Side effects

Too often the individual or corporation making a profit does not take his full real costs into consideration
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Too often his profit is someone else's  cost
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He who can most successfully push his costs onto others benefits the most
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This logic of externalization applies on the level of the individual or corporation.
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Profits accrue to those who most successfully externalize their costs.
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This is the second step of the eternal formula for business success.
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The first is to take something away from people and then sell it back again.
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Make someone else pay at least some of the costs, while you get the profits.
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Do the printers of unwanted junk mail have to pay the costs of disposing it in landfills?
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Do the makers or users of pesticides have to pay the costs of cleaning the groundwater they eventually contaminate?
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Do the makers or users of nitrogen fertilizer have to pay the costs of eutrophication.


Those things like algae blooms that deoxygenate water and kill the fish?
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Would the mounds of plastic junk we buy every Christmas still be so cheap if they incorporated the medical costs of toxic petroleum by products?
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When cancer rates rise 500% near an incinerator, refinery, or paper mill, does the manufacturer pay the medical costs? 

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Paul Hawken writes,
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Gasoline is cheap in the United States because its price does not reflect the cost of smog, acid rain, and their subsequent effects on health and the environment.
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Likewise, American food is the cheapest in the world
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But the price does not reflect the fact that we have depleted the soil, reducing average topsoil from a depth of twenty-one to six inches over the past hundred years
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Contaminated our groundwater and poisoned wildlife through the use of pesticides.
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All of these examples are real and continue to this day
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Multiple this around the world.
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Consider how it is almost impossible to hold those responsible for damaging the environment liable for the damage they cause.
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Fortunately Nature is on the case

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Nature in the shape of her increasingly violent weather changes is bringing many of these situations out into the open making it harder to spin away from responsibility.
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Hard times are a coming, are upon us.
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Maybe just maybe we will understand that we have not much time
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Time to change how we behave.
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There is a choice 
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A choice to choose  to live in harmony with nature.
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Rather than abusing her.