverty, when they struggle with environmental action themselves?

    Despite the many innovations that have come along since the time of Theodore Roosevelt, many of the major debates of his era continue to loom over modern policy and have only become more relevant since then. Interest groups seem to focus on keeping the world where it is, stifling the innovation and investment needed in the systems of the future. Our issues never stop evolving, the only question is can our technology, and our governments, evolve quick enough to respond.