 He studied geology and biology at Stanford University and did graduate work in economics at New York University and under the great Ludwig von Mises. How's that? Is that pronounced right? He was a William Volcker fellow in economics. He's a senior staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education and later served as research director of the Tuller Foundation. He's an accomplished birder. He was for five years a president of the largest Audubon Society in New Jersey. He's the author of a book published in 1979 called Earth's Resources Private Ownership versus Public Waste. His topic this morning is private property, rights, and environmental preservation. I give you Robert J. Smith. One of the problems of being part of the exceedingly small group of free-market environmentalists there are at least a couple others here at this conference. I don't know if they're in the room at the moment. It was illustrated at my table last night's banquet. Following the obligatory exchanges of names and what do you do, I replied that I was a rider and a free-market environmentalist. My tablemate frowned and said, well, what in the world are you doing here? And I can assure you that the same sort of reaction is often received when I meet new people at Sierra Club receptions or Audubon societies. And I think that that sums up very well the state of the entire debate on environmental preservation and wildlife conservation. The environment is still one of the most divisive issues in American society. It became a major political issue with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was focused with Earth Day in 1970 and has seemingly reached a peak this week when the Sierra Club delivered a petition with 1.1 million signatures calling for the resignation of Secretary Watt. On this issue, there's been a complete polarization between environmentalists and liberals on the one side and business and conservatives on the other side. I think there are two classic examples that show the total emotional opposition of the different camps on environmental issues. One was that the issue involving endangered sea turtles. For ages, sea turtles have been disappearing everywhere around the earth and a number of scientists and environmentalists began to realize if they were going to save them, they would probably have to be farmed in order to stop the exploitation of wild populations. And one of the leading sea turtle scientists in the world called for the creation of farms in order to provide the world market with farm bread turtle products rather than exploiting the wild. And a farm was created, but unfortunately when the farm was created they adopted as a motto conservation via commerce. And that motto conservation via commerce so upset the environmentalist that somebody was making a profit off the use of environmental, off the use of wildlife products that they launched a major campaign to close down the farm and have succeeded in doing so now and are now facing the fact that sea turtles will probably become extinct. And they have said subsequently that it would have been a very good idea if the farm had been run by a non-profit organization or by a government agency. An example from the other side is that in 1976 when Ronald Reagan was running in the primaries when he went into Tennessee and Kentucky and he was leading in the polls he decided to follow up on one of the old Benoit of the conservative movements and attack the TVA. Everybody in the conservative movement for years had disliked the TVA as a prototype for socialized energy and power around the country. And by doing this he ended up losing both of those states in an upset because he found out that the people there liked to subsidize power. They were getting from TVA. But then a mere year later when the environmentalist discovered the snail darter and for the first time someone launched an effective campaign against the TVA simply because this was coming from the environmentalist Reagan in one of his columns denounced the environmentalist for trying to stop the TVA saying it was part of an tireless effort to grind the American economy to a halt and said that the TVA was necessary for the survival of the regional economy in the mid Mississippi states. And I think these two examples show that people who regardless of what their positions are either as environmentalists or conservatives are so opposed emotionally to the other side on the argument that they will abandon their own positions. There have been a number of conservative magazines and books which have broadly attacked the environmental movement and even the importance of environmental issues. It's common to read statements such as who cares about endangered species? What does it matter if tigers or rhinos become extinct? Why be concerned with the disappearance of the tropical rainforest? However, on the other side of the issue we find continuous attacks in the environmental press against free enterprise, private ownership of resources, entrepreneurial greed, commercial exploitation, the American system and Western economic, social and religious concepts as being the source of environmental problems. The result of all this rhetorical and political battling has been that few rational decisions are being made. The environment has been reduced to a political football. The Carter administration attempted to severely restrict the use of the public lands and resources to only those uses that thought was appropriate. Preservation and wilderness were key concepts. The Reagan administration has swung the pendulum back the other way towards exploration, development and more intensive use. Carter wanted power boats off the Colorado River. Reagan wants them back on the river. Carter wanted strict limitations on the use of off-road vehicles on the public lands. Reagan wants to return them. What will happen in 1988 if a democratic administration comes in? There must be a better way of resolving these issues. In the process of playing politics with the environment, we're witnessing environmental degradation, loss of wildlife, an enormous loss of time and money and lobbying, litigation and counterproductive legislation. And those of us who place a high value on personal and economic freedom have seen restrictions on freedom and economic well-being. Perhaps one of the least developed areas of the free market philosophy has been the solution to environmental problems. Environmentalists have charged that the market has created our environmental problems and that it cannot solve them. And too few free market people have cured enough to respond to the challenge. Yet those of us who most value a free society must answer this condemnation of the free market and build the case for the compatibility of a system of private property and free enterprise with environmental preservation and wildlife conservation. I will assume that we can all agree that environmental preservation is important. We need clean air and water. We need to maintain the life-supporting functions of our ecosystem. We need to preserve soils for crop production. We need to preserve grasslands for grazing. We need fishery resources, forests and wildlife for economic reasons as well as aesthetic reasons. As Carl Sagan said, if we ruin the earth, there's nowhere else to go. This is not a disposable planet. So how do we save the earth and its resources? We'll take a general look at a group of environmental problems and try to see what the causes of those problems are and then look at a few specific examples of how private property rights appear to solve them. Many of the intellectual leaders of the environmental movement, as well as nearly every nature, conservation and environmental magazine, have long paraded a dreary list of the unique problems America has experienced with misuse of the land, the natural resources and the wildlife of our country. By constantly reiterating these tragedies, they have helped to convince a generation of young Americans that there has been something fundamentally wrong with the American way of life and especially with our free market economic system and our private property ownership system. Perhaps it may be instructive to run through this litany of environmental horror stories. There was the overgrazing of the short grass prairies and the creation of the dust bowl and the continuing overgrazing of the public grazing lands today. The overharvesting on timber and much of the national forest land portrayed so vividly in such popular books as Jack Shepherd's The Forest Killers, The Destruction of the American Wilderness and Nancy Wood's Clearcut, The Deforestation of America. The destruction of recreational and scenic values on parts of the public domain by too many people pursuing too many conflicting ends, the pollution of our rivers, lakes, and air, and most especially the enormous loss of our Native American wildlife. The most dramatic of our wildlife losses was that of the now extinct Passionary Pigeon, which was native to North America and was probably the most numerous species of bird on earth and possibly of all time. At its peak population it probably numbered at least three billion birds, a single flock in 1810 was estimated to contain over two billion birds. Its migrating flocks darkened the skies over towns and cities and sounded like an approaching tornado, yet they had become extinct by 1914 mainly because of massive market hunting. Many other species of wildlife which survived the overexploitation, although often only barely so, were slaughtered in equally staggering numbers. The saga of the buffalo has been repeated endlessly. The Spanish explorers ascribe the buffalo herds as a limitless brown herd sea. Once at least 75 million roamed the western plains, but by 1895 there were little more than 800 left, most in captivity or on private ranches. The pronghorn antelope may have numbered 100 million at its peak, yet by 1939 there were only 26,000 left. The equally vast flocks of ducks, geese, prairie chickens and shorebirds were decimated by market hunters to provide relatively inexpensive meat for the large cities before the development of the poultry and cattle industries. Frank Graham Jr. the naturalist wrote that in Chicago in 1873 markets bought 600,000 prairie chickens at $3.25 a dozen. Frank Chapman the ornithologist recalled that as a boy in the 1870s the glut of prairie chickens in the butcher shops, but by the end of the century he had to travel to the sand hills in Nebraska to find them in any numbers. However, it's obvious that not all natural resources or wildlife have disappeared or even been seriously over-harvested or depleted. Environmentalists and popular journalists and writers draw our attention to the most shocking cases. There are many species of wildlife which are more common today than they were at any previous time. There's also a wide array of plant and animal species which exist in truly enormous numbers today, but were not present in North America before the arrival of white man. Furthermore, certain animals and plants are thriving under some specific ownership and management conditions, but vanishing under other conditions. It is extremely important to examine these cases in order to gain an understanding of why overexploitation of some resources and wildlife commonly takes place. But other living or renewable resources are managed on a self-sustained basis. Why are some species disappearing and others thriving? First, we can take a rather obvious step of examining what is disappearing and what is not. Apparently, few environmentalists have taken the time to do this in their haste to catalog the extinct and vanishing species. It is true that the prairie chickens nearly vanished. One race the heath hand became extinct, another race has been reduced to endangered species status, and the rest are uncommon and local throughout their range. But what about other chickens? Why is the Atwater's Greater Prairie Chicken on the endangered species list, but not the Rhode Island Red or the Lake Horn or the Bard Rock? These lighter chickens are not even Native American birds. They are their ancestors. Came to this continent with the first European settlers, and small flocks at the settlement in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 became the basis for a broiler industry producing 3 billion birds a year. Similar questions come readily. Why was the American buffalo nearly exterminated, but not the herford, the angus, or the Jersey cow? Why are salmon and trout habitually overfished in the nation's lakes, rivers, and streams, often to the point of endangering the species? While the same species thrive in fish farms and privately owned lakes and ponds, where they are harvested on a sustained yield basis which leaves sufficient breeding stock to maintain the population? Why do cattle and sheep ranchers overgraze the public lands, but maintain lush pastures on their own land? Why are rare birds and mammals taken from the wild in a manner which often harms them and usually depletes their population, but are carefully raised and nurtured in aviaries, game ranches, and hunting preserves? Which would be picked at the optimum point of ripeness? Are blackberries along the side of a road or blackberries in a farmer's garden? Why are many of the most beautiful national parks suffering severe overuse to the point of the near destruction of their recreational values, but many private parks are maintained in far better condition? Why are the national forests so carelessly logged and over harvested while private forests are carefully managed, cut on a sustained yield basis, and reforested with supertrees grown on costly nursery tree farms? Why do people litter parks and streets but not their own yards? Why do people dump old refrigerators and rubber tires in the public streams, rivers, and swamps, but not in their farm ponds or their swimming pools? In all of these cases and many other examples we could consider, it is clear that the problem of overexploitation, over-harvesting, misuse, or destruction of the resource, whether it's land, water, air, trees, or wildlife, results from their existing under public or communal ownership rather than in some form of private ownership. Whenever we hit, well, the difference in their management, or lack thereof, is a direct result of the two totally different forms of property rights and ownership. Public, communal, or common property versus private property. Wherever we have public or common ownership, we find overuse, waste, and extinction, but private ownership results in sustained yield use and preservation. While it may be philosophically and emotionally pleasing to the environmentalists and conservationists to persist in maintaining that wildlife belongs to everyone, and that the oceans and their resources belong to mankind as its common heritage, the inevitable result of such a system yields the opposite of what they desire. Economists call such a system of property rights belonging to everyone, communal or common property ownership, and it developed an extensive body of literature dealing with it. Economist Harold Demsett's writes, By communal ownership, I shall mean a right which can be exercised by all members of the community. Frequently, the rights to till and to hunt the land have been communally owned. Communal ownership means that the community denies to individual citizens the right to interfere with any other person's exercise of communally owned rights. Private ownership, however, implies that the community recognizes the right of the owner to exclude others from exercising the owner's private rights. Suppose that land is communally owned. Every person has the right to hunt, till, or mine the land. This form of ownership fails to concentrate the cost associated with any person's exercise of his communal right on that person. If a person seeks to maximize the value of his communal rights, he will tend to overhunt and overwork the land because some of the cost of his doing so are borne by others. The stock of game and the richest in the soil will be diminished too quickly. If a single person owns the land, he will attempt to maximize its present value by taking into account alternative future time streams of benefits and costs, and selecting that one which he believes will maximize the present value of his privately owned land rights. Private ownership of land will internalize many of the external costs associated with communal ownership, for now an owner by virtue of his power to exclude others can generally count on realizing the rewards associated with husbanding the game and increasing the fertility of his land. Perhaps the single most important treatment of the common property syndrome was made by the noted biologist and environmentalist Garrett Hardin, and is now a classic paper of the tragedy of the commons. Hardin said, the tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably well for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning. That is, the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his game. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, what is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd? Utility has one negative and one positive component. The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly plus one. The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision making herdsman is only a fraction of minus one. Adding together the component personal utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd and another and another. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman, sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into his system that compels him to increase his herd without limit in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination which all men rush towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in the commons brings ruin to all. Harden is also going in to look at a number of different examples of the commons. And he points out that in an approximate way the logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate. But it is understood mostly only in special cases which are not sufficiently generalized. Even at this late date, cattlemen leasing national land in the western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding and constantly pressing federal authorities to increase the headcount to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed dominance. Likewise, the oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons. Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the freedom of the seas, professing to believe in the inexhaustible resources of the oceans they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction. The national parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present they are open to all without limit. The parks themselves are limited in extent. There is only one Yosemite valley whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly we must soon seize to treat the parks as the common or there will be of no value to anyone. Any resources held in common, whether land, air, the oceans, large bodies of water such as lakes, flowing streams, outdoor recreational resources, the fisheries, wildlife and game can be used simultaneously by more than one individual or group and also for more than one purpose. With many of the multiple uses being mutually contradictory, no individual has exclusive rights to the resources nor can he prevent others from using the resource for either the same use or for any other non-compatible use. Thus by its very nature are common property resources owned by everyone and the same time owned by no one. Since it is used by everyone it is therefore rapidly and thoroughly depleted. There is overuse, waste and extinction. No one has any incentive to maintain it or preserve it. The only way in which any of the users can capture any value economic or otherwise is to use or exploit the resources rapidly as possible before someone else comes along to do the same. But private ownership as opposed to common or public ownership allows the owner to capture the full capital value of the resource. And thus self-interest and economic incentive drive the owner to maintain its long-term capital value. The owner of the resource, be it a salmon fishery, a herd of game animals, a forest or whatever, wants to enjoy the benefits of the resource today, tomorrow and 10 years from now. Thus with a renewable resource he will attempt to manage it on a sustained yield basis. Therefore, given the nature of man and the motivating force of self-interest and economic incentive, we can understand the earlier questions. We can see why the buffalo nearly vanished, but not the herford, why the prairie chicken is endangered, but not the red grouse of Great Britain, why the common salmon fisheries in the United States are overfished, but not the private salmon streams of Europe or the private trout farms of the American West. By now it should be rather clear that most if not all of our environmental problems have occurred with those resources which have been treated as common property resources. They have nothing to do with private ownership of property or a free market economic system. Indeed, in case after case, private ownership of the resources prevents their misuse and their depletion and resolves the tragedy of the commons. This being the case, it raises fundamental questions about the management and ownership of the public domain, because the public domain is essentially one gigantic commons. Therefore, the entire environmentalist argument for maintaining our nation's lands, resources and wildlife and public ownership as part of the public domain falls apart if our goal is truly to preserve our natural heritage. As with all the common property resources, the tragedy of the common can be a long time in coming, but eventually the logic of the commons works its inexorable path and over exploitation of the resources leads ever more rapidly to depletion and eventually to exhaustion, destruction, or extinction of the resource. This of course is the essence of the multiple use problem. The public domain being a common property resource is therefore not subject to the exclusivity characteristic of private property. Eventually, multiple use of the public domain leads to the destruction of the physical, recreational, and scenic attributes of that very public domain. By its very nature, since it can be used by everyone, it means it is owned by no one. As with all common property resources, it can be used simultaneously by more than one individual or group and for any of a number of different uses, many of which are mutually contradictory. No individual has exclusive rights to the resource nor can he prevent others from using the resource. Since it can be used by everyone, it's therefore rapidly depleted and wasted because each individual user is driven by his self-interest to take all he can before others do the same. Common property management of resources pits user against user, and either self-interest or economic incentive drives each individual user of the resource to exploit it as rapidly as possible to maximize his gain before others deplete the resource. There is no incentive whatsoever for any user to conserve the resource. Doing so will simply leave more for others to take, and thus self-interest in the commons rapidly leads to overuse and destruction of the commons. One would be extremely hard pressed if asked to single out one especially classic example of the tragedy of the commons. There are hundreds, literally thousands of depressingly similar disasters, but perhaps for Americans deeply immersed in the romance of the West through movies and novels, the familiar range wars and the dust bowl are illustrative enough. With the exception of the huge land grants to the states and the railroads, most of the public domain was disposed of to private homesteaders in the form of 160-acre plots. This produced rich and productive farms in the fertile and rain-rich lands from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, and even into the lush tall grass prairies of the eastern plains. But further west as the land became more rugged, less fertile, and more arid, the 160-acre homesteads became increasingly less viable. What, after all, could be done with 160 acres of alkali flats. Unfortunately, even some resource experts, otherwise sympathetic to the free market and private property, have called the problems which developed in the western states a failure of the market system because nobody wanted the land and therefore it had to remain in federal ownership. But the tragedy was that no one could live on a mere 160 acres. It wouldn't support crops, it certainly couldn't support sheep per cattle, and might barely support a few jackrabbits. Yet as the country moved west, vast stretches of land were needed, and in the failure or refusal of the federal government to make the necessary changes in the legal size of homesteads, the ranchers, cattlemen, and sheepmen not being able to claim valid title to private property were forced to treat the land as a commons. Professor Samuel Hayes writes of this problem, Much of the western livestock industry depended for its forage upon the open range, owned by the federal government, but free for anyone to use. Chaos prevailed on the open range. Congress had never provided legislation regulating grazing or permitting stockmen to acquire range lands. Cattle and sheepmen roamed the public domain. Cattlemen fenced ranges for their exclusive use, but competitors cut the wire. Resorting to force and violence, sheepherders and cowboys solved their disputes over grazing lands by slaughtering rival livestock and murdering rival stockmen. Absence of the most elementary institutions of property law created confusion, bitterness, and destruction. Amid this turmoil, the public range rapidly deteriorated. Originally plentiful and lush, the forage supply was subjected to intense pressure by increasing herds. The public domain became stocked with more animals than the range could support. Since each stockman feared that others would beat him to his available forage, he grazed earlier in the year and did not permit the young grasses to mature and reseed. Under such conditions, the quality and quantity of available forage rapidly decreased. Vigorous perennials gave way to annuals and annuals to weeds. In response, Cattlemen proposed that Congress permit homestead entries with sufficient land to support stockards, but the plea fell on deaf ears. Hayes pointed out that laws restricting homesteading to 160 or 320 acres hardly suffice for successful grazing, a land which required as much for each head of cattle. Although Congress passed the Kincaid Act in 1904 permitting 640 acre homesteads in western Nebraska, this was too little, too late, to prevent destruction of the western grasslands, setting the stage for the Dust Bowl. To this day, America's public lands and its common property resources are still suffering overuse and depletion by keeping them in the public domain. If we are to resolve the tragedy of the commons, we must transfer our common property resources into private ownership. We need to begin to develop the institutional framework and legal framework for the creation of private property rights in the public domain if we are to preserve this heritage. Now the Dust Bowl situation and the overgrazing in the west is one of the classic examples that the environmentalists used to show the lack of concern for land and resources by Americans and by people following a profit motive. But the analysis of the problem seems to show that it's the absolutely direct opposite of that, that the problem was created because of the total lack of an East concept of private property rights. Let us next look at an example of the results of private conservation efforts in wildlife protection and habitat conservation. The National Wildlife Refuge System has generally done a fairly good job of preserving waterfowl habitat. But even here, they are conflicting multiple uses. Some refuges allow hunting, which preservation is opposed. Birdwatchers want the refuges managed their way. Nature photographers don't like birdwatchers flushing their photographic subjects and neither are pleased with fishermen disturbing the birds. An example of the misguided use of the resources occurred a number of years ago at Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, where at a time when budgets had been cut, the refuge did not go out on the various beaches and erect their usual barbed wire fences to keep off-road vehicles and fishermen out of the nesting colonies of the turns and shorebirds. Yet at the same time that they were not doing this, they spent over $10,000 to build a magnificent new rest station with tile floors and hot air hand dryers. And so you can ask yourself the question, why were they doing this? Was this in the best interest of the ducks and geese, or was it in the best interest of maximizing bureaucrats? The pioneering work of the National Audubon Society in purchasing wetlands in the south and protecting the nesting areas of the then endangered herons and egrets with private wardens from the depredations of the hunters for the plume trade did more to preserve the birds than the all too common attitude of prohibition and enforced morality. Fortunately, the Audubon Society is still carrying on this fine tradition. The National Audubon Sanctuary System now consists of over 70 wildlife sanctuaries located throughout the country and totaling approximately 250,000 acres. These areas are owned or leased by National Audubon and most are patrolled by the society's wardens. Additionally, various local Audubon chapters have purchased or leased their own sanctuaries. The great advantage which private sanctuaries have is that being privately owned, there is no problem of conflicting multiple use. The directors of the Audubon Society or any other private organization or business can determine the best use for an area and then maintain it in that use in perpetuity without fear of changing governmental priorities or the desires of weary taxpayers. Thus, the Audubon Society is sanctuaries which are closed to all visitors because of difficult accessibility or because any human pressure would cause harmful deterioration of the resource. Depending upon the cost of managing the various units, some have user fees while others are free. It is only in such privately owned areas that genuine non-conflicting multiple uses can exist where the owners can determine the optimal use of the resource, rate them in order of their priorities, and then maximize non-conflicting uses. As the expense of management, patrol, and maintenance can be high, this leads the owners to collect fees from many different users. For example, some wildlife refuges have harmoniously shared a multiple use with petroleum production with royalties paying a substantial portion of the refuge's cost. Perhaps the prime example of this is the National Audubon Society's largest refuge, the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge, 26,800 acres of bayou and brackish marsh on the Louisiana coast, preserving one of the finest stretches of wetlands in the country, and serving as a winter sanctuary for one-third of all the country's lesser snow geese. This sanctuary is carefully managed for the benefit of the geese, as compared to the kind of problems you get with national wildlife refuges with the competing uses of taxpayers. One of the prime management tools is the deliberate controlled burn-off of the marsh each year to encourage the growth of the grasses that are the staple dye of the snow geese. The fires expose the roots to the feeding geese, encourage new growth, and keep and check other grasses and weeds. Imagine trying this management technique on the public domain in the face of Smokey the Bear and the interest of myriad multiple users. Society's directors and refuge managers, besides deciding the refuge, should be closed to the public in order to prevent disturbance of the geese, and the possibility of driving them onto nearby hunting areas have concluded that there are compatible multiple uses. 650 head of cattle graze the refuge at a grazing fee of $5 ahead. Overgrazing is carefully prevented, and it is argued that the herd provides a cost-effective method of distributing desirable grass seeds across the refuge in their droppings. But the grazing fees pale in comparison to the over $300,000 in annual royalties received from the three oil companies, which are currently operating nine active gas producing wells. This, of course, contributes substantially to society's conservation programs, and it equals the annual dues of 20,000 members. Needless to say, both the society and the oil companies take lavish care with regard to safety precautions. Neither can afford a disaster. Society is already receiving accusations of selling out to the oil companies, partially because they carry ads from oil companies in Audubon magazine. And, of course, the oil companies can ill afford the publicity which would result from polluting the premier refuge of the nation's major conservation organization. As refuge manager Lonnie Ledge puts it, you better believe the oil companies behave themselves. I think I'm running a little behind, so come one last example here. Probably the single most important example of this approach to conservation is the program of the Cayman Turtle Farm on the Cayman Islands and the British West Indies. It was originally formed in 1968 by Anthony Fisher, a British free market economist and urban nailer and American businessman. Operating under the model of conservation via commerce, the owners began a program of captive breeding of the green sea turtle by gathering eggs from the wild, generally from beaches where the eggs would have been lost because of high ties, predation, or animals, or collected by natives for food, and then successfully hatching them and raising them at a far higher rate than would have occurred in nature. Unfortunately, from the very beginning of their efforts, they were met with hostility and opposition by many environmentalists and biologists. They were met with philosophical and emotional arguments that it was wrong to make a profit from exploiting wildlife with economic arguments that they had over-invested in their physical plant and with biological arguments that what they were doing was unsound and would harm sea turtles. Eventually, under the weight of environmental opposition, the environmentalists got the Department of Interior and the Department of Commerce to list all the sea turtles, all the wild sea turtles of the world, as endangered and in addition to ban the imports of Cayman Turtle Farm products. And it had been argued by the environmentalists they reacted with great glee to this decision, feeling that now they had saved the turtles because they argued that even if you farm sea turtles in captivity, that that would supposedly encourage exploitation and trade in wild turtles, smuggled wild turtles. But of course what it served to do was to replace the trade of exploited wild sea turtles. And this was proved in the year after the ban went into effect, two of the largest smuggling cases in the history of U.S. fish and wildlife occurred involving the importation of the meat of something like 9,000 wild sea turtles into the United States, labeled as mud turtles and labeled as fish. And the sad thing is that all of these turtles and all of those products could have come from farm bread products instead of from exploitation of the wild. In summary, there are only a few, these are only a few of the wide diversity of private conservation programs carried on by bird watchers, hunters, land preservation organizations, and commercial farming operations, which have been successfully preserving wildlife and natural areas privately. The supposedly insoluble problem of conservation becomes, upon close examination, amenable to solution if we allow freedom and private ownership. The superiority of these programs lies in the fact that because they are private, they permanently avoid the tragedy of the commons. And they have the additional virtue of moral superiority in that they preserve nature through voluntary efforts without resort to the compulsory taxation of people who would rather seek other goods. It is the absence of the profit system and private property, not their existence, which causes environmental problems. Every well-meaning attempt to limit, restrict, and reduce private ownership of natural resources only worsens the problem and creates still more serious ones, as does state interventionism in any other area. Do we have any questions? For the many people in the country who believe that it is unfortunate that lack of money should deny ordinary people access and enjoyment of the country's beauty, resources, etc., that by having a land tax which then goes for the public good, this might be a useful argument for your point of view. Well, I would think it would be preferable to having land taxes to simply find the quickest ways we can to remove the public domain from federal ownership, whether we sell this off, whether we auction it off, or whether we simply give it away. Monies that could be generated from those sales or those auctions could be used for the poor people or whatever uses you wanted to. Well, I mean, I don't think that it's a question of everybody being priced out of the market. I mean, the Audubon Society, any kind of organization, the nature conservancy, they have areas in which they allow people into for free, they have other areas in which they charge a minimal fee, they have other areas which may be of much higher demand by users who want to come in and seek whatever amenities are there, and for those, they would charge higher prices. I think it's simply incorrect to say that private ownership of resources would exclude people. What is your opinion about the need for strip mining controls on privately owned land such as privately owned coal lands in West Virginia? Well, I think when we get into the problem of the results of strip mining, the impact that it has on adjacent lands, I mean, the approach that I would like to see taken on this is one of strict accountability for protection or violation of private property. For instance, if someone pollutes water that comes onto your property, excuse me, that you have a water right in, I think a legal system should enable you to seek recompense in the courts or else to get an injunction to stop it. I don't think that you can carelessly use the error of the water to dump your waste. I mean, unfortunately, the error in the water in this country have become a commons. And since there are commons, it's the cheapest way to get rid of waste. I don't think this is a condemnation of free enterprise in any sense. I think it's a condemnation of a legal system, which has allowed people to invade other people's persons and property. We had, there are probably some people here who know more about the scholarship that's being done on this, but in the earlier days of this country, there was a much closer approach to private property rights in air and water. And it was essentially a somewhat of a close approximation to the old English common law. And if somebody polluted water or used or diverted water that you had a right in, you could take them to court and get an injunction to stop it or collect damages. But in the period from about 1780 to 1860, there was a major shift in the American legal system in their approach to water rights. And they air water rights at that time and air rights later, in which the courts held that it was true that if somebody erected a mill on a stream and you had downstream water rights and they diverted your water rights, they were harming you and your property. But they maintained that they could no longer afford to keep this system in operation because the public good required rapid industrialization of the country. Now, this was a changing of the rules of a free market economy. It wasn't free enterprise itself that was doing this. The government did not enforce the simple laws of property rights. You talked about tragedy of the commons in cases of overuse. I want to comment on common ownership like the Adiromic Park Agency, where they have large areas that are forever wild. No use. Well, when it comes on wilderness areas, we have one of the top scholars in the country here on that issue, Bill Dennis, but he might add more to it after the after this session. But there has been a movement in this country towards the creation of private wilderness areas. There are people who want wilderness amenities, but of course don't have the time or the money to get into Alaska. There's been the development of some of these wilderness ranch areas in California in which a giant area is purchased. And then on the outskirts of that area, some sort of facility for people to camp and have water and whatever is there. And then from that as their base, they can explore all the back country of the wilderness themselves. And I can imagine private organizations, whether it's Audubon Society, Nature Conservancy, for instance, has a number of very wild areas that they maintain in wilderness-type conditions and perpetuity. The thought occurs to me that here in this common usage area, if it is turned to private property usage and is non-productive of anything, but for personal individual usage, rather than producing a useful economic good for the market, it does not serve the common good. It becomes at first, and it's only a personal individual good, an individual right. And the common good, it should be preserved as many times overlooked in abuse. And it becomes an imposition. And taxing the private property, what good is its ownership and virtue, which is another item of consideration. If a productivity is abused, it is destroyed by taxing. What good is its value? Well, I'm not quite sure I understand fully, but I mean, I would say that I don't think that everything that we value is something just for its productive use. I mean, we value recreation, we value relaxation, we value naturalizing, we value getting away into wilderness areas. I mean, people all place values on these things too. I think these are part of human life just as much as listening to a Beethoven symphony or whatever. I don't think we can simply throw them out of the equation of what we want to have a free society for. Common strategy arguments to other domains. It occurs to me right off the bat that the tax base or the tax payers are in large columns being overgrazed. Absolutely. But that there are other tragedy of the common's addressable problems which are not environmentally, okay, that would explain historical reasons why things seem to happen that are nonsensical. Are there people working that you know of to extend common's arguments in, say, economic or political non-environmental domains? Well, John Bodden who was here in Rick Stroup at Montana State have done a considerable amount of work on this, particularly on dealing with the federal treasury as a commons, and pointed out how with that money being there, how people operate towards that, acting in the same way that you would towards any other commons. Yes, they are. I guess we were supposed to finish it up now. We can talk after.