I haven’t read Eric Ng Ping Cheun’s new book on Maurice: Ile Durable (MID). Nor, frankly, do I intend to. Yet after perusing an extract of “Robinson sur l’Ile Durable” published in Le Mauricien on Monday, I felt compelled to comment on what appears to be a paean to the free market, a capitalist fairy tale in which the Invisible Hand is the knight in shining armour. The ecological movement, on the other hand, is a Trojan horse packed to the rafters with Commies intent on dragging the world back to the Stone Age. The excerpt starts with an indictment of a chimerical “ecological imperialism”, proving that the author is not immune to the very Manichean worldview he accuses the objects of his scorn of harbouring. After which, the inconsistencies keep piling up like untouched pancakes on an anorexic’s plate.

Climate change, for instance, is the fruit of “natural regulations” and climate science the pursuit of deluded faddists. Fancy that, an economist accusing actual scientists of not grounding their fi ndings in fact. Never mind that the scientifi c community is virtually unanimous in agreeing that human activity is responsible for climate change. He supports his incredibly bold claims simply by mentioning the names of three climate skeptics, thereby dismissing in one fell swoop the reams of empirical data that prove exactly the contrary. To his credit, the author does mention that Mauritius, as a Small Island Developing State, is particularly vulnerable to these “climate evolutions”, but goes on to warn that humanity must be protected from nature, rather than vice-versa. That these two conditions can be linked does not occur to him apparently.

It gets better though. Mr. Ng Ping Cheun suggests that we must be wary of opting for natural gas, which despite being far less carbon-intensive than coal, is produced in politically volatile countries. Naturally, political stability has long been an important yardstick when it comes to the planet’s addiction to fossil fuels, the Middle East being a case in point. Peak petrol, for its part, is a distant prospect given that new stocks will become available in the form of tar sands in Canada, for example. That their prohibitively high extraction costs will mean they’re unaffordable for all but the richest countries is neither here nor there. Oh, and when it comes to the overexploitation of natural resources, don’t worry the markets know best. “The exhaustion of resources is not characteristic of the market economy, but the result of the free access to resources in the absence of a market founded on propriety rights”, he affirms without a hint of irony.

Now’s perhaps the time to share a pearl I’ve been saving for awhile now. It’s from another Eric, Mr. Hobsbawm, the historian who passed away last year: “Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profi t-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies inwhich public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left”. Mr. Ng Ping Cheun has no such qualms. For him apparently, it’s the free market or bust. All the way to Wonderland.