Protecting Endangered Species: Alternatives to Legislation

The Fraser Institute

April 15, 1998

Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada

Becky Norton Dunlop

 I would like to both thank and congratulate the Fraser Institute for sponsoring this important symposium, as it “provides a forum for economists to show they have a sense of humor.”

I believe that we all want a cleaner, safer, healthier environment. We cherish the beauty of the natural world and want to pass on to the next generation a world that is better than we found it. Although these sentiments are universal, there are strong disagreements over how to achieve them.

Unfortunately, the aim of some environmentalists is to set aside the maximum amount of land and lock it up from any human influence, preserving resources from people rather than for them. Passing laws, writing regulations, and filing lawsuits that halt human activity have been the principal policies pursued by those claiming the mantle of caring for the environment.

It is assumed by many in power in Washington, DC today that government makes good land use decisions and private landowners make bad land use decisions. But these assumptions are not based on sound, objective science and are not verified by human experiences.

In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin described a phenomenon that he termed “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Hardin observed that when land is owned communally each user tends to the detriment of the resource rather than working to increase the value of the resource, as is the case with private property. His observations are correct whether referring to primitive, tribal societies or big government collectivism.

Because the environment is often hurt even when the government publicly owns the land, it is necessary for us to consider the legitimacy of environmental takings of private property. Taking private property for the “public good” without compensation is morally wrong and surpasses any moral authority government might possess. Taking private property for environmental public benefit has unintended consequences that negatively affect the environment. When a law improperly forces landowners to bare the cost of preserving governmentally defined wetlands or providing habitat for an endangered species, it creates a perverse incentive to abandon conservationist land management practices. Why conserve natural resources when the government may prevent you from harvesting those resources in the future?

Ben Cone, a timberland owner in the state of North Carolina, asked himself this very question. Mr. Cone always tried to harvest trees in a way that conserved habitat for wildlife. Campers, hunters and fishermen were permitted to use his land because he believes that wildlife, tree farming and outdoor recreation are compatible, not mutually exclusive. Although when the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker arrived on his property, the Endangered Species Act was used to padlock 1,000 acres of his property. Now, that parcel of land was essentially off limits.

Mr. Cone has spent $8,000 on biologists to make sure he is following the stringent rules. He estimates that he has lost $1.8 million dollars in timber because it is located the area he is not permitted to harvest. He is prohibited from harvesting these trees because they have reached an age at which they attract red-cockaded woodpeckers.

Now, because of the perverse incentives of environmental regulation, Mr. Cone has been forced to ensure that no more of his property is taken when his trees become old enough to attract woodpeckers. To protect his property, Mr. Cone must harvest his remaining trees at an earlier age.


The end result is that there are many losers and only one winner.

· Mr. Cone has lost part of his property and has reduced management options on the remainder.

· The red-cockaded woodpecker has lost because once the trees now off limits to Mr. Cone are gone there will be no more woodpecker habitat generated on Mr. Cone’s property.

· And, the taxpayer loses because dollars spent on regulators ended up harming the very bird they were spent to protect.

· The only winner is the faceless government bureaucracy that writes and enforces ill-conceived laws and regulations. Moreover, they record their failed results in ways to assure more ill conceived laws and regulations are written –assuring that faceless government bureaucrats never become an endangered species.

As a conservation measure, the Endangered Species Act of the United States and its maze of rules and regulations, has noticeably failed in its mission. Not a single endangered species has been recovered and taken off the list as a result of enforcing this law since it was adopted over 20 years ago.

Compare the results of the ESA’s regulatory and punitive approach which often takes private property with the record of voluntary, incentive based efforts which benefit greatly from private property. Wood ducks and bluebirds came back from very depressed numbers because thousands of people built artificial nesting boxes on their private property.

Wood duck boxes built by duck hunters and placed in swamps are actually better than hollow trees at keeping out predators such as snakes and raccoons, and as a result of these boxes there are now over three million wood ducks in America -enough to support an annual harvest of over eight hundred thousand ducks.

When bluebird fanciers discovered about thirty years ago that their favorite bird was declining primarily because the English starling, an aggressive, introduced species, was taking too many of the bluebird’s nesting cavities, they designed bird houses with openings too small for starlings. In the last 15 years, over one hundred thousand bluebird houses have been built and bluebirds are on the rebound.

During the past 30 years, wild turkeys have been restored to their original range and beyond at the impetus of turkey hunters. Today, wild turkeys are found in every state except Alaska. In Virginia, the efforts of the Wild Turkey Federation, a private conservation group, working hand in glove with private landowners, individuals and corporations, to provide habitat, monitor harvests, and enhance the population of wild turkeys has been tremendously successful. And the Virginia State Game Department proudly acknowledges the benefits of this private conservation effort. The turkey population across the U.S. is at an all time peak and growing. And the hunters who organized the restoration effort are now able to harvest five hundred thousand birds annually.

Why are these private efforts so much more successful than the Endangered Species Act? Consider the difference between incentives and regulation. Suppose the Endangered Species Act had been adopted early in this century -wood ducks, bluebirds and wild turkeys would have been added to the federal list and regulated under this law.

How would you possibly get a landowner to give permission to put a nesting box on his property?

How many landowners could afford to let the Wild Turkey Federation release birds on their land if the presence of an endangered species meant they could no longer use their land?

Through the implementation of laws, which take private property without compensation to the landowner, we have created a climate that pits rare plants and animals against property owners. As a result, they both lose.

The same is true of wetlands.

The program’s defenders say the regulations really do not inconvenience landowners that much and that only a tiny fraction of the permits are denied. Yet a study of Corps of Engineers data that The National Wilderness Institute published shows that on average it takes a landowner over 373 days to get an individual 404 permit. Ladies and Gentlemen, a small business cannot afford such a delay if they intend to make a profit. Mom and Pop operations may go bankrupt if their business is disrupted for a year. Only a fraction of the permits may ultimately be denied, but is the story ever really told of the true cost to the applicant of waiting on government bureaucracies for one year?


· 93 % of the individual permit applications exceed the 60 day standard for “evaluation” specified in the Corps of Engineers regulations.

· 63 % cent of the individual applications decided in 1992 ended up being withdrawn. And most of these cases had little effect on the environment.

· One out of four cases in 1992 involved less than one-quarter acre of wetlands. Almost half involved less than half an acre. One person had to wait over a year for a permit that involved a piece of land smaller than half of a ping-pong table.

We will never know how many landowners who might otherwise restore or construct a wetland on their private property for agricultural, fishing, hunting or other purposes were scared away from doing so because of a fear of losing future use of their land.

In Virginia we found that protecting property rights is one of the most important steps you can take to improve our conservation efforts. It is no accident, I think, that our wildlife and habitat management successes -and there are many- are the result of voluntary efforts, not governmental over-regulation of private property. And, no matter where you stand as a state, province, or a country with your laws protecting private property, you can always take more steps in public policy, however incrementally, to better protect or restore these rights.

Successful wildlife programs almost invariably occur where private incentives are allowed to work as in our sport fish and game programs, where consumption or harvesting is used either as a management tool or as a way to make a government program pay its way. Virginia has put into place an Individually Transferable Quota program for rockfish, a program that uses the principles and incentives of private property to benefit the commercial watermen who depend on a healthy and sustained fishery and to promote conservation of this particular fishery. It is a new concept for our fishermen and we have high hopes that it will be successful.

Virginia’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries is the only state agency that is paid for entirely by license fees for hunting, fishing and boating contributions to the non-Game fund.

The U.S. experience in agriculture and forestry also demonstrate the superiority of private stewardship. In 1910, to feed and clothe a population of 92 million people, 325 million acres were harvested for crops. Today we provide for 246 million Americans with 297 million acres and have more than tripled food exports at the same time.

What would have happened if the U.S. government had put in place an environmental regulatory bureaucracy in 1910 that tried to save the environment by blocking the development of agricultural chemicals, farm mechanization, and all the other scientific, technological and management changes that have occurred? What would the environment look like if agricultural technology had been frozen at the 1910 level?


To feed the present U.S. population, at least 925 million more acres would be needed for cropland.

· 925 million acres is over 11 times the acreage of the United States National Park system.

· It is over four times the acreage of the U.S. National Forest system including Alaska.

· It is over four times the total historic wetlands in the United States outside Alaska.

Now, I have a question for our friends who believe that modern technology is destroying the earth. If 60% of the United States’ land outside of Alaska were cropland, where would the wildlife live? Where would the endangered species live? Where would the wilderness areas be? How much bio-diversity would we have if the only lands not farmed were mountain peaks or desert?

Can we get our country back on the right course? And, more importantly, for today, can we persuade you to learn from our mistakes before Canada makes the same ones?

Today’s mainstream environmental ideology was formed 30 years ago and has resisted change more successfully than any other aspect of that era. That mistaken view is that nature exists in a state of fragile balance until man’s rapacious over-consumption of irreplaceable resources overwhelms nature’s tendency toward stasis. The delicate web of life is destroyed. Remember those days when the world was out of oil, out of food, out of soil, out of water and out of baby seals. And in pre-Reagan America when wage and price controls were the way to solve economic problems, similar command and control, one size fits all programs, devised to be run out of Washington, were the way to deal with environmental problems.

Today, scientists describe nature as dynamic and constantly changing. That, my friends, is a good place to begin the new way of thinking about these challenges.

Some of us in the US have gone back to first principles. Rather than simply bashing the greens, concerned conservationists are promoting a positive and distinct environmental vision of our own.

As Secretary of Natural Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia, I chose to talk about what Governor George Allen’s administration stood for -that a growing economy and an improving environment were mutually dependent. That position was proven in four years. This made our opponents, EPA and environmental extremists, as well as the media very unhappy, but the citizens had jobs, economic growth and an improved environment.

The National Wilderness Institute, a thoughtful conservation group, produced a set of positive environmental principles called the American Conservation Ethic. These principles represent a new approach to achieving a cleaner, healthier, and safer environment. In bold, positive language they call for a new, more effective conservation and environmental policy based on the bedrock principles that made America great. They reject the mistaken notion that support for government legislation, regulation or ownership is the measure of environmental commitment and instead call for an approach using the creative forces of free markets and personal responsibilities.


The American Conservation Ethic consists of eight principles that comprise a practical and effective approach to conservation. Let me mention them to you.

Principle One: People are the most important resource. The foremost measure of the quality of our environment is human health and well being. A policy cannot be good for the environment if it is bad for people.

Principle Two: Renewable natural resources are resilient and dynamic and respond positively to sound conservation management. Human life depends upon the use and conservation of renewable natural resources -trees, plants, soil, air, water, fish and wildlife. Because they are resilient and dynamic, we can wisely use renewable resources now while ensuring they are conserved for future generations. For example, forests in Virginia.

Principle Three: The most promising new opportunities for environmental improvements lie in protecting and extending private property and in unleashing the creative powers of the free market. Ownership inspires stewardship. Private property stewards have the incentive to both enhance and protect their resources. It is important to de-couple conservation policies from regulation or government ownership.

Principle Four: Our efforts to reduce, control and remediate pollution should achieve real environmental benefits. We must rationally weigh risks to human health and safety, as well as rationally assess and measure other environmental impacts. Science provides a means of considering the costs and benefits of actions designed to reduce, control and remediate pollution so that we can improve our environment without wasting scarce resources. Collecting fines does not improve the environment. Compliance does!

Principle Five: The Learning Curve is Green. We must encourage the accumulation of knowledge and technology for as we learn more we are able to conserve by substituting information for other resources. We get more miles per gallon, more board feet per acre of timber, a higher agricultural yield per cultivated acre and more GNP per unit of energy.

Principle Six: Management of natural resources should be conducted on a site and situation specific basis. A site and situation specific approach takes advantage of the fact that those closest to a resource are best able to manage the resource, and it avoids the institutional power and ideological concerns that dominate politicized central planning.

Principle Seven: Science should be employed as a tool to guide public policy. Societal decisions should employ science but ultimately are the product of ethics, beliefs, consensus and many other unscientific processes. Science cannot be substituted for public policy but public policy on scientific subjects should reflect scientific knowledge.

Principle Eight: Environmental policies, which emanate from liberty, are the most successful. Our chosen environment is liberty and liberty is the central organizing principle of the U.S. There is a direct and positive relationship between free market societies and the healthiness, cleanliness and safety of the environment. Free people work to improve the environment and liberty is the energy behind environmental progress.

The American Conservation Ethic gives all of us a great opportunity to direct the environmental debate to the real question of how we should care for the environment, rather than the inaccurate debate of whether we should do so.

Establishing public policies based on this ethic will provide Canada and Canadians a wonderful opportunity to enhance the natural resources that are both unique and essential to Canada. It may provide opportunity to export some of your wonders to other parts of the world where individuals may be seeking to invest in the diversity you have and wish to conserve. It is most likely to assure that endangered species can be nurtured, and even prospered.

In closing, let me thank you again for participating in this important symposium. We all know that “ideas have consequences.” I am finally convinced that now that our free market institutions have focused their attention on natural resource and environmental issues, the best days of the big government, command and control extremists are behind them. The world will begin to take notice of the new ideas based on the principles we share, which provide economic benefits and improvements to our environment.

Thank you very much.