The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the African lion as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. But will it actually help the king of beasts?
Posts by Terry Anderson
I'm in rainy Seattle to give a speech on the Green Tea Party at an environmental conference. Ads for the hotel boast that it has double shower heads, which had me pondering the following:
We pass laws forcing people to install restricted flow shower heads. The hotel responds by installing a double shower head and posts a sign saying "restore our world" by turning off one of the heads to save water, our "precious resource." We use time and money -- precious resources -- to pass the laws; we use capital -- a precious resource -- to install double shower heads that deliver more water; and we print signs -- using precious resources -- to restore our world without asking the obvious question: Restore to what? And all of this is to save water which falls from the heavens, runs into lakes and streams, is diverted into pipes delivering water to the shower heads, cleans our bodies, runs down the drain, and returns to the watershed. To be sure, the shower heads, the water purification systems, the delivery systems, and so on use precious resource which might be saved, but how can we save water?
See the Green Tea Party pocket guide [pdf] for some market-based solutions to water allocation.
Image by Angus Mackie/Creative Commons via flickrThe May issue of Outdoor Life carried an article entitled "Can I Fish This Stream?" It included a map of the U.S. showing 45 states with "limited stream access," 4 with "pending access litigation," and 1 with "liberal stream access." The one was Montana, about which the article’s author opined, "Anglers in other states should be so fortunate." Not so fast.
Since the original stream access cases in the early 1980s, landowners have claimed that the court and the legislature took property rights without compensation. Not surprisingly, the conflict has torn the social fabric of landowner-sportsman relations in Montana.
What the author failed to note was the unintended consequences of Montana’s law, namely landowners who cannot prevent access have less incentive to preserve habitat. The now infamous Mitchell Slough case in southwest Montana illustrates what can happen. When anglers took the right to control access from landowners and created public access to the reclaimed irrigation ditch paid for by landowner dollars, owners rightfully shut off the flow leaving fish high and dry. Not only did this reduce spawning habitat for trout that previously migrated freely into the Bitterroot River over which public access has never been questioned, it reduced the incentive of other landowners to invest in such reclamation projects.
The Outdoor Life article concludes that "although Montanans were able to ward off impingement of their access rights last fall, it’s not likely that the assaults on stream and river accessibility are over." Proponents of unlimited access fail to recognize that their assault on landowner rights is also an assault on trout habitat.
Access unlimited, yes; trout unlimited, no.
'Tis The Season
When PERC opened its doors in 1980, free market environmentalism (FME) was considered an oxymoron; environmentalists saw markets as an enemy, not an ally. Now, thanks to PERC, the largest and oldest think-tank focusing on market solutions to environmental problems, FME is being tried and tested around the world. In Africa, private land owners are protecting rhinos from poaching; in the Caribbean an alumnus of PERC's Enviropreneur Institute (PEI) is working to help replant and regenerate dying coral reefs; and in the Gulf of Mexico, the Environmental Defense Fund has joined PERC in campaigning for property rights solutions to overfishing.
At 45°N and 4,820 feet elevation, PERC needs your help to keep its dedicated PERC staff warm this winter season! Your tax-deductible gift will help fund innovative research, convene conferences, publish the results in PERC Reports and other venues, and add to the growing number of environmentalists implementing PERC's ideas.
Here are some specific things that your donation to PERC can accomplish:
- $25 will cover the cost of producing and distributing PERC Reports to one reader for one year;
- $100 will pay for printing and distributing a PERC Case Study to 100 people;
- $2,000 will provide a scholarship for a student to participate in PERC's summer programs;
- $5,000 will pay for a Lone Mountain Fellowship, which brings a professor to visit PERC;
- $15,000 will give an environmental entrepreneur an opportunity to attend PEI and learn to apply FME to their work.
Sincerely,
Terry L. Anderson
Executive Director
Jim Huffman, a long-time friend of PERC, recently published an op-ed in the European edition of the WSJ entitled, “The EU's 'Non-Regression' Gambit.” In it he says,
On Sept. 29, European parliamentarians adopted a resolution calling for next June's United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro to demand that all nations adhere to the "principle of non-regression." In a nutshell, the claim is that international law forbids nations to amend or repeal laws designed to protect the environment. . . . There's no mystery why the principle of non-regression is so appealing to many environmentalists. It would exempt existing environmental regulations from review, reform and repeal, even if the costs have proven to be greater than the benefits. The mystery is why the parliament of an economically struggling continent would agree.U.S. environmentalists also insist on policies with huge economic costs without environmental benefits as evidenced by the efforts to stop the Keystone pipeline. Must we follow Europe’s failed economic policies and its environmental nonsense, too?
The link between natural resources, institutions, and economic prosperity is nowhere more apparent than on American Indian reservations. For this reason, PERC hosted a workshop at Lewis and Clark College on “Institutions, Resource Use, and Economic Prosperity for North American Indians.”
If the scholarly papers presented at the workshop didn’t provide enough evidence of this link, Don Leal and I saw it first hand when we hunted pheasants on the Crow Reservation last weekend. Like most western reservations, the Crow has three categories of land ownership: tribal lands held in trust by the U.S. Government; individual Indian lands also held in trust; and privately owned lands. The important thing to note is that the trust lands are shrouded in layer upon layer of bureaucratic red tape. It was this bureaucracy that led to a court decision (Cobell v. Salazar) holding that the federal government pay $3.4 billion to individual Indian for violation of its fiduciary trust responsibility. How would you like the federal government to be trustee of your assets?
Moreover, trusteeship makes it impossible for tribes or individual owners to use land as collateral for loans, one of the main sources for agricultural investment. Not surprisingly, trust lands have little investment and little agricultural productivity.
Under tribal rules, Don and I could only hunt on trust lands so we took along an ownership map. Turns out the map was not necessary; we could easily tell the trust land from the private land. With only a fence running between the two, the private lands had crops, grain storage bins, barns, and so on; the trust lands had only a few cows or horses grazing on them.
PERC’s research shows that property rights are key to good resource stewardship and economic development is key to understanding why American Indians remain at the bottom of the income ladder. Stay tuned to PERC for more research on this subject.
I purchased The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert Frank thinking I would learn something. I did. I learned that I should not have purchased it.
Frank takes a very simple game theory used to explain the arms race (and naively applies it to elk antlers, arguing that one elk grows big antlers and gets all the cows so that others must also grow such big ones to compete), applies it to market competition, and concludes that competition can lead to bad things for the group as a whole. In the case of elk, he claims that large elk antlers make elk as a species worse off because the antlers make it difficult for the bull elk to run through the woods and therefore more susceptible to wolf predation; obviously he has never seen a bull lay his head back so that the antlers are tucked neatly against his back and ribs and run through the thickest trees; never seen a bull use the antlers for defense against wolves; and doesn't ask how it is that elk are thriving by moving to more open spaces in the presence of wolves--spaces which they occupied before human pressure moved them to the mountains. Finally, Frank argues that taxes can fix the problems--and yes, of course, most importantly the problem of global warming. No data, no theory, no knowledge of wild species, but lots of rhetorical arguments.
Save your money, and if you get a complimentary copy, save your time by not reading it.
With the battle over the debt heating up in Congress, the EPA has once again become the target of budget cutters in Washington. A plan by House Republicans to reduce funding for the agency has been called an "environmental disaster" and a "declaration of war" on environmental protections. But the question no one is asking is what effect the EPA's budget has on measured environmental quality. Do increased EPA budgets result in direct improvements in environment quality, or does it simply increase the size and scope of the agency? Could budget cutting reduce bureaucracy without reducing environmental quality?
Consider the figure above, which shows that since 1980, the EPA’s budget (adjusted for inflation) has remained relatively flat, yet air quality continually improved. Ambient concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have declined by 51%, sulfur dioxide by 76%, carbon monoxide by 80%, and lead by 93% (data here). Moreover, as Joel Schwartz described in PERC Reports, fine particulate levels have declined by 42% and peak ozone levels have fallen 30% as well. Such data suggest that increasing the EPA's budget, as the Obama administration has proposed, will only increase bureaucracy, not air quality.Since the EPA sets national air quality standards, the agency decides when its own job is finished. Despite such improvements, the EPA has never declared the air safe and continues to push for more funding, more workers, and more regulations. If lawmakers are looking for an agency in which to cut spending without causing harm to the environment, the EPA is a great place to start.
This post was co-authored with Shawn Regan.
A property rights solution to tree poaching in Liberia:
[T]he elected government of Harvard-trained President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has signed a deal with the European Union to place timber sales on a permanently legal footing. The deal, agreed to this month, makes use of a unique national timber-tracking system that requires every legally harvestable tree and every cut log to carry a barcode that will enable it to be tracked from its origin to its final destination.More at YaleE360....Every tree in a forest with a logging concession must be tagged with a unique barcode. When that tree is cut, the action is recorded and new tags are attached to each log. Every log that turns up at a port has to be traceable back to a stump in a forest. It’s as simple and as foolproof as checking out at the supermarket, says Ivan Muir, the local boss of SGS, the Swiss specialists in forest certification systems who are in charge of making it happen. Muir also issues export permits for the timber — which mostly gets turned into furniture and paneling — and monitors royalty payments to the government.
Last week I joined Andy Nash on InsideAcademia.tv for a short discussion on "Sustainability and Free Market Environmentalism." The video is now available online. Thanks to Andy for a great discussion.
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Founded 30 years ago in Bozeman, Montana, PERC—the Property and Environment Research Center—is the nation’s oldest and largest institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through property rights and markets.
PERC’s publications, each designed to resonate with specific groups, move ideas generated at PERC to broader audiences.
Research is at the heart of PERC's work, with a focus on the question: What is the link between economic growth and environmental quality?
The goal of PERC’s programs is to fully realize the vision of establishing “PERC University,” where scholars, students, policy makers, and others convene to expand the applications of free market environmentalism.
PERC's fellowships share a common goal of exposing new scholars, students, journalists, and policy makers to free market environmentalism, as well as enable scholars already familiar with FME to explore new applications.
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