Read this article. How would this be avoided and/or dealt with in an anarcho-capitalist society?
The way I see it, if the Lake was privately owned, the owner would have been paid by whoever had used/polluted the lake, so, even though it was polluted, he made money off of what happened and can now use that money in order to clean the lake and rent it out again for people to use. Or sell it in general.
Why this happened in China, I’m assuming, is because the government owns the lake, and therefore they either gave a state-controlled company the permission to use/pollute it, or people just pollute the lake because it doesn’t really belong to anyone, therefore it’s not really their problem to clean up.
However, it says that millions of dollars have been put into the cleanup yet it’s still really dirty. Of course, this could possibly be that the bureaucracy isn’t good at handling funds as always, but what would happen if the individual owner of the lake didn’t have enough money to clean it up and couldn’t find anyone to buy it? Could someone use the putrid smell of the lake to somehow sue him since it could potentially drive away business?