[…] Clinton designated the multiple-use Bureau of Land Management lands as the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in 2001, existing grazing permits were grandfathered into the management plan, much to the dismay of some environmentalists. Lawsuits were quickly filed. In 2013, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the BLM “violated the National Environmental […]
We need creativity to balance the many competing interests affected by monument designations.
Property rights are a tried-and-true method of incentivizing responsible resource use. If rockweed is private property, the owners will have strong incentives to protect it.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT National monuments have always been controversial. Indeed, the very first monument created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Devils Tower in eastern Wyoming, sparked a decades-long conflict between Native American tribes who considered the butte sacred and rock climbers who wanted to scale its vertical walls. As this historical […]
[…] projects. The lack of such incentives explains why environmental groups regularly oppose productive use—they don’t see any benefit. As PERC’s Terry Anderson and Donald Leal explain in Free Market Environmentalism, environmental groups respond to incentives and make trade-offs when they get to capture the benefits. When the Nature Conservancy receives new property, it evaluates […]
[…] ensure our public lands can remain healthy for years to come. The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), where we work, has developed several alternative management approaches that would free federal land management from the fickle process of congressional appropriations while still maintaining proper accountability to government standards. One example would be to allow local park […]
[…] As farmer Michael Bosworth put it to Comstock’s: “People wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t making money.” The prolonged California drought still poses significant challenges—a recent study based on satellite measurements found that surface water availability in Sacramento Valley wetlands has been steadily declining for three decades. Market solutions have the potential to […]
[…] Overfishing is taking its toll around the globe, from South America to West Africa to the Pacific, which supplies more than half the world’s tuna. A recent World Bank study found that 90 percent of the globe’s fisheries are either fully fished or overexploited, costing roughly $80 billion in lost economic benefits every year. Property Rights Slow […]
The theme of Earth Day 2017 is Environmental and Climate Literacy; here at PERC we agree that education is a crucial part of conservation.
Economists Steve Miller and Robert Deacon examine the management of bycatch in the U.S. West Coast groundfish fishery.