What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

None of this libertarian fantasy is remotely feasible, even after you assume that you can assign property rights to every molecule of the earth and have to sign contracts to take a breath.

As someone who is broadly centre left in outlook, I do actually agree that there is some truth to this. From what I've seen, many environmental campaigners do talk in terms of complete economic and political transformation. And they are often conflate environmental issues with other issues of social and economic justice, even when the actual links between them is questionable. For example, do we have to solve issues of gender, racial, and income inequality in order to stop climate change?

Personally, I think that these issues are not inextricably linked. I'd like to see improvements in all of them. But I also think that climate change is a more pressing issue, because while human-scale problems can always be fixed with more time, runaway climate change is likely a one way process, and one with a very narrow window of opportunity to address. I think many environmental campaigns would find a more receptive audience amongst conservatives if they focused more narrowly on the specific issues of pollution and climate change.

Of course, campaigners do have a answer for this. They argue that these issues are inextricably linked. That the capitalist system is incorrigibly rapacious, and all these different problems are really just products of the underlying dysfunction, and cannot be tackled in isolation. That "evolutionary" improvement is simply an emollient that cannot address the fundamentally catastrophic impact of the free market and the global supply chain on the biosphere, and as such, revolutionary change, even though very difficult, is the only solution that can work, and therefore the only thing worth campaigning for.

My take is that, while some of the fundamentals of modern capitalism are basically broken, with respect to environmental impact, they are still delivering results, in terms of general reduction of overall poverty and improvements to quality of life for the very poorest, and security for the richest. As such, it's not realistic to expect to achieve major changes through campaigns focused on policy. Instead, campaigns to influence policy should focus on specific issues that mitigate the worst of climate change and pollution. Their purpose should be to buy us enough time as a species to solve the other problems using technology. Technological change can deliver genuinely transformative changes to the economy, as we're seeing with the adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles, but not always fast enough.

No, you have it backwards. The "tragedy" was a fiction invented to justify the Acts of Enclosure in the UK, wherein public land (commons) was fenced off for sole use by the local lords.

Here's a good explanation: http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/

In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land.

OK, here are two counterpoints:

First, if land is held in common, everybody has a share of ownership, including people who actually live there and therefore really do care deeply about the environmental quality.

Second, just look at the recent stories about Toys'R'Us. It was purchased in a leveraged buyout in 2005 -- meaning the buyers paid relatively little and the company was saddled with a massive debt. By your argument, wouldn't those new owners care deeply about the long-term health of the company? Instead they extracted as much cash as possible and left behind a bankrupt shell. I think the analogy to private land is pretty clear.

As someone who left a part of the country that votes Republican to Dem 9:1, this is the mindset of most rural voters (where I'm from at least).

They think pollution and grime are "city problems" because city people are just "dirty sons of bitches". These are people who, once their car breaks down, they just put it into the woods/a creek and forget about it. Old tires? Do the same. Loads of plastic garbage? Slow burn it outside since they don't want to pay the monthly garbage fee. These people think they're clean, but they never stop talking about how it's getting dirtier these days because "those city people are buying up houses here and bringing their shit with em", and not that their waste has just accumulated. In my chunk of rural America, the only reason it's not a total wasteland is because the population density is so low. For how many people live in cities, they're pretty clean. If they were to adopt more rural lifestyles, waste would be everywhere.