ABSTRACT
Not everyone today exhibits a concern for the well-being of our shared environment. For some such a concern is simple delusion, for everything is fine, and is going to be fine. We discuss this sanguine denial in the following chapter. But if for most of us the concern is there it is very often swamped, even negated, by a concern for our private environment-the luxury of a car and house, the conditions and possibilities of travel, the opportunities for employment, personal enrichment, and so on. Perhaps this concern for the private environment at the expense of the public is ultimately self-defeating: if there is enough public squalor and neglect then there can be no real private comfort or luxury. But still such a focus is understandable, for it reflects some key features of modernity. So it is that the operations of unfettered capitalism are thought by many to harness private ends to public goods without the need for rules and structures of explicit public concern. The "free" or "socially disembedded" market will ensure that supply and demand are neatly and sustainably matched, not only for manufactured widgets and financial goods, but for natural resources and environmental goods generally; and if there are market-failures, if there are burgeoning "negative externalities", well they too can be met by extending the market into new areas, or quietened by the assumption that "overall" negative externalities will be matched by their positive brothers, so that the effective sum is zero and rightfully omitted from economic calculation.
