“What many environmentalists seem incapable of understanding is that resources are created. After all, crude oil is just sludge until you get it out of the ground and figure out how to use it as an energy source.”

“This Earth Day, we should all give two green thumbs up for human freedom and innovation.”

There is a certain fringe of the environmentalist movement whose members have almost nothing good to say about their fellow men and women. If not for humans, they sometimes explicitly argue, the Earth would be a wonderful place. The lion might not lie down with the lamb, but at least “nature” would be allowed to run its course unobstructed by humankind—which in their reckoning is somehow not a part of nature.

Admittedly, humans have a particular nature that sets them apart from the rest of the fauna on this planet.…

“… knowledge is truly the mother of all resources.” – Erich Zimmermann (1951).

Thanksgiving 2020 presents an opportunity to step back and appreciate the driver of progress in the free economy: the liberated, liberating entrepreneur. The change-makers of the market drive the creation and usage of resources, as well documented by the oil and gas extraction revolution of the last decade or more.

Increasing “depletable”  resources is a paradigmatic example of what Julian Simon called “the ultimate resource,” human ingenuity. Resourceship is a term that the followers of Erich Zimmermann, from Stephen McDonald to Pierre Desrochers, have popularized to understand mineral development.

Salient quotations from seven sources follow: institutional economist Zimmermann; fellow institutionalists Wesley Mitchell and Tom DeGregori; political scientist David Osterfeld; economists Terry Anderson and Donald Leal; economist M.…

This completes our two-part review (Part I here) of the development and worldview of Joanna Szurmak, whose work with Pierre Desrochers is at the forefront of classical-liberal scholarship in sustainable development.

Q. And the shorter pieces led to something bigger—a book, Population Bombed!

A. Yes. Since Julian Simon’s influence and inspiration was in our minds, in late 2017 we realized that Simon’s nemesis, Paul Ehrlich, was approaching the 50^th anniversary of his bestseller, The Population Bomb (1968). This slim book—really a collection of Ehrlich’s lecture notes that his wife and life-long collaborator Anne Ehrlich stitched together into a narrative—became a manifesto to population-control activists around the world.

Like Simon, we disagreed with both the premises and the arguments of those who Pierre likes to call the “population bombers.” But we had been noticing an upsurge in calls to impose controls on world population in the name of environmental health and climate justice.

“Only a relatively large population able to engage in a complex division of labour in the context of trade, industrialization and urbanization can reap the benefits of the feedback loop between technological innovation, increased economic prosperity, and population growth.”

“The most resilient solution for a cleaner earth and better climate, even with the spectre of anthropogenic climate change, is that of intensive growth thanks to, and not in spite of, a large population.”

– Joanna Szurmak (below)

Q. Joanna, you are a new name in the sustainable development field as co-author (with Pierre Desrochers) of Population Bombed! Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change (2018). How did you get to that point?

A. I am new in most areas of scholarship familiar to MasterResource readers. If they happen to have an interest in how amorphous hydrogenated carbon can be made to behave like a semiconductor, they will find my publications from the late 1990s.