Consumers may not care what happens to others but they are certainly worried about the costs they pay themselves. But all the other environmental problems affect people too indirectly to make them act. If I act alone it won t have any significant effect on the problem. Because only co-operative action can tackle environmental problems, they will not be resolved by unhampered market forces. Indeed, it is precisely market forces which bring them about.
Environmental problems occur through the combination of millions of individual economic decisions.
These decisions are taken privately, without reference to what everyone else is doing, because nobody can know what everyone else is doing. Added together, market forces generate an overall result which no-one can predict. This is the invisible hand which the economist Adam Smith argued brought general prosperity. But it can equally be an invisible elbow which brings the earth s precarious ecological balance crashing down like a pile of cans in a supermarket. Bronzed, rich and dying To protect the environment we must force consumers and producers to make decisions which take wider interests into account.