“The words ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ are everywhere,” writes reporter Betsy Cohen in a Montana daily paper. “Used casually and broadly, they seem to have become attached to nearly every facet of daily life. . . ”

Although the story details how businesses are using “green” and “sustainable” in their marketing, it doesn’t take much investigation to learn that most of the talk along that line is fueled by government agencies (such as the university I work at) and by people who benefit from government.

Of course, the words “green” and “sustainable” actions are proffered alternatives to what is supposed to be a global environmental crisis — a crisis requiring massive expansion of national governments and international regulations.

But one of the most prominent recurring themes in American history is the federal government’s resort to crises – whether real, exaggerated, or wholly imaginary – to expand its power. This is true even when the crisis, if any, was created by government itself.

The Civil War was used to justify suspending the writ of habeas corpus in states where no fighting was taking place. World War I and the “Red scare” supposedly justified throwing dissenters in jail. The Great Depression was an excuse for a vast expansion of federal control over the economy, even though the Depression was largely the federal government’s own fault. World War II was used as a reason to expand that federal control further, and to herd tens of thousands of innocent American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps. Federal politicians are using the run-up in health care costs to argue for more government control, even though that run-up is mostly the fault of the federal government’s previous intervention.  And since the 1970s, government agencies and their dependents have stoked environmental hysteria to justify expanding their power ever further.

You can probably come up with other examples on your own.

In the current instance, as in the others, government apologists invent reasons for crushing  individual choice and freedom. In the case of the environmental “crisis,” they claim that free enterprise capitalism created, or at least aggravated, environmental problems.

The truth, however, is that government action and government favoritism have been major causes of environmental disaster. The massacre of the buffalo occurred mostly on federal land and on land-grants the government had given as subsidies to favored railroads. Pollution and other disasters — whether in the U.S. in the past or in China today — are often the result of government favoring the property rights of some over others. Some of the worse environmental disasters in history resulted from government decisions in the formerly-Communist countries of eastern Europe.

While it is not invariably true (little in human affairs is), in general free markets secured with firm property rights serve to protect the environment by encouraging careful use of precious resources.

I’m not suggesting that you be heedless of the environment. My own family and I practice recycling, and we try to be careful with the resources we use.

But we must not allow environmentalism to become an excuse for ceding anyone’s legitimate freedom — yours, mine, or anyone else’s — to overreaching government.