Among such groups, there is an intense fear that public land may be put on the auction block. It doesn't matter that, by and large, public land managers have allowed these resources to be severely degraded, often at a loss to the public treasury. The public land paradigm blinds its supporters to the fatal flaws inherent in the political allocation of resources. And the desire to politicize all natural resource debates is the heart of what's wrong with the environmental movement today. Lets take a closer look at these factors.
Many environmentalists are ignorant of how the economy works and distrustful of economic forces.
They see the economy as a chaotic, messy place, with millions of people making billions of voluntary transactions daily, with only their self-interest in mind. But this certainty is often an illusion. The city of Los Angeles has implemented dozens of prescriptive air quality rules for over 20 years, but is still faced with many days of unhealthful air. Centralized regulation in Los Angeles will never work because there are too many diffuse sources of pollution. The amount of knowledge it would take for regulators to design effective pollution reduction strategies for each source is so vast that even if it could be collected, it would immediately be out of date.