Private Conservation

Virginia’s Uranium Mining Moratorium Should Be Buried, But What About Property Rights?

by Marc Scribner on January 16, 2013

in Economy, Environment, Features, Natural Resources, Private Conservation, Property Rights

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The earth below the United States contains 5 percent of the world’s known recoverable uranium deposits. More than a quarter of U.S. uranium is found in southern Virginia at Coles Hill near Chatham in Pittsylvania County. The two uranium deposits at Coles Hill are valued at $7 billion and together constitute the seventh largest deposit in the world.

Yet all of it is still in the ground. Over 30 years ago, Virginia placed a moratorium on uranium mining in the state. This prohibition was to be lifted once the state went through the arduous process of drafting uranium mining regulations. Unfortunately, Virginia never got around to writing the rules and the “temporary” ban is still in place. The property owners at Coles Hill and some outside investors formed a company in order to mine uranium once the moratorium is lifted and the onerous regulations recommended by the Uranium Working Group [PDF] are promulgated, but still face stiff opposition from the sadly typical alliance of anti-development environmentalists and ignorant NIMBYs.

This underscores the problem with relying on unreliable and arbitrary regulatory regimes for the ostensible purpose of protecting residents and the environment. Few dispute that responsible, safe uranium mining is possible and indeed practiced throughout the world, especially in major uranium-producing countries such as Australia and Canada. Instead of increasing regulation on mining, however, a more thoughtful approach would focus on strengthening property rights so that those doing the mining face incentives to extract natural resources without harming adjacent property owners.

Robust private property rights — those which are well defined, well defended, and voluntarily transferable — are the most critical underpinning of any free society. It should not be surprising that they are also the best tools to protect others and the environment from potential hazards. (For a brief discussion and defense of free-market environmentalism, see “Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values” by Mark Pennington.) Pollution in this context constitutes a trespass against those rights and the injured owner can file suit to halt harmful activity and collect damages. But relying on the regulatory state in an attempt to protect the environment essentially grants polluters additional rights while preventing property owners from exercising their rights to defend their own property from pollution. This false commons is forced upon society by government and the predictable tragedies result again and again. Unfortunately, these state-caused disasters often only embolden far-left environmentalists in their calls for doubling down on failed regulations.

A firm engaged in uranium mining under state and federal regulations has the incentive to follow the regulations to the letter, regardless of how arbitrary or counterproductive they may be. In contrast, robust property rights would incent miners to allocate resources efficiently (after all, pollution is just a form of waste), take immediate risks into account, and prevent expensive trespasses against neighbors.

While this vision of a free society is far different from our current reality — meaning a complex regulatory regime will be practically necessary for uranium mining to take place in Virginia anytime soon — it is important to remember that it is an absence of liberty, rather than an excess, that increases harm done to people and the environment in the first place.

Remembering Elinor Ostrom

by Fred Smith on June 12, 2012

in Economy, Environment, Features, Natural Resources, Personal Liberty, Private Conservation, Property Rights, Zeitgeist

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Among the individuals with whom I wish I could have greater opportunities to exchange ideas is Elinor Ostrom. She passed away today, and now I must pursue that conversation indirectly — via her writings, her colleagues, and my recollections of those few conversations I did have the opportunity to enjoy.

Her work — for which she received the Nobel Prize in Economics – dealt with the way in which cultural enclaves often evolved institutional and technological solutions to resource management. And, not surprisingly, ideologues of various sorts claimed her work validated their world view.

Communitarians saw her work as “proving” that the classical liberal institutional view of private property, based on a formal rule of law, was not essential to ensure efficient allocation of resources. All one needed, they claimed, was to return to the common property world of yesteryear. Conservative agrarians also found much support from her research for their perspective. And, indeed, her work could be read that way – but it didn’t have to be.

Classical liberals, myself included, viewed her work far differently — as  evidence that the core institutions of a liberal world had developed (in embryonic form) much earlier than first thought. They were not imposed from above, but rather evolved as man began the long path toward modernity.

Moreover, some of her work did touch upon modern property rights — illustrating how commons could evolve into properties that could be restricted by use, by time, and in other ways that moved toward the formal property rights of today, ultimately meeting my friend Rick Stroup’s 3-D definition of property — definable, defensible, and divestible.

CEI’s Center for Private Conservation benefited greatly from some her insights. Once, she and Vincent, her husband, visited CEI and gave an impromptu seminar.

One question that I wished I’d pursued further with her concerns the transition from tribal common property management regimes to the modern private property regimes of today. Under what conditions do such transitions occur? What leads groups to accept a shift of this sort and what advantages (and penalties) does it create?

My own thoughts are that culturally enforced resource management rules can often be very creative and efficient — still, they rely on the culture being closed to outside transactions with others not sharing these cultural values. In a global mobile society, this suggests such closed systems are not likely to survive. However, unless the conditions for the transition to the modern formal rules have arrived, the situation can actually worsen. Fisheries, tropical forests, wildlife — all illustrate how the Tragedy of the Commons re-emerges when the old order collapses without anything to take its place.

Thus, CEI’s interest in pursuing the question: How can one assist isolated tribal enclaves to join an open world economy — when that shift is wise? The question is relevant in many areas of policy: how to better allocate the electromagnetic spectrum, offshore fisheries,  surface waters, and myriad other areas where property rights remain somewhere between the cultural controls Ostrom explored and those favored by classical liberals.

The right to trade a resource that is often restricted to one class of users (agricultural uses of water, for example) might be extended to urban or industrial users, but that liberalization threatens existing  arrangements and requires some trust that the new rules will be at least as effective. The very slow evolution of such liberalized trading policies suggests how little we understand social change. Ostrom had much to say about all this, and left us a rich legacy on which to ponder.

Give a Man a Fish

by Iain Murray on May 18, 2012

in Environment, International, Private Conservation

Those with an interest in conserving our oceans’ fish stocks and those with an interest in promoting private property should both be interested in my latest short study at CEI, “Give a Man a Fish.” Here’s the introduction:

Some policy makers and environmental advocacy groups are beginning to realize that the solution lies not in further government regulation, but in investing fishermen with property rights. However, government bureaucrats are also attempting to utilize this insight to gain even more power over fisheries, threatening to derail the momentum toward a more rational allocation of ocean resources. That would be bad news for both fish populations and the people who depend on them for their livelihood.

The oceans are an important source of food and income for people around the world. In 2007, proteins from fish accounted for 15.7 percent of the total global animal protein supply. In 2008, an estimated 44.9 million people were directly engaged in the fishing industry (both marine capture and aquaculture). However, the world’s fish stocks are not limitless, and are being depleted rapidly.

Two principal factors are at work. First, the billions of dollars in subsidies bestowed on the fishing industry by many governments makes overfishing profitable, even as per capita fishing yields decline. Second, the absence of property rights over fish in most countries means that there is no incentive for any party to husband this resource. In fact, the absence of property rights, combined with subsidies, creates a perverse incentive to deplete this scarce resource.

Attempts to prevent overfishing by promulgating regulations (which are often at odds with subsidies) have proved both ineffective and impossible to enforce. As long as the incentives are skewed by bad government policy, many fishermen will continue to work around regulations or simply neglect to report some of their catches—a practice known as “black” fishing that is all too prevalent. Ending subsidies and extending genuine property rights to fisheries will help solve these problems.

Thanks are due to my co-author, Roger Abbott, who provided much of the initial research effort, and to Michael DeAlessi, who wrote the definitive free market work on privatizing fish stocks, Fishing For Solutions, in 2003.

It’s Nothing Death, Poverty, and Ignorance Can’t Fix

by Wayne Crews on May 5, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Natural Resources, Personal Liberty, Private Conservation

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The New York Times “Room for Debate” frets today about overpopulation (h/t Don Boudreaux). Julian Simon and liberty have long since come to the rescue, in case anybody’s listening. As Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, people are not just mouths and stomachs; they’re also hands and brains. So free them.

Human Achievement of the Day: Tree-Bombing Planes

by Michelle Minton on March 8, 2011 · 1 comment

in Environment, Features, Private Conservation

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As our frenemies over at Treehugger wrote last October about how Lockheed Martin had come up with an ingenious idea for its 2,500 decommissioned Hercules cargo planes: mass-planting of trees.

As The Guardian reports, while these planes were once used for aerial assaults, they can now drop sapling-containing cones instead of land mines — about 3,000 cones a minute or about 900,000 a day.

According to Peter Simmons from Lockheed Martin:

Equipment we developed for precision planting of fields of landmines can be adapted easily for planting trees.

…The tree cones are pointed and designed to bury themselves in the ground at the same depth as if they had been planted by hand. They contain fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture, watering the roots of the tree.

The containers are metal but rot immediately so the tree can put its roots into the soil.

Lockheed has set up Aerial Forestation Inc., a company to market the idea. But just who might pay for something like this? According the article, the system works well for replacing forests that have disappeared for one reason or another. For example, desert areas like Egypt, where there is already a pilot program in the works, the Scottish mountains, or the Black Forest, part of which was cut down for strategic military purposes during the Cold War.

The turboprop plane, which was originally designed for troop medical evacuation and cargo transport, might someday be used to speed up the process of reforestation post-disaster. For example, when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it took nearly 25 years for wind-blown seeds to take root to begin to regrow the forest that the super-heated pyroclastic flow leveled. Perhaps with this new way of planting we can accomplish the Herculean task of regrowing an entire forest in less than a decade.

This is what human achievement hour is all about: using human intelligence, creativity, and technology — not government interference or mandated conservation to come up with the solutions of the future.

A New Course for Wild Tigers

by Brian McGraw on November 24, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment, Private Conservation, Regulation, Trade

A New York Times editorial highlights a struggle faced by the wild tiger, noting its population is down to approximately 3,200 from a high of over 100,000 just one century ago. Tigers face a number of challenges: their wild populations occupy a dwindling amount of space — putting pressure on their habitats, and a variety of tiger parts are highly valued, specifically by the Chinese.

Read the Times quote:

Ending the international trade in tiger parts, which are still believed to have almost magical powers in China and across Asia, will be harder to solve. This isn’t a matter of stopping a few poachers. It means shutting down hard-core traffickers and a high-profit black market. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, is scheduled to attend on Wednesday, the final day of the meeting, which we hope is a good sign. China banned trading in tiger parts in 1993. It must actively discourage the cultural appetite for them and aggressively pursue traffickers.

You can almost hear the condescension jump off the page. Those silly Chinese and their primitive beliefs about medicine, and their revolting food and drink preferences. If only their government were able to make them more civilized, like us.

Imagine this paragraph is about the trade in drugs rather than tiger parts. Many sensible liberals understand the failure of the war on drugs — the inability of a government to stop market forces from meeting the wants and needs of individuals, the billions of dollars and lives wasted, the futility (and arrogance) of efforts to change a “cultural appetite.” Why are they unable to see that the trade in tigers is no different? I am confident that these same individuals support trade in cows, chickens, pigs, etc. all of which are killed in the same way.

The current wild tiger population is found in a variety of scattered countries throughout the world. One thing that many of them have in common is that villages located near tiger populations (forests) are often still living in poverty. Furthermore, without adequate protections against the tiger, these villages are threatened as tigers are capable of attacking and killing humans. When poachers arrive to kill tiger’s, villagers are more than happy to trade their localized knowledge of the area (to help poaching) in exchange for money and the removal of the tiger — a threat to their lives. Poachers are able to pay significant fees to these villagers for their assistance as one individual tiger can fetch as much as $50,000 on the black market.

The solution? In my opinion, more of the same will not work. Poachers will continue to be allured by large profits and conservation efforts will not succeed.

Allow tigers to be traded internationally. There is some worry that the Chinese truly prefer “wild tigers” rather than one which would be raised by humans, though I cannot imagine that their would be much hesitation when the price of tigers drops precipitously due to market forces. The incentive to poach tigers will disappear, and breeders of tigers will ensure there is an adequate number of tigers remaining to assist with re-breeding efforts if that becomes necessary.

Image credit: wallyg’s flickr photostream.

Malthusian Indoctrination of Children Funded with Your Tax Dollars

by Lee Doren on October 20, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment, Natural Resources, Private Conservation

Many people are familiar with Annie Leonard, creator of “The Story of Stuff,” a factually inaccurate viral video being shown in classrooms throughout America. In the video, Leonard argues that we are running out of resources, using too much stuff, destroying the planet and anti-capitalist values are the solution to the problem. It is bad enough that “Green Journalists” push Leonard’s falsehoods, and some teachers think her work has educational value, but now I just learned that your tax dollars are funding Annie’s latest project.

Loop Scoops is a new kids program on PBS where Annie is the content director. The cartoon is geared to children 6 to 9 years of age where they are taught that juice boxes are destroying the planet, consuming less is inherently good for society and we are using too many resources. Sadly, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Environmental Protection Agency provided the funding, which means your tax dollars are paying for it.

The video below highlights one of the videos within Loop Scoops.

I’ve heard some people ask me why we shouldn’t teach kids to recycle. The answer is because we are not running out of landfill space, we are not running out of resources and recycling is not always the right thing to do. Just read the Eight Great Myths of Recycling to understand why tax dollars should not be used to indoctrinate kids to fear their juice boxes.  Kids should be able to enjoy their childhoods without being bombarded with Malthusian propaganda.

The Environment is a Luxury Good

by Iain Murray on August 3, 2010

in Environment, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Private Conservation, Regulation

One of the central insights of Free-Market Environmentalism is that people treat the environment as a luxury good.  They are willing to pay for it when they have spare money, but not when they don’t.  That’s why treating the environment as a tax, which is how statist environmentalism works, arouses resentment, while treating it as a privately-owned asset, like FME does, promotes stewardship and conservation.

There’s more evidence for this view from a new study, Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle: The Chilling Effect of Recession.  Here’s the abstract:

This paper uses three different sources of data to investigate the association between the business cycle—measured with unemployment rates—and environmental concern. Building on recent research that finds internet search terms to be useful predictors of health epidemics and economic activity, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology. From national surveys, we find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate is associated with a decrease in the probability that residents think global warming is happening and reduced support for the U.S to target policies intended to mitigate global warming. Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue. Beyond providing the first empirical estimates of macroeconomic effects on environmental concern, we discuss the results in terms of the potential impact on environmental policy and understanding the full cost of recessions.

The paper’s authors are obviously concerned that the recession means that statist environmental policies are less likely to be enacted.  It would be helpful if, instead of thinking so linearly, environmental academics could think what opportunities this gives to advance free-market environmentalism.  It is clear that low-cost environmentalism is much more likely to be supported during a recession than high-cost environmentalism.  because free-market environmentalism shifts the burdens of environmental protection from the masses to those who are willing to pay, it should be much more attractive to people during a recession.  It is indicative of the ideological blinkers of the environmental establishment that this possibility does not occur to the authors.

Food Fight Over a Living Relic of the Past

by Greg Conko on April 21, 2010

in Agriculture, Culture, Environment, Natural Resources, Precaution & Risk, Private Conservation, Zeitgeist

There’s an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today on a big new food fight over hybrid heirloom tomato varieties.  Some years ago, shoppers fed up with the bland, styrofoam-like taste of the typical supermarket tomato started turning toward farmers’ markets, specialty produce departments, and their own back yards for older, “heirloom” varieties that taste great but generally ripen into muted and mottled colors, and non-uniform size–all characteristics that make them less appealing to retailers who prefer standardization.

There’s one big problem with heirloom tomatoes, however; they typically lack the innate resistances to plant diseases, fungi, and insect and nematode pests that more “modern” varieties enjoy.  That makes heirloom varieties easy prey to the forces of Mother Nature and, in turn, makes the fruit of those plants considerably more expensive.  Now, though, some of the country’s bigger seed companies–including Burpee, Park, and Territorial–are breeding these traits into heirloom varieties.

Despite the high level of demand from seed buyers, a number of gourmands have gotten their panties in a bunch over the mere presence of these improved varieties.  ” “I cringe when I hear the term ‘heirloom hybrid’,” says Amy Goldman, board chairwoman of the Decorah, Iowa-based nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange.”  It seems they object to the fact that heirloom tomatoes have long been “[g]enetically unchanged from one generation to another,” and the introduction of these natural resistances can only be done by breeding new genetic traits into the heirloom varieties.  That is, the superior taste of heirloom varieties isn’t why these folks like them, it’s the idea that they’re eating a living relic from the past.

Some opponents, like Ms. Goldman and her fellow Seed Savers also don’t like hybrids because they don’t breed true–that is, new plants grown from the seeds of a hybrid tomato won’t necessarily be identical to the parent plant.  But, since most commercial and backyard tomato growers buy new tomato seedlings each year anyway, the ability to save seed would seem to be a fairly isolated concern.  After all, it’s a heck a lot more expensive, in terms of the opportunity cost of one’s lost time, to save seed than it is to buy fresh seedlings each year.

But, for those who object to heirloom hybrids on the grounds that they’re not “natural,” I have some news for you.  Heirloom tomatoes aren’t remotely natural either.

wild-tomatoes2

“Natural” tomatoes (i.e. those that grow wild and have never been altered by human hands) look like the little purple and gray berries on the right side of the picture above.  They’re small and hard and full of deadly alkaloid toxins, which stands to reason since tomatoes are in the same taxonomic family as nightshade and tobacco. Oh, and they also express spectacularly vibrant natural resistances to plant diseases, fungi, and insect and nematode pests–you know, those new genetic additions that the opponents of heirloom hybrids object to.

Those resistances were unintentionally bred out of wild tomatoes by early farmers who used crude selection methods to produce good tasting fruits that were safe to eat, but at the cost of significantly lower yields.  During the 20th Century, more sophisticated breeders armed with an understanding of genetics and Mendelian heritability were able to re-introduce those natural tolerances into cultivated tomatoes, but often at the expense of flavor.  Today, however, breeders are now able to give us both the superior taste of the heirloom varieties AND the robustness of modern cultivars–much like the tomato’s wild progenitor but without the deadly toxins.   So, in one very meaningful sense, heirloom hybrids are a lot more “natural” than the plain old heirloom varieties that they’re intended to replace.

That’s capitalism in microcosm:  Early innovations are almost invariably crude and expensive.  The next generation of those products is affordable for the masses, but often lack important refinements and features that earlier artisanal products displayed.  Finally, the pull of market demand and the push of increasingly sophisticated engineering permits the creation of high-quality products with all the bells and whistles, but cheap enough for everyone to enjoy.

One wonders what really is motivating the opponents of heirloom hybrids?  Do they fancy themselves as curators of some kind of backyard gardening museum?  If so, why preserve an intermediate product and not the original?  Maybe they’re really just opposed to capitalism and technology, and this is an easy way to make some sort of symbolic stand?  My guess is that, in their innate snobbery, they fear that the wonders of their precious heirloom varieties will be debased if even the hoi polloi can have them too.

Well, either way, this particular battle doesn’t matter much to me, since I don’t like tomatoes anyway.  But I do love the democratizing quality of modern technology and industrial capitalism.

If we want elephants to die off, we only need to do what we’re doing

by Wayne Crews on February 25, 2010 · 1 comment

in Environment, Natural Resources, Private Conservation

They can be saved, however. Dan Hannan in London talks about “privatising” the elephant (and watch the video):

To us, elephants are cuddly. To Africans, they are dangerous neighbours that trample crops and villages. The best way to incentivise the protection of the herds is to allow local people to treat them as a renewable resource, selling their meat, hide and tusks while preserving their numbers. Property rights, in short, will ensure the preservation of natural resources.

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