I was arguing with a buddy; he says that in the PRB (Beautiful Russia of the Future), you can’t just take and distribute state land (which is 92% of it) as homesteads, because people will take it, cut down all the forests, sell the wood to China, and then leave. How realistic is this? Will an ecological catastrophe occur?
How are environmental problems solved in an anarcho-capitalist society? I heard there are several books on this topic.

Anonymous Ancap (question accompanied by a donation of 0.00021605 BTC)

If state land were distributed in modern Russia, then after some time, those who invested enough in this land and built a profitable business on it would start having that business squeezed out of them. Foreseeing these obvious consequences, people would be interested in squeezing as much as possible out of the obtained land as quickly as possible, and conducting more or less intensive farming only on a very modest scale, below the radar.

If the same were done in the Beautiful Russia of the Future, where judicial reform has already been carried out, property rights are protected, and there are several precedents of the successful protection of these rights, then it’s a different story. One could clear part of the forest, selling the logs to China, and use the proceeds to purchase wood processing equipment, gradually scaling a normal business, without forgetting to plant new forests to replace those cut down.

Thus, the optimal strategy for an entrepreneur will depend on their planning horizon, which is further the greater their confidence in tomorrow. Confidence, in turn, is strengthened by the presence of institutions that protect property rights.

Now about environmental problems. Ecology is a complex of knowledge and technologies for organizing a comfortable living environment for humans. The greater the solvent demand for such an environment in a specific territory, the higher the probability that the owner of the territory will prefer to invest in increasing the ecological attractiveness of the plot, even to the detriment of the existing business on that plot—because the demand for ecology also allows one to make money.

As for emissions, there is no fundamental difference between a simple garbage dump on someone else’s plot and, say, releasing harmful substances in the form of smoke into the atmosphere. This activity will meet opposition from neighbors, which will be more pronounced the greater their desire to have a healthy ecological environment right here. Were the polluter’s business somewhere on the internet, they could avoid responsibility for a long time, but land cannot run away; it is a large, stationary target. Therefore, anyone who, at their own risk, sets up a smoking factory that bothers the neighbors risks soon being left without a factory, and realizing that it is cheaper to install a filter on the smokestack, they will do so.

One might object, saying that in Africa, the compliance with environmental standards by enterprise owners is not very good. This is because the balance of violence there is not very stable. As long as it is cheaper to protect a factory from an attack than to re-equip it according to the latest word in ecological science, the owner will invest in protection. But in the absence of a state, under conditions of a sufficiently stable and sufficiently wealthy local community, the balance of violence can be maintained for a very long time, which means everything will be OK with the ecology as well.