In my attempt to understand how private law would work, I’d like to ask you the following. Let’s assume person A on his own territory builds a factory which pollutes to only an insignificant degree the neighboring territory which is owned by person B.
Now it is unclear whether this pollution would be considered an act of aggression or not because it is in a gray area. For example I’m sure we all agree that allowing someone to release oxygen molecules into the nieghboring territory should not be considered aggression, however a heavy pollutor is definitely an aggressor.
Now who can decide whether the pollution relased by A is a pollution in the legal sense or not? Let’s also assume person A is uninsured. Let’a also assume that there are several pollution standards and person A justifies his case relying on a standard C, while person B claims person A has been violating his property rights and he justifies that notion on standard D. Who is right, and how can this be resolved?
Whatever market practice comes to be. Practically, I doubt that any industrial activity would go on without insurance (would workers and suppliers even agree to do business with you, not to mention clients), but even with no insurance, some arbiter would be called and, should he decide that pollution is indeed significant, I suspect boycott would be used to make him stop. In extremis, ‘aggression’ on the part of the victim, if within what will be considered proper limits, would be condoned if aimed at stopping the polluting activity.
I always thought tha property rights should extend into the air and into the ground. Let’s say some factory buys a cube of land (3 dimensional) and builds a coal power plant on it. This power plant puts out a ton of smoke into the air. Some environmental group then buys the block of space above and perhaps to the sides of the plant. They can then test the air flowing between the their block and the coal plant’s lot and if the coal plant’s average air composition coming from the coal plant is outside of a statistical norm then the environmental group can sue the coal plant for ‘polluting’ their air.
As for how to define what constitutes pollution versus just ‘air’, I personally think it should be based entirely on mathematics/statistics. Figure out what the average chemical makeup of air on earth is and then get a general idea of how much it fluctuates in unpopulated areas and then use that as your acceptable range of air composition. The same mechanism can be used for water polution.
As always, if you get sued for outputing ‘bad air’ even though you run a clean facility you just need to be able to show where the pollution is coming from (neighbor) and then sue them. The biggest problem with this is that in a city the ambient air is likely already polluted so switching to this system in an already industrialized society would be more difficult. You likely would have to do some averaging of the air quality of everything around the plant being sued and use that as a baseline.
Well if we take a current example as context. The recent information of gas drilling (fracking) that is causing water pollution that is affecting American farms. Currently they do not do so well even with a state. One example one man had a farm for three generations and he woke up one day and just outside his property they were drilling for gas. But in an anarchist society it would be just as difficult i would imagine. The difference would come down to the quality of arbitration, in theory,
If we take another example of companies that drill for water and end up bottling entire regions water supply. It has been known for water companies to take over rivers. In an anarchist society those people would have more right to the property and could have more recourse. If it is public land then there is a grey area. (but that is more common in developing counties.)
Let’s assume that all property is owned by someone, including subterranean, aquifers, etc. But not air, because it moves around and can’t be controlled in the same way.
Next, establish some principles: property rights, individual rights and freedom from the initiation of force or fraud.
One immediate corrollary is that you don’t have a right to clean air. You do have a right to seek it. You also do not have a right to damage other people’s property (without their consent).
Another conclusion you can draw is that if one person’s actions damage the property of another, including by pollution, then those are illegal actions, and the police and/or courts could be enlisted to halt them. In a fully private system, you would simply have private equivalents of the police and courts. To win in court, the person claiming damage would have to prove their case, in terms of reduced property value, damage to health, etc.
Pollution standards should only be put in place by mutual agreement among the parties – in which case, they might help simplify things should a disagreement eventually arise.
