Here's something I don't ordinarily do: ask you to donate money (no of course not to me). The only reason I would consider this is because I believe in it, and I just donated some myself.
How many posts have I written about declining species on the Green Manifesto? Well here's a chance for me and you to do something.
http://www.nrdcactionfund.org/
This site is about protecting OUR national resources, which include wild spaces and wild animals, not just oil or coal. Other resources have value, and values much harder to calculate than the cost per barrel. So if you want to find out more, click the link. This campaign is about Grey Wolves, a distinctly American animal and one I personally find incredibly beautiful and elegant. And worth protecting.
As some of my more market driven friends might say, it's not the government's job to regulate the protection of these animals, but unfortunately they are the only people with the power to regulate these animals protection or destruction. It is the government in Idaho who is legislating the ability to hunt these animals who have just recovered from the brink of extinction. So I say, let the market speak! And I have now spoken with my very own hard earned dollars!
Preserve, protect, or perish.
7 comments:
As some of my more market driven friends might say, it's not the government's job to regulate the protection of these animals...
I prefer "freedom driven" but I'll take what I can get. :)
I'm gonna get yelled at for this... but the best way to protect anything valuable is to allow someone to own it.
As an example: Cork Bark Trees in northern Tunisia were dwindling to the point of crisis. The trees, a major industry in the area, were owned and "protected" government. Because nobody owned them, locals weren't prevented from overharvesting to the point the trees died. Unsurprisingly, the government had neither the ability nor the inclination to stop it.
So the government started selling the trees. Once an individual owned the trees, he had a powerful incentive to protect his investment. Unsurprisingly, individuals went to great lengths to protect their property. Surviving trees were saved and new trees were planted. Their numbers are coming back. All at zero cost to the taxpayers.
Imagine if you could own a pack of wolves, Green Man! If some rancher shot one, he'd have to pay you for the wolves. He'd have to face you in court. Don't you think this might give a rancher pause before he started shooting? I do.
Or even better... what if you could own National Forest land, the wolves territory? Then you could bar the ranchers from even coming on the land to hunt them.
But because you don't, you must instead try to lobby government to protect them, and sorry to say, the ranchers seem to have more political pull than you do.
Freedom and property rights are the answer. Not more government.
Oh Trav, I love your attitude. It's so honestly heartfelt and positive, and as an eternal optimist I hate to say; naieve.
In almost every case people are the cause of environmental degredation, including but not limited to, death of species (extinctions), loss of arable land, loss of natural and wild habitat, and systematic exclusion of other organisms including humans! if we count on the good will of people to protect through ownership our natural capital we are dooming ourselves to a continuation of the downward spiral we currently find ourselves in.
I will provide you with evidence. To honor your evidence I will agree that in some cases adding value to a thing and commodifying an entity can preserve, and can even restore. Your example of cork trees is a great one! And in fact, it is an excellent result of freedom. However what your example fails to address is how we can do the same with other parts of the natural world that do not have a market value!
What is the market value of a wolf? What is the market value of a species of wolf? Saddly it is somthing we will only know once it is gone, if we stick to our current economic models.
Ultimately within the paradigm of our current economic understanding (which I believe is fundamentally flawed, and possibly bankrupt (haha)) things like meadow, forests, raising a child, cooking a dinner at home, butterflies, etc... have NO VALUE! Now you can protest and say "forests have a value if we sell tickets, or if the tourist industry is supported by their presence" but the forst itself has zero value. This is wrong and I will be proved right only when they are all gone. And that is WRONG. Just like lashing a woman for being raped is wrong. Just like genocide is wrong.
So if the people are judged on their track record then I say to hell with them and hello government regulations. No if I am really going to start talking here I can tell you all about my ideal form of government but I am not. Instead read books about the future and dream for yourself!
Book list coming soon.
What is the market value of a wolf? What is the market value of a species of wolf?
Irrelevant.
What was the market value of Tiger Bob? Hard for me to say, but I'm sure for you, he was priceless.
What matters is that he belonged to you. He was your cat - not some pet of the public at large. Had someone harmed him, they'd have to answer to you - in court or otherwise.
In this situation it isn't necessary for anyone but the owner to perceive value in the wolves, the cork trees, the meadows, or the butterflies. It is only necessary that someone own them. Then, should an individual harm that property in any way, the owner has legal redress.
Travis, I totally agree with you about assigning personal responsibility to things so that people will take care of them, but what about things that *can't* be owned, like the atmosphere? Or, to take your example, a pack of wolves. Who would take on the liability for a free-range predator species that will cause damage to livestock?
Or, for that matter, biodiversity, or a healthy habitat, without which an individual wolf is screwed?
As I see it, there are two problems with the idea that property rights are all we need to protect the environment:
First, the environment is an ecosystem, which means that it's the aggregate of a tremendous number of individual animals, species, and systems that depend on one another for their continued existence. You can't parcel an ecosystem out to individuals and hope that their self-interest will keep the whole thing alive; everyone will just try to extract maximum value out of the piece that they have.
Which brings me to my second point, and that's discounting, the way people calculate the value of what they have versus what they might have in the future. Simply put, discounting makes any future amount less valuable than the same amount today, and does so in an exponential manner, so you can pretty much disregard anything past 20 years.
What this means is that if you have a self interested individual seeking to maximize the value of her holdings, she is almost always better off extracting maximum value *now* and then investing the returns in a better scheme.
That's what's stopping a lot of movement on reducing CO2 emissions: the damage will occur in the future and are thus discounted, whereas actions to reduce emissions have to happen *now*. The economists will say that it is more rational to invest the money you would have spent on reducing emissions so that you can pay for the damages to our kids later on.
Tarek,
...but what about things that *can't* be owned, like the atmosphere?
There is no reason the atmosphere can't be owned. With clearly defined property rights, ownership can be affirmed for just about anything.
Modern American real property law says that an owner of a parcel of land controls everything above and below his land. In effect you draw a ray from the center of the planet thru each point along the perimeter of the parcel and out into space. The the owner has title to everything within the "cone", including the air.
With property rights in place, if a factory pollutes the air in their cone and it drifts into yours, decreasing it's value, you would have recourse. The company would be forced to be mindful of this when creating pollution. As it stands now, all they need is to obtain pollution allowances from the government.
The problem, as I see it, can be solved by technology. The settlers of the Wild West had trouble defining property rights and cost effectively keeping another settler's cattle off their land. That is, until the invention of barbed wire. All we need is barbed-wire for the air. It's only a matter of tech and time.
Simply put, discounting makes any future amount less valuable than the same amount today, ... so you can pretty much disregard anything past 20 years.
You're correct in concept but not in application. Consider the captain of a whaling ship who has a whale in the cross hairs of his harpoon. The captain is about to pull the trigger when his first officer points out that the whale is pregnant and if they let it live there will be two whales within a few months. Will the captain save the whale on hearing this information? Not likely. He will correctly conclude that since he has no property right in the whale, if he doesn’t kill it today someone else soon will. Being patient and allowing the whale to give birth requires an immediate sacrifice, without permitting him to benefit from that sacrifice in the future. If somehow whales were privately owned, it would then pay the captain to take the future value of the whale and her offspring into consideration, since that future value would be his opportunity cost of killing the whale today.
Chickens, cows, horses, pigs, dogs, cats, and parakeets are all "ownable" animals and we need not worry about extinction for any of them. That is no coincidence.
Travis,
That is a terrifying vision of the future and you failed to address so many of the concerns I cited. In fact I feel that your response example is so concoted that it has given me redress to shoot from the hip with flower-shotgun and paint a picture of the world as you so describe...
If everything in the world was privately owned there would be PEOPLE that were owned (and I am speaking even more effectively than they already are by the system extant). There would be no public land and eventually only the things of value on a market would exist. Travis, c'mon dude, you are a smart guy, isn't the extrapolated reality of this mode starkly hideous?
You have not addressed in any way how things that don't have SNA quantities would exist! Your idea about atmosphere would create even more regulatory nightmares than our current system. That sort of system would garner a world of exclusivity where people's interests could only be addressed monetarily, and let's face it, not everyone has equal monetary status. All's fair in dollars in sense? Not hardly. I've already said it, and I'll say it again, we cannot count on people's good nature to ensure a safe, healthy, and happy future for our descendants. History has proven that over and over again.
I do have a solution, and it is waaaay too complex to address here, but in essence it would be a horizontal, open source, democratic free market government with strict environmental regulations and incredibly civil liberties.
There I've said it. Now I'm going to get yelled at ;)
Travis, that's an intriguing idea about dividing up the airspace based on property lines.
Here's my question to you: I don't own any property. Does that mean I don't have a right to clean air?
I think that points towards a fundamental problem I have with individual rights being based on property rights: I don't think that my right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness should be based on whether I own stuff.
Especially since, absent instruments like the estate tax (which anti-taxers like to call the "death tax"), net worth inequality will increase from generation to generation. Does the fact that you have a bigger property than me mean that you have more of a right to clean air than I do?
Tort law would answer yes, as the size of the compensatory damages are based on the extent of the injury. So, if you "own" more air that will be polluted, you will be more willing to pay the transaction costs (legal fees) in bringing a tort claim because the potential awards will be greater.
On a different tack, what do you think about anti-trust regulation? This seems to me to be a fairly clear cut case of a necessary role for government to take to ensure a functioning market, but it *is* regulation.
Eli, I'll yell at you the next time I see you.
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