Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation

T. Anderson, D. Leal, T. Anderson, D. Leal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137448149, 9781137448132
• eBook ISBN: 9781137443397
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a vision for environmentalism's future, based on the success of environmental entrepreneurs around the world. The work provides the next generation of environmental market ideas and the chapters are co-authored with young scholars and policy analysts who represent the next generation of environmental leaders.

CHAPTER 1

Visions of Environmentalism

with Katy Hansen

The wolf’s howl sends a chill of excitement down Anne’s spine. She has hiked into the wilderness hoping to hear or see one of the hundreds of wolves that inhabit Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding region. Thanks to the reintroduction program started in 1995, when 14 wolves were brought from Canada, her hope is fulfilled. As four wolves wander into the meadow, 200 yards from her tent, Anne fully understands what the great conservationist Aldo Leopold felt while watching a dying wolf. As Leopold (1966, 138) put it, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.”

Not far from the trailhead where Anne began her wilderness experience, rancher Patrick Hill discovers the carnage left by the wolf pack that just killed seven of his sheep. The predators ate part of their prey and left the remainder for scavengers. Far from thinking of the wolves as a missing link in the ecosystem, the rancher sees them as a threat to his livelihood. How could the federal government pour millions of dollars into a wolf reintroduction program when it had previously helped exterminate the killing beasts to give ranchers a chance to make a living from the land?

These two very different perceptions of wolves exemplify the conflicting demands that humans place on nature. The backpacker sees the land as habitat for wildlife, including wolves, and a place where she can commune with nature. The rancher, on the other hand, sees the land as fodder for his livestock, which in turn provides food for humans. The developer sees land near the city as potential housing for a growing population, while the land trust sees it as open space. The power company producing electricity from coal sees water in the nearby stream as a low-cost way of cooling its generators, whereas trout fishers and rafters see the stream as a recreational site. Each of these examples, and hundreds more, illustrate that all environmental problems emanate from conflicting demands on limited natural resources.

When human demands are small in comparison to the resource base, conflicts between competing users are less prominent. People were not concerned with waste emissions into the atmosphere when clean air was abundant. As smoke clouded the air and respiratory illnesses increased with industrial emissions, however, demands for cleaner air mounted. When open space is abundant, citizens take it for granted, but when urban development encroaches on rural landscapes, citizens seek ways to preserve open space for themselves and other species. Will air and water be used for waste disposal or for pristine views of the mountains? Will housing demands trump wildlife habitat? Will dams and reservoirs eliminate free-flowing rivers? Environmental conflicts inevitably arise when scarcity dictates that one use precludes another.

If access to use resources is open to all, however, the “tragedy of the commons” will be inevitable (Hardin 1968). For example, open-access fisheries are rapidly declining because each fisher benefits from larger catches without bearing the full cost of overfishing the population. This results in lower fish reproduction and higher costs of finding and catching fish. Similarly, open access to highways causes congestion, to campgrounds causes crowding, and to groundwater aquifers causes overpumping, drawdown, and land subsidence.

Eliminating the tragedy of the commons requires limiting and clarifying who gets to use and derive value from scarce natural resources. This begs the question of who gets to decide which uses will prevail. Should some fishers receive access to the fish while others are excluded? Do the factories get to use the air for emission disposal or do citizens in the airshed get to breathe clean air and enjoy views unobstructed by smog? Do developers get to build homes on the urban fringe or do wildlife lovers get to protect the habitat?

And what is the role of the government in determining who gets to decide? Are the decisions made by local people directly involved with the resource? Are they decided democratically? Regardless of who decides, it is important to realize that resolving environmental problems creates rights to use and derive value from the environment. Not surprisingly, therefore, resolution is controversial.

For our introduction to a myriad of approaches to preventing the tragedy of the commons, we briefly compare and contrast the two bookends of the spectrum: private property rights and governmental control. Governments—national, state, or local—can impose rules to grant access to the commons and dictate the terms of use. Because such public choices occur in the political arena, we refer to this as political environmentalism. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals or groups who own resources can control access and use in a private or market setting. We refer to this as free market environmentalism. How well these approaches maximize the net value of scarce resources depends on the ability of decision makers to ascertain the value of alternative resource uses and on their incentive to weigh one value against another (see Anderson 2000).

Consider the difference between political and free market environmentalism with respect to fishery management. Political environmentalism relies on regulations and permits to prevent overfishing. If too many fish are being caught, regulators can limit the catch. If monitoring total catch is too difficult, regulators can impose season restrictions, thereby limiting the harvest. If fishers respond by using bigger boats, regulate the size of boats. Free market environmentalism, in contrast, relies on well-defined and enforced property rights to the fishery to prevent overfishing. If fishers are assigned shares in the sustainable catch, they have an incentive to husband the stock of fish rather than race to catch as many fish as they can, as fast as they can.

Neither politics nor property rights work in isolation. Most resource management requires interaction between individual resource owners, corporate owners, local governments, and national governments. Community organizations are increasingly being recognized for their role between markets and government in the allocation of resource rights. Collective groups, such as condominium associations, can regulate and control access; kinship groups can set rules for resource use; and private property owners can determine use. These might be communities of fishers who regulate access to a fishery or tribal members who restrict access to a grazing commons. In either case, the success of the institutional arrangement depends on its ability to generate information on values and provide incentives for individuals to act on those values. Thanks to the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (see Ostrom 1990), we recognize that communal ownership in many different forms can be an effective way to manage resources. Indeed, in the chapters that follow, we will consider these as alternatives to government and private ownership.

This book explores the origin and practical applications of political and free market environmentalism, presents a framework for comparing the two, and provides evidence on the effectiveness of each for improving environmental quality. For now, we compare two ends of the policy spectrum, what we have chosen to call free market environmentalism and political environmentalism.

Free Market Environmentalism

Free market environmentalism connects self-interest to resource stewardship by establishing private property rights to environmental resources. Property rights compel owners to account for the costs and benefits of their actions and facilitate market transactions that create efficiency-enhancing gains from trade. To be sure, some people may act with enlightened self-interest created by, what Aldo Leopold, the father of modern environmentalism, called a land ethic (see Leopold 1966). However, good intentions are often not enough to produce good results. Property rights and markets can provide the right incentives, without relying on altruism or good intentions. As Leopold put it, “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest” (1934, 202).

Markets based on secure property rights provide a decentralized system for enhancing the value of resources. They generate information in the form of prices that give demanders and suppliers objective measures of subjective values. Resource stewardship will occur as long as private owners are rewarded for the benefits they generate from resource use while being held accountable for any costs they create.

To be sure, governments play a critical role in clearly specifying and recording ownership claims, establishing liability rules, and adjudicating disputed property rights. That said, well-defined and enforced property rights impose discipline on resource owners by holding them accountable for the damage they do to others and rewarding them for improving resource use. Property rights incentivize owners to protect the value of their environmental assets.

Trade encourages owners to consider not only their own values in natural resource use decisions, but also the values of others who are willing to pay for the use of the resource. When rights are transferable in the marketplace, owners, be they individuals, corporations, nonprofits, or communal groups, have an incentive to evaluate long-term trade-offs since their wealth is at stake. In short, property rights align self-interest with society’s environmental interests.

Market forces based on demand and supply of environmental goods and services stimulate human ingenuity to find ways to cope with natural resource constraints. Producers improve productivity and find substitutes to conserve in the face of resource scarcity, while consumers reduce consumption and redirect their purchases in response to changing prices. Though natural resources may be finite, their potential to supply human demands is limited only by human ingenuity (see Simon 1996).

In addition to promoting gains from trade, free market environmentalism embraces the free enterprise market system as a proven engine for economic growth, which, in turn, is an important driver of environmental quality. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, economists have devoted an untold number of pages and statistics showing the correlation between the institutions of free societies and economic development. Various “freedom indexes” have been compiled based on the degree to which nations rely on free markets, the rule of law, democracy, and limited government, to mention a few.¹ Regardless of how freedom is measured, the correlations with measures of growth are always positive; more economic freedom means more economic growth.

The connection between incomes and environmental quality is more complicated in that the latter generally declines in the early stages of growth and then increases after a certain threshold, and the turning point varies with the environmental goods in question.² As incomes rise people shift their focus from obtaining the basic necessities of life—food and shelter—to other goods and services. For a person living at subsistence, setting aside land for wildlife or reducing carbon emissions to reduce the potential for global warming is unfathomable. With higher incomes, people demand cleaner water, cleaner air, and other ecosystem services. The higher demand for environmental amenities stimulates environmental entrepreneurship. Moreover, the new technology and innovation that stimulates growth in other sectors can be applied to the environment, thus reducing the cost of producing environmental quality. For example, computer technology can be applied to transportation to improve fuel efficiency, reduce congestion, and decrease automobile emissions. Global positioning satellites and geographic information systems can better define land boundaries, track land use, and monitor water supplies. In short, growth is green.

Consider two examples that illustrate how free market environmentalism works. When the Wisconsin Nature Conservancy was given title to 40 acres of beachfront property on St. Croix, Virgin Islands, it had to ask whether beachfront preservation was consistent with its goal of preserving habitat for rare and endangered species. One might think that an environmental group would go to great lengths to prevent development of a pristine beach in the Caribbean, but it actually traded the beachfront property, with some protective covenants in place, for a rocky hillside in northern Wisconsin.

Why would the conservancy make such a trade? The answer is incentives and trade-offs. As owner of the beach, the Wisconsin Nature Conservancy had to ask what is gained and what is sacrificed by preventing development. The gain, clearly, was beachfront protection. The sacrifice may not be obvious to the casual observer, but it was obvious to The Nature Conservancy (TNC). At the time, the Wisconsin Nature Conservancy was trying to protect an entire watershed in northern Wisconsin. It did not have the money to buy the last parcel of land needed to complete the protection, but it saw an opportunity to trade St. Croix beachfront for that rocky hillside. The discipline and the incentives of private ownership forced the conservancy to make careful decisions and allowed it to accomplish its goal of saving a watershed. As a result, TNC’s wealth in the form of environmental amenities was enhanced. Voluntary exchanges resulted in gains from trade and each party was made better off.

The same principles apply to wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone National Park in 1995. Outside an old schoolhouse in St. Anthony, Idaho, pickup trucks filled the gravel driveway. Inside, dozens of ranchers made small talk about the weather, crop prices, and any topic other than the one on the agenda. A young environmentalist bravely made his way to the front of the room. As he described a proposal to reintroduce gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho, he got cut off by a booming voice in the back: “Hank Fischer, you mean nobody’s kilt you yet?” The comment was meant as a joke, but did little to cut the tension hanging in the air. The not-yet-killed wilderness lover and environmentalist had gathered the cattle and sheep ranchers to discuss why they so vehemently opposed the wolf reintroduction proposal. It was and still is a touchy subject, to say the least, because it was the ancestors of ranchers like these who helped extirpate wolves from the Northern Rockies decades earlier.

As one rancher told Hank, “It’s easy to be a wolf lover. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s the people who own livestock who end up paying for wolves.” This insight led Hank and his organization, Defenders of Wildlife, to rethink their strategy for advancing wolf reintroduction. Most ranchers do not hate wolves, per se; they hate having to bear the cost of wolves killing their livestock. For them, wolf reintroduction meant an added financial liability. To minimize that liability, Hank convinced Defenders of Wildlife to establish a program that paid ranchers the fair market value of any livestock lost to predation. Rather than forcing wolf reintroduction through the political process in which wolf lovers won and livestock producers lost, Defenders of Wildlife voluntarily accepted responsibility for some of the costs wolf reintroduction imposed on ranchers.

Initially, Hank raised money for the wolf compensation fund through the donations of Defenders of Wildlife members. He later commissioned Missoula, Montana, artist Monte Dolack to create a poster depicting a stylized image of how wolves might look if reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. At $35 apiece, the posters generated more than $50,000 for the wolf compensation fund. By shifting some of the economic burden of wolf recovery from the livestock owners to the poster-purchasing wolf lovers, Hank and Defenders of Wildlife diffused some of the controversy over wolf reintroduction and paved the way for the species’ recovery.

When Hank Fischer and Defenders of Wildlife began the wolf compensation fund in 1987, only a handful of wolves occupied the Northern Rocky Mountains. By 2009, when the gray wolf was delisted from the Endangered Species Act, the population had grown to more than 1,600 animals. During that recovery, Defenders paid more than $1.1 million to livestock owners who lost animals to wolf predation. Those funds came from wildlife enthusiasts who wanted wolf reintroduction and were willing to pay for it. As the Missoulian newspaper reported, “By stepping forward, checkbook in hand, Defenders has gone a long way toward diffusing the loudest and most emotional critics of restoration of free-ranging wolves . . . Defenders has created a responsible and refreshing alternative to traditional and often inefficient government programs” (as cited in Defenders of Wildlife 2010).

Political Environmentalism

At the heart of political environmentalism is the contention that decentralized human action results in environmental damage. Political environmentalism draws on traditional natural resource economics by using government regulations to prevent environmental calamities. Natural resource economics conventionally hypothesizes that markets fail to incorporate all costs and benefits of an action on society, so that individuals will overutilize open-access resources or underproduce public goods. To correct this, autonomous, uncoordinated human action must be regulated by the government.

Governmental regulation has been the standard approach to address environmental costs and benefits that are not accounted for by individual human action. In the 1970s, the modern environmental movement began giving birth to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water and Clear Air Acts in the United States and similar agencies and laws in other developed nations. It then expanded its horizons with global pursuits in the international arena such as the Kyoto Protocol in 1990 to combat the fears of anthropogenic climate change.

Another approach to correcting market failure is gover...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1   Visions of Environmentalism
• Chapter 2   Rethinking the Way We Think
• Chapter 3   Who Owns the Environment?
• Chapter 4   This Land Is Whose Land?
• Chapter 5   Prospecting for Energy and the Environment
• Chapter 6   Tapping Water Markets
• Chapter 7   Fencing the Fishery
• Chapter 8   Calling on Communities
• Chapter 9   Enviropreneurship in Action
• Chapter 10  Frontiers of Free Market Environmentalism
• Notes
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index