In the fall of 1971, I was sitting in a big lecture theatre at the University of Alberta with over 500 other freshmen, at the introductory lecture of Biology 298: Ecology. The charismatic professor was touting the fact that this was one of the first environmental courses offered across North America. The course was advertised as not a prerequisite for higher-level biology courses, so most of the students were there to make up the obligatory science credits for non-science students. But the professor was obviously passionate about getting out The Message, so maybe the more business, econ or poli sci students, the better.

Professor Ecology proceeded to deliver a really gripping and convincing harangue on the hidden destruction of the environment, inflicted by the unthinking habits of the marketplace. If only I’d known then, what I know now.

He took a package of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum© out of his pocket, and counted the number of layers between the gum and its consumer. On the outer package, there was the clear plastic coating on the green paper Wrigley’s wrap, the paper itself and the silvery coating on the inside of the paper – that’s three layers. Then there was the paper sleeve around the gum itself – that’s four. And then the wrapping around the individual gum stick of gum, another piece of silvery paper, the silver and the paper – that’s five and six. Six layers of packaging around a simple piece of gum.

Imagine! Six layers of packaging! Think of all the raw materials going into all this packaging! Think of the waste! None of the real cost of all this packaging figures into what you pay at the till. It’s all hidden cost! How can capitalists be allowed to get away with wasting all of our shared, natural resources, eating them up on packaging a simple piece of gum?

If I knew then what I know now – and I’d had the courage – I would have raised my hand and objected: If these costs are really hidden, how do you know there’re really there? It’s like claiming that we’re surrounded by invisible spirits, then offering as proof the fact that we can’t see them. Uh, maybe… but we’ve now stepped outside the world of critical science.

Let’s back it up a step. Nobody has more interest in cutting costs than Mr. Wrigley, and he has to pay something for every layer of packaging. Spraying a thin layer of shiny aluminum on the wrapping gives him a durable wrap from an otherwise unusable, thin layer of tissue. The same applies to the outer wrap for the whole bundle. The paper sleeve around the stick lets the consumer to pull it from the bundle, put it in a pocket, and have it remain sealed and edible.

Most important: sugar is hydrophilic. A sugary gum stick, exposed to a climate like New Orleans or Atlanta, sucks up moisture like a sponge, coating itself in an unappetizing slime. (Later sugar-free gums innovated with plain-paper wraps.) So the real hidden waste would have been hundreds of thousands of cases of sugary gum, returned to the manufacturer, after turning slimy, moldy, and then toxic on the corner-store shelves. That hidden cost is prevented only by that thin layer of aluminum, keeping out moisture. Mr. Wrigley crunched the numbers on the cost of his packaging. He had too. Unlike the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration, he works in a competitive market, and he can’t afford to be blind-sided by unforeseen expenses.

Mr. Wrigley knew what he was doing, and Professor Ecology did not. Mr. Wrigley proved his numbers in the marketplace. Professor Ecology did not; he claimed the costs are hidden.

The environmental movement has been selling hidden costs, ever since it was launched in the early 1960s, by Rachel Carson’s half-truths and bald lies in Silent Spring (1962), and then by biologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Science magazine essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin argued that the real costs of the free market economy – particularly the free market in breeding of children – are inflicted but hidden in all the things that humanity holds in common: land, air and water. People always breed beyond the carrying capacity of their environment, he claims, inevitably destroying “the Commons.” The only way of preventing the coming disaster is – wait for it – “coercive legislation” in preventing “cheaters” from having too many kids.

Never was there a more convincing yet false appeal to “science,” in the justification of the malignant expansion of public authority.

Falsehood: Hardin claims that human population has only ever been limited by war and disease, when typically populations always stabilize at the “carrying capacity” of their technology (like two millennia of Pharaonic Egypt).

Falsehood: he states that no prosperous people ever achieved “zero population growth,” when prosperous peoples always “level out” in their prosperity and then slide into decadence and depopulation (like third century BC Greece or first century Rome).

Falsehood: He describes the world’s fastest growing peoples as living “most miserable” lives, when in fact the prosperous West has the soaring suicide rates, and developing countries report high levels of happiness – except when inflicted with predatory socialism.

Blatant Falsehood: Hardin claims the “common people” were at fault for overgrazing the village commons in 17th century England. Villagers had lived for over five centuries, sharing the village commons, without overgrazing. Their squires were charged with protecting their agrarian way of life, animated by their shared religion. Tragically, that political elite was then liberated by the “scientific” Enlightenment’s worship of human power. So their squires freely chose to enclose the commons for industrial pasturage, thus driving their villagers in the squalor of the cities. Proving once again Plato’s ancient observation: revolutions come, not from “below,” but from the greed and power-lust of a decadent political elite.

“Scientifically” predicted catastrophes are the HUMA’s bread-and-butter. The biologists or astronomers or geologists or climatologists draw a trend line out to the horizon, and they “prove” that the 1970’s Ice Age or 1990’s Global Sauna is “inevitable.”

And of course, draw the line out far enough, and everything is inevitable. The scientists are never wrong, because all their research is publicly funded, and “all the experts” agree with all the other experts.

As I mentioned once before, the only science that deserves the name is science that specifies what sort of evidence would falsify its hypotheses. To the extent to which environmentalism appeals to “hidden costs” – hypotheses that cannot be falsified nor verified – it has slid sideways into religious faith.