in common law at the beginning of the industrial resolution you had cases where a lady put here wet and clean laundry out to dry and found it dirty and dry the next day. She went to the courts to sue the factory that put the sud on her clothing. The courts ruled that the factory needed to pay copmensation and an indemption was issued, for such cases in the future.
But at some point the government said: progress is more important then the ladies laundry and abolished this. Britain was the main global power and the US wanted to be, so progress had to get right of way.
This story illustrates that external costs were better dealt with before the government came along. A good legal system could put a price on every pollution that hit peoples property.
As for even more grand things like global warming/ozone/acid rain/ rain forest hotels:
first question? Is it really a problem or just one of the many schemes from the left to scare people and grab power? Remember that the right scares people with evil terrorists that come to kill you and demand more powers to deal with those. Left people are usually quick to realise this is a scam. Right people more easily realize many environmental scares are scams. Humans have 2 important properties
1.Protect my loved ones against external threats (more male character)
2.Nurture the weak (more female character)
Both instincts are healthy but open to exploitation by both sides of the political spectrum
If someone wants to build a hotel in the rain forest, can other people use violence to prevent him, because the trees produce their oxygen? In other words:does the breather own the trees that produce his oxygen? I don't think so. It would mean that everyone can put a gun a Brazilians, because they happen to live in the earth's lungs. If we could make forrest protection worth while for them, by offering something in return, that's a different story.
The only reason the rin forest hotel has value is because there is a rain forest. If they completely fill it up with hotels, no one would come. So they are likely to have bought a whole bunch of rain forest around the hotel, to keep their hotel from loosing value. This seems a good protection for the forest.
Forresting is also a way to preserve forest. Not the way it is currently done with government leases for a fixed time period, so grab as much forest as you can is practice, but privately owned forest. The owner wants to have a constant stream of income from his forest lands, just like any other investor, so he will replant to make sure his land does not become worthless barren dessert.
There was a case mentioned by Walter Block once, in which an environmental group found natural gas on their own property. Though there reaction to big oil was always:do not exploit resources, leave nature as it is, they decided in their own case to exploit the resource and use the money to buy up more nature reserve.
Does this help?
Violence has nothing with which to cover itself except the lie, and the
lie has nothing to stand on other than violence. Any man who has once
acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander