 Ugh. The environment isn't such bad shape. The government needs to do something. Nuh-uh, no it doesn't. Does too. Does not. Uh-huh. Nuh-uh. There are plenty of ways to help the environment without government. It's called free market environmentalism. Sounds stupid. What's that and why should I care? Why free market environmentalism? Well, whether you believe strongly in property rights or not, the fact is, government is relatively inconsistent and doesn't always handle protecting Mother Earth so well. So, whether you respect and value a free market, or you don't much care about the market, but you don't want to write a letter to your congressman because he's gross, here are several ways to protect the environment without government involvement. One great way to protect the environment from ruin is collective ownership. Yes, comrade! Together, we will seize the means of destruction! Not like that. Oh. I'm talking about a group of people getting together and forming a private contract to own a piece of land together so they can forbid pollution and littering on it. Everyone wants a nice, clean place to live, and this is one way to ensure a cleaner neighborhood and healthier environment overall. Okay. Yeah. It's possible for individuals to help the environment when it comes to small-scale issues, but aren't big businesses destroying the environment so quickly for consumers to stop them? No, not really. In fact, many businesses are doing good work to help save the environment. Well, paper companies, for example, do lots of work to replenish trees so they won't run out. Not only that, but new technologies have inadvertently but drastically lessened the demand for cutting down trees in the first place. For example, a small 16-gigabyte flash drive is able to contain roughly 10,847,408 pages of text at once. To have to print all of that information on paper would require just over 1,300 trees. But what can a market do to prevent massive impending ecological disasters? Like the inevitable extinction of bees, for example. What is the deal? Actually, bees aren't going extinct. Oh, just kidding. There's a bit more to the picture than that. While not exactly going extinct, bees have been dying at increased rates over the past few years. But bee farmers have been breeding them so much more quickly that their population has stayed the same. Bees are livestock, and entrepreneurs don't want their property to go extinct. So in this case, a so-called impending travesty has been prevented by the market. Huh, so entrepreneurs can have a vested interest in protecting Earth? Absolutely, which brings me to the final and arguably most important and effective way to help the environment. Hold businesses accountable. Don't write your gross congressman. Write letters to businesses, or vote with your dollar when they behave in environmentally destructive ways. The market changes a whole lot more quickly than the government does. And the direction it moves in is way more up to you than you think. Hey guys, thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this, please check out feed.org for other educational resources.