Nature, Mankind and Society : Basic Understanding for the Reasonable Use of Natural Resources and Conserving Natural Environment and Resources

The purpose of the paper is to find the basic measures of conserving natural environment and resources which are the sources of the wealth and welfare of human beings mostly from the social and economic aspects considering the facts that many kinds of public nuisance, environmental contamination and destruction of natural resources are becoming serious recently. Most of these unfavourable occurrences are caused by the production activity of enterprises chiefly belonging to the heavy and chemical industries which discharge several useless by-products out of the factories. From the viewpoint of private enterprise, so-called free goods such as air and water do not constitute any expenses though they utilize those goods abundantly in the process of production. Also, in general, they do not need to pay any cost even when they pollute the free goods so long as the public opinion against the pollution do not become severe and the physical causes do not become quite clear. Originally speaking, enterprise, as one of the modes of economic activity, has been recognized as rational one for reasons that, as a rule, efforts devoted to the self-interest of enterprise coinside with public benefit during almost two centuries since the Adam Smith\u27s age. However, the actual characteristics of enterprises have become very different as compared with that of the Smith\u27s age. The size of business has become gigantic and the technique of production far more complicated. Besides, free competition was changed noticeably to monopolistic one. Therefore, it is natural that the government should adopt many kinds of severe regulations against the business activities, when unfavourable, in place of a non-intervention policy in the Smith\u27s age. The recent progress of ecology has exaplained the significance of equilibrium between natural environment and many forms of life including mankind. This suggestion seems to be very important particularly when man does not have, enough knowledge about life and vital phenomena yet. However, one should notice that environmental contamination occurs usually as the results of social and .economic activity of human being forming a certain system of society. Recently, some of the ecologists have too much pesmistic opinion concerning the human living in the future and particulatly concerning the food supply because of the environmental contamination and destruction of natural resources as well as the rapidly increasing population especially in the newly developing countries. It thus appears that Malthusianism has revived. But, if the classical doctorine is checked carefully, one would find that Malthus did not have any actual data on which this kind of doctorine should be based. On the contrary, at present, there are surplus food products mainly in advanced countries. In addition, the cost of food production is fairly higher in Japan than in foreign countries. Referring to these situations, one often insists upon the benefit of importing most of the food from foreign countries. The basic idea of this opinion seems to be depending upon the theory of comparative advantage set force by David Ricardo primarily. In spite of his dissertation, there is no security of the long future prospect even at present that foreign food can be easily imported. Furthermore, it should be noticed that when one talks about the cost of production, it means the cost only from the viewpoint of private enterprise while agriculture has played an important role for the welfare of every nation, though it is difficult to appraise it at an economic value. Therefore, there are many reasons why economic policy should set a high value on agriculture and emphasize the importance of conserving the natural resources such as soil and water