Environmental conservation and libertarianism aren’t words frequently heard in the same sentence, unfortunately. Instead when we think conservation, we think hippies. Hippies, annoying rangers and other officials tell us we aren’t allowed to play in the park anymore, build a house on our own property, or drive that gas guzzling sports car.
I say this is unfortunate because capitalist ideas, where they’ve been tried, have been more effective than anyone could have dreamed. It’s pretty easy to see why, when you think about it. One method makes the process of conservation antagonistic whereas in the other people actually profit from it. I’ve heard it said that the way to succeed in life is to make everyone think they’ve gained in a deal. That’s the beauty of capitalistic strategies; everyone leaves happy.
To an economist, life can be seen as a series of games. These are decisions that create winners or losers. Now, there are two kinds of outcomes: Zero-Sum and Non-Zero-Sum games. The difference between the two is that in the former, there is no new wealth created. The winner ‘wins’ because he takes wealth from the loser. In the latter there is new wealth created. So both parties can win, although one might make out on the deal better than the other.
Typical conservation efforts use the zero-sum model. Man against nature. Which is slightly ironic considering our stereotype of your typical environmentalist. It’s easy to see why people will be perpetually unhappy with that:
“You want to take my land to give to that endangered newt?!?!? A newt, who the heck cares about a newt, for crying out loud?”
Conservation programs that have been popular with the locals and haven’t hemorrhaged money, on the other hand, are based around the non-zero-sum model. I’d like to claim that libertarians were the ones who spearheaded these programs, although largely they weren’t; they were just conservationists who were willing to give evil capitalism a try. The way these programs work is to tie the identity and the prosperity of a local community into the natural habitat that the overbearing white people are trying to preserve.
For us to turn conservation into something that profits everyone (non-zero-sum), we have to give value to the protected area and animals within. This can be done in two ways: Giving them intrinsic or extrinsic value. Extrinsic value is what the price tag says. Intrinsic value is why you could never sell it at any price.
Hippies try to appeal to conservation efforts based on the intrinsic value of the natural world. As a Hindu and an outdoor kinda guy, I wish it could work that way. Hindus and Buddhists, and to a lesser degree Tao and Shinto, are the best target population for this kind of entreaty, their religions being based to a large degree on interaction with the natural world. And, well, if you’ve seen the changes that have occurred in India and Southeast Asia in my lifetime alone, you’d understand the futility of that.
No, our best chance is to appeal to the extrinsic value of that which we would protect. Money. I don’t like that it has to be that way, but I’m mature enough to admit it. One of the most spectacular conservation successes has been the Karisoke Wildlife Reserve, a mountain gorilla habitat in Rwanda. This is the camp that Dian Fossey set up, where she went slightly native as she studied and possibly engaged in carnal activities with gorillas. It wasn’t her efforts, but the work of her successors Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, that I’m going to discuss.
The couple decided to try a more local-friendly approach than is traditional (usually the locals are treated like the enemy). They paid the wardens well, hired local trackers, camp workers, and publicizers. They went to the schools in the area to educate kids about the intelligence and beauty of gorillas. And, in a coup-de-grace, they set up a tourist program in which rich Americans and Europeans funnel thousands of dollars per head into the local and national economy just to point and laugh at the gorilla scratching himself funny. The result was that when the Rwanda/Uganda civil war of the 1980s erupted, only two gorillas were killed by underfed soldiers turned to poaching…on the Rwanda side anyway. Just across the imaginary line where Karisoke stops and the Ugandan part of the Virunga mountains start, close to 100 times that number were killed.
Here, where we’re not quite as impoverished as Africa, the same kind of economic incentives don’t necessarily work to the same degree. But we are a nation of hunters. And that’s a vastly under-utilized resource. Sure, there are yahoos out there that will shoot at anything that moves, but most hunters are responsible, ethical, intelligent individuals. As such they understand that if there’s no more pristine habitat, there is no more good hunting. If we better tapped them as a resource, the national park system would be a good deal more robust, and conservatives would be much happier with conservation efforts.
Kim Du Toit brings us an example that has to do with culling an elk population in Rocky Mountain Forest. The government plan will of course cost $18 million and take 20 years . . . to kill 1500 elk. Which, as Kim points out, is something that hunters pay to do. His modest proposal would result in a $1.5 million profit based on hunting permits alone. Throw in the money spent on travel, lodging, food, guides, and we’re talking a fair amount of money injected into the economy here.
With capitalism, not only can we make conservation less painful, we can even make it a substantial new growth sector in the economy. As Weber and Vedder showed us, it’s at least worth a shot.
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license.
Video published by this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling+ license.
Bad Behavior has blocked 2643 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Facebook
Digg
del.icio.us
reddit.com
Newsvine
Brian D
Jun 02, 2006
Adding this to the mix; take CFIUS, economic espionage, and technology transfer. Do you want to bring it to a grinding halt overnight? Set up a national sales tax as described be John Linder and Neil Boortz and overnight you will have business skyrocketing in the US. But more importantly, keeping existing security procedures, our national industrial and technological advancement will be so fast that by the time someone steals something we will have already invented the next replacement. Creating wealth is homeland defense.
Jun 02, 2006
OK so I’m not really a cowboy. » Conservation And Capitalism
IndianCowboy
Jun 04, 2006
It also takes a certain level of ignorance to assume that the author was for unfettered capitalistic privatization. He isn’t. And was pretty certain he didn’t espouse a completely laissez-faire attitude to environment.
The author is of the hardin-ite school of ecology (google tragedy of the commons). He believes that the only way the environment can be saved is if we don’t make the process antagonistic.
The green party does. Not to mention the fact that they might as well call themselves the red party.
socialist environmental groups continue to approach the environment solely in the context of liabilities. Taxes, penalties etc. That will not work, that will never work.
The point of the article is that we have to turn conservation into a non-zero-sum game, rather than penalize people for treating a commons as a commons, or pretending that they won’t treat it as one, we need to convince them to be a bit more rational and a bit more far-thinking about said commons.
That won’t occur so long as we don’t give any value to the environment (which the green party doesn’t, not in an economic sense).
swoolley
Jun 04, 2006
It takes a certain level of ignorance to presume that if we put environmental protection in the hands of an unrestricted monetary system that somebody who wants the land for externalizing destruction and internalizing profits wouldn’t pay the highest price for it given the short-term economic gain that can be had in a single lifetime versus the long-term economic gain that would be required for unbridled dollarism to actually value conservation.
Land we would like to preserve will always have some resources that can be privatized, used, and destroyed — that is until said resource extraction has completed its continuing course of self-destruction.
Not that the limited success highlighted in the article only describes an accidental niche whose time will expire the moment development takes an interest in the other resources on the land.
However, if we actually decided to internalize the cost of lost resources by charging for the extraction of resources at the same rate used to replace the resource, we might actually have a monetary system that would work, but no libertarian would ever support such a system of full-cost accounting. If they did, they’d be a member of the Green Party who already supports such taxes. These taxes could eliminate sales and income taxes in most places. Enforcement could be localized and trade could be allowed based on calculating in the costs of exploiting comparative advantage, as well, with those countries that have no such legal framework. Natural efficiencies would develop, natural trade routes would open, and people would be paying actual costs, with the help of a market system.
Instead what I hear is that economic progress would come to a halt and even retrograde if we actually internalized ecological costs. I only see that as a tacit admission that the capitalistic system couldn’t cope with sustainability, and it only drives those who care about the environment into socialism.
Can capitalism be reformed to internalize losses to the public welfare? Perhaps it can, but it won’t through the current libertarian ideology of socializing risk and destruction and privatizing profits. This article completely misses that mark.
swoolley
Jun 04, 2006
I’m sorry, IndianCowboy, but if you think “saving resources at the cost of many more easily monetized resources” is going to simply go over well for people who would rather monetize those resource, you’re simply ignoring the current status quo. Any proposed change, from attempts to internalize costs to attempts, to trying to instill in people a future-focus to preserve the environment through their own savings will go contested by those who stand to lose from it. The reason we don’t have such a system is because they have more money than people who would internalize economic losses. The process will not be without antagonism, but in the end, how much of our ecosystem will be lost by the time our genes coevolve with the environmentalist memes through an unrestrained process? That’s the real question we have, and I’m not blindly optimistic. We have brains for a reason — we should use them to setup systems to protect our future generations, not ignore systems that actually protect so that we can setup a system that may work if we were on a totally different planet with a completely different initial condition (I’m not sure you are aware of study into evolutionary stable strategies and the non-linear nature of such strategies).
Rather than espouse Hardin-esque ideology, perhaps try looking into the Santa Fe Institute for some real naturalistic thinking.
I also think it’s ironic that you don’t think the Green Party supports giving economic value to the environment to internalize costs. Have you ever looked at, say Geonomic theory, as an example? Guess where that’s being discussed? That’s right, the Green Party.
Full-disclosure: I was the secretary of the Oregon State Green Party for two years, elected to its State Coordinating Committee, twice, a national delegate for Oregon to the presidential nominating convention, and was at one point an official party spokesperson (though not anymore because I moved to another state for a different job).
swoolley
Jun 04, 2006
I should add that I’m also a hunter and I agree with the part of the article that hunters can pay to solve their problem. In fact, I’ve participated in such programs when I was living in Washington State. The state issued extra permits in areas where natural predators, such as wolves, had been culled (particularly farmland and apple orchards, where the deer would eat the apples and the farmers culled the wolves).
I received one of those permits and shot a bull elk that year. Sustainable area-restricted harvesting has never been opposed by the Green Party. Even groups such as the Oregon Native Forest Council that opposes all clear cutting on national (public) forests supports sustainable harvesting and private property rights. They just don’t support public commons giveaways.
Having been with Earth First, the Oxygen Collective, and Witness Against Lawless Logging members on actions, in person, I can attest that the vast majority of them aren’t communists (I think I met one or two that were). I also think of socialism as part of a market solution, as almost all socialists think, not as part of a totalitarian regime — but if you can’t overcome false dichotomies, that’s your problem, not mine. What concerns me more than so-called left-wing socialists is corporate socialism in the style of “The Greening of America” (I lived for a short time in a flat just above the author in San Francisco.)
tinylittlelife
Jun 07, 2006
swooley-
I have spent a few minutes now trying to decipher what you’re trying to say.
Although you name “evolutionary stable strategies”, “naturalistic thinking” and “Geonomic theory”, you don’t give any details about how those concepts and/or how they support your argument. I’m not even sure what your argument is — the only thing you assert with any clarity is that you worked for the Green party.
As accurately, honestly, and faithfully as I can tell, your points are that:
1. The author [IndianCowboy] thinks that the solution is “saving resources at the cost of many more easily monetized resources”. (This is not a quote from the article, and you [swooley] give no explanation as to which resources are saved and which are monetized)
2. People who promote the ideas of the environment’s intrinisic value or use their own money to protect the environment (antagonistic approach) will lose out to people who wish to exploit the environent, because those who wish to exploit it have more money. (This is precisely the view expressed by IndianCowboy in the 8th paragraph)
3. The antagonist approach to environmentalism will eventually win, but not before the ecosystem is lost. (This seems to agree with IndianCowboy)
4. We should set up systems to protect our environment’s future. (Depending on what you [swooley] could mean by “system”, you are either in agreement with IndianCowboy or contradicting your previous points)
I don’t mean to pass judgements on you or the Green party, but if your post is representative of your work as their spokesperson then I don’t have high hopes for their success. Either that, or you’re joking and I’ve totally missed the punch line.
Michael Hampton
Jun 07, 2006
I would like to invite you all to play the Bunny Game.
Anonymous
Jun 06, 2007
wtf