 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris, and I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Ryan M. Yonk. He's in the Department of Political Science at Utah State University. He is the co-author along with Randy Simmons and Kenneth Sim of Nature Unbound, Bureaucracy vs. the Environment. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Ryan. Thanks for having me, Trevor. It's great to be here to talk a little bit about it. So what's wrong with the way that we think about ecology and the environment? Just about everything, Trevor. Most people, we think about ecology and we have this grand notion. Most everyone's heard of John Muir, and they think about ecology and say, ah, these are these great cathedrals in the mountains, and we need to get everything into balance so we arrive at perfection. But it turns out nature and ecology in particular have almost nothing to do with being in balance. An economist might call it equilibrium, but nature doesn't exist ever in equilibrium, and almost always we think about our vision of what we want nature to be as some sort of notion of something static from the past. That usually does not involve humans. Almost never. It almost always involves somehow, how do you separate humans out from what's going on in the environment? And the more you can separate them away, the easier it is for lots of folks that think about environmental policies, particularly from the environmental aside, then you have a way to get to this romantic notion of some perfect almost ademic state in the past where humans are not influencing their environment. It's always struck me as odd, which is why yours is the first book I ever found that dealt with these questions that I remember when I was being taught environmentalism stuff as a kid, of course, indoctrinated might be a better word, but I sat there and I asked a teacher one time in seventh or sixth or seventh grade, I said, what's the difference between a beaver dam and a human dam or a human building in terms of environmental effect as one of those natural and the other one not? And she got kind of mad at me. Well, yes. I mean, because on its face, the assumption is that, well, it's patently obvious what the difference is. The difference is that one is constructed by humans to change their environment and the other is constructed by a natural part. But it turns out that all of these things are species, and I include humans as I talk about this, their attempt to modify their environment to make their ability to live and live well easier. And so the beaver builds a dam, humans engage their environment to make change. And I don't have a clear way to say which of those are natural and which are not. Unfortunately, the sort of shorthand has become that for something to be natural, it needs to be absent man. And that's become almost always what the focus is that it can only be natural if a human being is not involved. Is there, though, it seems like there's a difference of scale at the very least. A beaver dam is a rather small thing that impacts a small portion of a lake or stream or whatever, whereas the Hoover Dam is enormous. And that most of humanity's environmental changes that we have created throughout our history have been a vast scope in a way that seems, at least on the surface, to far outweigh anything that other species are doing. Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I think that part of the issue there is most of the discussions about these things are not focused on scale because I'm very sympathetic to the scale discussion about that humans are able to impact their environment on a much larger scale. But fundamentally, the discussion starts not with that question of scale, but with a question of whether or not man was involved and his man is influencing his environment rather than what's the scale or the actual outcomes of that intervention. And I think that's where the discussion about environmental policy, particularly its foundations, would be useful to go. Because, yes, human beings have a profound and sometimes negative effect on their environment. But so to do other animals, depending on how you measure what a negative impact is, because a beaver dam that blocks a stream creates new habitat for beaver, but it also it takes away habitat from other species. And so that's the sort of discussion I think that would become useful, not one whether or not man was involved in it, but in fact the actual impact that's being had in a real meaningful way. And scale becomes a really big important part of that. But unfortunately, lots of the discussion and ultimately lots of the policy requirements and regulations do relatively little to distinguish actions based on their scale and their impact. Instead, they're based on whether or not on how and in what way the action is being taken as their initial place to begin, whereas scale would be, I think, a valuable way to do it. I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine's father who's a PhD ecologist, and I spent a very long time trying to figure out what he did. I mean, he studies things, but I was trying to figure out the basis of any normative claim that he would make. It would be, it would say, well, this is out of balance or, I think he studies whales in particular and he lives in Alaska and so the question of well, we need to fix this or normatively do this. What would be an ecology, how do they conceive of their jobs in the sense of, you know, because you would be maximizing one thing, say the elk or the wolves, but then you'd be minimizing other things and saying that it's in balance, but of course it's not about, what do ecologists think about what you're saying? Well, so ecologists themselves, ecology is a discipline, especially an academic discipline, hasn't relied on a balance of nature sort of philosophy in a couple of decades. Working ecologists today when they're doing their actual studies and what they send to study is environmental systems and how species interact in those systems. If you want to get right down to sort of what it is they're studying, they've moved on much more to not a steady state sort of analysis approach, but multiple equilibria and that there's continual evolution and flux in those systems as the way they think about it. Now, what gets interesting is what happens when ecologists leave the academic realm and start to make public policy recommendations because there's a switch that seems to occur where they pivot right back to balance of nature arguments despite the fact that the road academic work doesn't focus on it. That just puts me in mind if there's a poster up, an advertisement up on the side of a bus stop around the corner from Cato that is I believe from the National Geographic and it has a picture of a cute koala bear mom with two koala bear babies holding on to her and it says only 750,000 koala bears left in the or not 750 sorry 350,000 koala bears left in the wild and then has a take a selfie with this to show that you support saving the koala bear and my response when I saw that was you have to see these kinds of things but like 350,000 koala bears is a lot of koala bears. I'm also not sure how many there should be. That's the human population of Iceland. How do you decide make that normative claim of what the proper number of koala bears is? There's not a clear answer and if you read most of what the estimates try to do is they try to figure out what the historical populations were and so this is sort of I have no actual knowledge about koala bears but some of what we've looked at in some detail are things more like the bison on the American planes, those sorts of things where for years there was these discussions about what the right numbers were but they were based on assumptions that Native Americans weren't having interaction with them or that the change in the populations that should exist should be immediately before settlement or before contact as it's often put in 1492 but there's no clear reason why that's the case and in fact most of the the good sort of scientific ecology literature suggests that well this is a the right number is a result of complex interactions between the environment, the other species that exist there, the the impact of various climate situations, all those things play into it and there's there is not a steady state or right number but instead there are trade-offs that occur based on these changes that as you change one variable the right number so to speak changes dynamically instead of it being we should be really worried because there's only 350,000 I don't have any way of knowing if there should be 100,000 koala bears or 3.5 million koala bears that's something that is a much more nuanced discussion but in terms of environmental policy discussions all that sort of gets dropped out and we get there gets to be a real focus on some steady state answer where it's easy to get you to take a selfie with the koala bear because there's only 350,000 of them left because somehow that's the right answer and one of the lectures I've seen you give and we've taught together a couple times you tell a story about Yellowstone and the regulation of Yellowstone and kind of the different areas that we have gone through and trying to decide the kind of question that we're talking about today it could be what is the natural state of Yellowstone or what should what do we want out of Yellowstone or is it going to be in harmony or something like that can you talk a little bit a little bit about that story yeah so Yellowstone is like the quintessential American national park I mean I grew up going there as a kid has a special place and certainly at least every every person in the western United States and I suspect most every American and there's this iconic notion about what Yellowstone is and part of that is the bison that roam around Yellowstone and the elk this wildlife that's been developed but that's only the sort of more most recent incarnation of wildlife management policies in Yellowstone because Yellowstone as it's evolved there's been there have as you said been these eras about we're thinking about what it should be like and the the current one is something called natural regulation which is simply you you work your you work your best to remove humans all the way from the system and let the system just interact together and so what that's practically done is it's created very large numbers of bison and particularly large numbers of elk and in the 1980s they saw the rise of those coming in and it started to do damage to other species so the aspen's that were growing in Yellowstone were severely damaged by the elk population but we didn't get to those decisions just based on true natural regulation because what came before that was an active management program where they very much wanted to increase the numbers because people like to come and see them so if you look at the information from the 50s the 60s and the 70s in Yellowstone I mean we've all probably seen the picture of the old where they used to feed bears for example well they were doing similar things with elk and bison to raise the numbers because the thought was well the wildlife herd of manatee that's going to draw people here and so we're going to manage for that well in the 80s that changes if we go back a generation before the wildlife increases there was a focus on on sort of restricting the number of animals and so there were large-scale hunts of these animals going on and in all the all these cases the discussion was largely about what is Yellowstone supposed to look like and it was always anchored against one sort of for me I caught a horrific idea that there was some right number in the past that if we could just get back to the right number of elk and bison before the settlers showed up and started messing with it we would we would be able to get it right and so the most recent incarnation of that is get humans all the way out well it turns out humans have always been part of the ecosystem in Yellowstone at least back to 10,000 years ago and so what we get is we get pretty dramatic responses to the policies that we put in place and simply trying to remove humans are not exempt from those policies having the impacts and what ends up happening is as we mess with these things we end up doing some substantial damage to places like Yellowstone as we sort of pivot from from attempt to attempt. You mentioned I remember in the lecture that they removed the native population from Yellowstone and I think John Muir was not a big fan of humans living in the environment in that way too. No John Muir was not a fan of the Native Americans that were living in Yosemite in fact his first order of business in attempting to preserve it was to move the Native American population out of the Yosemite Valley by force if necessary. And then the wolf population goes up and at no point it's in this underscores the discussion at no point did anyone go well the real apex predator in this ecosystem was man that that would that would have made sense but they kind of thought of man as not being outside the ecosystem and what would happen if they took took the natives out. Yeah well I mean that's the fundamental I think issue in all of these discussions are that as soon as you attempt to separate man from the ecosystem man from Nate that man is not a part of nature you lose a a historical historically important part of of the environment because I mean it's at least 10,000 years of human history that have interacted with their environment and beyond 10,000 years back we have very little understanding of what environment looked like and so we're almost always trying to target to something to a time when man was in fact a very important player in the environment but we're trying to target it now by excluding man from being part of the environment and that sets up some really problematic issues and the apex predator in Yellowstone discussion I think is sort of really emblematic of that. Before we go too much further I just wanted to ask a clarifying question you guys both you and Trevor now have mentioned John Muir a couple of times yeah who was he for listeners who aren't familiar with him? Well so John Muir was sort of one of the he was one of the the founding fathers of the environmental movement if you will he was very active in California in the Yosemite Valley was sort of even a mystic about the mountains there and having been to Yosemite I am always struck every time I go back that in some fundamental way John Muir was right and then I have to remind myself but everything he did to try did in response I think was largely not right but he was a big advocate of the true preservation of Yosemite in the with the exclusion of human beings so he was a big wilderness supporter and advocate and he's one of the most sort of politically savvy of the early environmental movement because the way in which he got Yosemite protected was he became convinced that if he could just get President Theodore Roosevelt out to the Yosemite Valley Roosevelt would use his powers under the Antiquities Act to preserve it and so Muir gets him there and that's essentially exactly what happens and so Muir is a big pusher for essentially government intervention to preserve these places and create wild spaces absent humans. Getting into some of the more specific topics of the book that laying the groundwork for the way you think about environmentalism you and your co-authors you have a few terms that you employ one of them is political ecology what does that mean well so political ecology as we use the term we mean essentially the politicization of ecological goals and understanding to arrive at some particular end it's a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of a term from Marxist economists actually that speak to political ecology as being one of the what should be one of the end goals of the political state but what we're really talking about there is that as as you start to politicize these ecological questions these questions of the environment you're going to get all of the sort of problems that come along with taking something and putting it into the political or governmental sector and so when we talk to political ecology what we're speaking to is this notion that these are ecological decisions that are now being made in the political realm and then what about political entrepreneurship yeah and political entrepreneurship again is a is a little bit of a term of art that we use to talk about the notion that just like an entrepreneur work can work in a market political entrepreneurs scan the political system in the policy realm and see openings to get what they want by taking action through that realm and so they go they may lobby government for regulations they may lobby government for set-asides of Yosemite and so John Muir is sort of the the quintessential early political entrepreneur because he saw the the opportunity to get what his preference was achieved by going directly to Roosevelt and saying hey you should preserve this incredibly beautiful place but it's essentially taking action through the political realm because you see an opening or an opportunity it's for those for listeners that know anything about cursnary and entrepreneurship that's really what we've grafted on to there and and all that is is it's the awareness of unexploited opportunities so then going back to Yellowstone as our example if you know if the the wrong answer according to your co-authors is the we should try to preserve this in some pre man's presence state but at the opposite end we probably don't want to you know let's let or we can stipulate that we don't want to say just privatize it sell it off and let it get turned into shopping malls or I guess now it would be like what server farms or something I mean maybe want to privatize it but that might not be like let's say that's not our goal so in between those two what's then the proper way to think about say Yellowstone what we're trying to preserve what state how to get there how to identify it yeah so so my my answer to that is is a little bit of the standard weasley economist political science to this answer and that is well it depends because our our big objection I think to the discussion about Yellowstone is the idea that somehow they're going to be able to achieve all of the ends that they want by going back to this this romantic notion and as you try to get to the romantic notion you have lots of negative outcomes now maybe the most important value that that they're trying to achieve is the absence of human intervention in the ecosystem well if that's the case then you've essentially designed the system to get exactly the results that you do but the bigger question is what is it that and I'm going to use a term here that drives me bananas when others use it what is it that we want Yellowstone to be and then we need to have actual rational discussions about how do we how do we get to those ends rather than this romanticized version about we can just get back to the the past that never really existed and that that's our big objection in Yellowstone is folks are trying to get back to a past that never was it's sort of the my when I was growing up my grandmother had a real affection for the 1950s but it wasn't the 1950s that ever actually existed they were the 1950s that she created in her mind and remembered sort of through the rose colored lenses and so if you're trying if you try to go to something that never existed you're going to end up with all sorts of weird policy outcomes because there's a whole range of things solutions we could do in Yellowstone Trevor indicated it is possible to privatize I think that's unlikely it's also not my own personal preference for that area but it's this notion that somehow because it's a notion that there is a single right answer that I think it becomes so problematic in these things and it's trying to anchor this that idea of a single right answer to something in the past that gives you a trump card that this is what it's supposed to be yeah I think that that's a really interesting point that you make throughout the book that you you could kind of say that the main thesis is that there there is no scientific and I kind of put that into scare quotes answer to how to regulate the environment there's just choices and trade-offs and people who want to do different things with it they might want to have a jeep trail or maybe the hikers don't want any noise but then they want to win farm and trying to figure out what we're going to do with these areas is fundamentally political and then we need to realize what happens when you pass laws that allow people to game the system for their preferred use or non use of the environment so we can get into some of those those laws that you go you go through the kind of major environmental legislation pieces which which just as a general overview when did most of these come about whether we're talking about the clean water act clean air act things like this and how are they animated by this folk theory of the environment of the balance in nature theory that we've discussed yeah so I think a big part of that is I think comes they start to come about in the 1960s almost all these acts they have origins before the 1960s but their sort of present form and their present thinking really gets solidified beginning in the 1960s the clean water act the clean air act and then through the the 1970s and then on into today but they're they're sort of the major legislation comes about in the 60s to my own mind in sort of response to a couple of things one of which is the social movements of the 1960s begin to create some opening for these sorts of discussions and then simultaneously you start to have nightly news broadcasts that are able to be picked up across the country and so the sort of the made for TV environmental disaster or concern starts to move these things forward so lots of these early acts clean water act in particular clean air act comes about sort of as a sideways result you can trace a lot of the sort of their their more rapid advancement to an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara that started to turn up in the nightly news in this era and it followed on the heels of the sort of famous example of the Cuyahoga River catching on fire that began to capture people's minds but as these sorts of things started to get out that started to create an opening while at the same time folks like Rachel Carson who is sort of the quintessential balance of nature I wouldn't call her an ecologist but she's writing in this area and so she writes Silent Spring which is sort of this the quintessential book in this regard that says here all the terrible things the humans are doing to the environment and if we could just get those things out lots of these problems would go away and so at the same time an opening has happened in the 60s and 70s you have this sort of thinking starting to happen in terms of public policy and suddenly as these things go forward we end up hard baking this balance of nature or steady state vision of what the environment should look like into the regulatory acts and we have that unfortunate legacy with us today that almost all these regulations are focused on trying to get to some sort of steady state vision of what the environment looks like whether it's the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act or the Endangered Species Act but I guess to take a sympathetic view of them I mean there certainly was pollution and environment on fire I mean it's like that's insane and environmental destruction oil spills are not good for the environment no matter what you know theory we're we're laying out and so these things you know maybe that that steady state was simply let's pass legislation to prevent people to prevent corporations from making the environment objectively worse as opposed to just we're making trade-offs here yeah so so I have so I'm I'm actually fairly sympathetic to that argument with a couple of big caveats in there in part because despite the fact that the Cuyahoga River caught fire most of the reliable evidence about the water pollution in the Cuyahoga River suggests that the period in which it caught fire was was one of the cleanest periods in the river up to that point and they'd actually been fairly substantial state and local action that had been taken that had started to make progress here and at the same time you had part of the reason why we knew about the Santa Barbara Spill is that they that had become more rare and so you'd seen lots of action for environmental improvement and so as that's going on and then you graft over this a steady state notion I'm not opposed to environmental regulation I actually think there's some good that can be done with it if it's crafted relatively well it's fairly simple and doesn't doesn't fall into many of the traps that regulation does but it captures a moment of thinking that creates this hard anchor about what we're going to do rather than allowing for more innovative solutions so one of the great examples of this is in the 90s they updated the Clean Air Act to allow for something other than the sort of the hard steady state so they allowed for some emissions trading to go on and what that created was an opportunity not to simply say everybody has to reduce and not emit above x level instead what it does is says we have a concern about it about air pollution and we want to engage this in a more creative way to say hey there may be times when when some amount of air pollution above whatever we think the the magic number is is is appropriate but we want to figure out how to bring down the overall to get there and so it starts to if you think about these things in ways other than a balance of nature that you have to get back to then you can start to say what's the measurable improvement that we can make and how do we get there and then that becomes a discussion around how do you craft public policy and what it should look like rather than a discussion about we we have violated some i'm going to call it mystical correct state and we have to get back to it instead we can talk about what are the marginal improvements we can make in order to make the world better and here's where sort of my hard assumption comes in for the people that live in so when we talk about some of these these famous laws that are still in effect with amendments today and are pretty well known clean water act clean air act endangered species act national environmental policy act for example would you would you have voted i mean i guess we can take each of them in turn but would you have voted do you think you would have voted for them at the time or written in support of them or because maybe one thing we didn't foresee was kind of the level of gamesmanship and abuse that these laws could be put to especially when you have political entrepreneurs like the national resources defense council suing all the time to like do you think you would have voted for them at the time so i i mean that's a that's a tough counterfactual for a critic of these things to try to address let me let me take it on sort of in this way i think during that era there was both a political there was a political appetite and a recognition that something should be done with regard to the environment that was already bubbling up in society at large and so while i can't i i mean i i'm not going to let you pin me down to say what i voted for against sort of the individual acts i simply don't know it's not a counterfactual i'm understandable jumping into but i think that there was there was a real appetite for legislative action across a number of these areas and so i think in general there was there was a fair bit of support for these these kinds of actions and i i believe that i much more am interested in how do you craft sort of societal level responses where instead of it being sort of imposed order you you're you figure out how to get to emergent order and what that probably meant was eliminating some of the preferences that polluting industries had under lots of sort of the old regulatory regime to allow for the sort of public's preferences to get expressed more directly and so i think that's an interesting alternative approach to go at because lots of these things didn't happen and this is i think one of the great misnomers is lots of these things didn't happen just because of unfettered sort of market forces some of the some of the some of the excesses did but lots of them happened because industry was able to capture even the pre-existing regulatory state or prevent regulate prevent any sort of looking at them a regulation because of their ability to capture the political system in order to get preferential treatment and we still see lots of this today i mean the whole fight over renewable energy is essentially a fight between two sets of rent seekers over who's going to win it's not a quite it's not really a question about what works it's a question about what what privileges will be will be enshrined in law for the industries and that ends up i think creating really bad public policy for us all so that brings up something we most of the examples you've been giving right now you criticize say the clean water act a clean air act as being in a sense because of this you know they a set state that they're they're in a sense overly restrictive that they lock us into a certain way of operating and don't give us the flexibility but we've also mentioned ways that they've been abused or mentioned that we they have been abused can you tell some of the ways that these laws get abused by various actors throughout the clean air act for example yeah i mean the clean air act um yeah you have to pick the hardest example trevor is that the hardest one i mean that oh by by far well there's some pretty good rent seeking going on there yeah no there's a ton of rent seeking going on there um and that really it's about so if you think through um the scrubber requirements in the clean air act which for those for listeners that don't know what a scrubber is lots of emissions particularly power generation emissions have had a requirement put in place under the clean air act that they had to install scrubbing technology to remove remove sulfur compounds and others from the emissions that they were putting out and so the clean air act as it was finally promulgated the most sort of most recent large-scale incarnation of it ended up requiring these sorts of scrubbers and it basically what it meant was that you had to do use one particular approach and the way the way the regulation ended up being implemented was that it made it very very difficult to replace the technology and comply and so you ended up locking in this specific set of essentially power plants that were able to continue with the scrubbers and made it tougher for different power plants to come online now i think the more sort of abusive example is the is a is nipa because nipa is that's a national environmental policy policy act that nipa is been been heavily used especially by the environmental community because it's not actually an environmental protection act and that is the greatest misdome about about nipa almost everyone who talks about it that doesn't have a lot of sort of specific issue area knowledge refers to the national environmental protection act but it's not that it's the policy act that lays out the procedures that have to be done in order to take actions that could adversely affect the environment and so what's happened with nipa is because it's a procedural act it's become the central focus of almost all litigation if you look at the litigation that's gone on lots most of the litigation about environmental questions on public lands or these things they almost always start with an appeal to nipa because nipa as nipa governs the process if you can show a nipa violation you can shut down the whole sort of overall process and it became a way in which that you could have a procedural fight in order to get to the end you wanted if you were an environmental group so let's how does this work like just in terms of more like a situation like a hypothetical or a real situation so someone wants to do x and then what happens how do they try and shut this down or gum it up sure so so one of the sort of prime examples of of nipa of nipa fights that have developed are over the siting of roadways in areas that have not previously had them especially on federal lands and so to put a roadway in either for recreation use or for accessing resources you have to undertake a nipa study and you and the goal of a nipa study is to determine the environmental impact and what nipa does is it lays out the specific processes that have to be done in order to arrive at a determination and those include everything from the sort of review that needs to be done by scientists working in these places the public comment requirements and sort of how the process has to go to get to the decision making and so often what happens is rather than attacking the desire to not have the road they attack how the how the decision was made that the road would have little environmental impact and so if they can demonstrate that the nipa process wasn't followed at any step along the way it allows them to essentially litigate over that and shut down the final the the final approval determination which then prevents the project and it's one of the things that's happened is there's been a whole sort of cottage industry that's developed on both sides to engage the nipa process to say whether or not the sort of procedural requirements have been met and if they're not met it's it's an opening and in fact places like the natural resources defense council wild earth guardians litigate substantially over questions of nipa they you if you read some of the cases there's very little reference to actual technical violations of the regulations that would likely happen instead they've attacked the determination process of whether or not there would be an impact and if they can do that they create the ability to to end the product without have to actually demonstrating an underlying violation so is this working on the theory that do you think that they say okay they're building a road through a forest and we regard that road as tainting the forest and so we're going to do everything we can to stop there from being a road is that why they go after these things yeah i i that i think that's in large part i think there's they have a set of preferences and this is one of the ways in which they are able to actualize those preferences and specifically the two groups i just mentioned although wild earth guardians even more than the nr dc have a real image of what we want to do is minimize or eliminate the impact of human of humans on the environment to whatever extent is possible and so i think that's large-scale what the motivating factor is and i mean i i i actually think most most environmentalists are very genuine in in their beliefs i think they're i'm sure yeah they they these are things they they strongly hold as beliefs i i i have a difference i have a different understanding of what i think is important and what's allowed to happen is you've you've essentially created the opportunity for rent seeking in terms of the policy rents as opposed to our more traditional understanding of rents which are monetary benefits that they can get so instead of rent seeking for subsidies groups are able to use nipah to rent seek for their preferred policy outcomes how do we then begin to push back against this if it's such a ideologically driven you know that we can't say like look you'll be you know like in a lot of policy areas you can say look the policies that you're pushing for aren't going to work as well or they're going to you know you could become wealthier if you did it this way but with this if the the goal is very clear which is to prevent mankind from spreading into the environment more than we already have there's not really you can't say well you know how you negotiate with them and and if you can't negotiate with them how do you begin to lessen their influence over the existing processes i mean are these i guess one way i see are these really fringe beliefs like it's just a handful of super ideological people who because the laws were structured the way they are can exercise um enormous power or is it that these views are also fairly widely shared among americans so it would be harder to shift the policies um so how do we how do we begin to push policies in the right direction yeah so there's sort of i i think a real sort of two product response to that one of the first is in terms of sort of the hardcore balance of nature folks that that's relatively fringe i mean that's i i you wouldn't pick up a whole bunch of that i don't think in the american population i think when when push comes to shove if they have to make marginal decisions between environmental benefits and and and humans generally humans probably went out in that in that scenario but i think the policy question then is well how then do we start to to talk about policies like this in such a way that we can acknowledge that we want to do something the environment's important and we want to set up the best opportunity to have a clean and prosperous environment uh while at the same time recognizing that we live in a world of trade-offs and so it's not possible to have everything that we want and and so partly that's a matter of helping dispel some of the romantic notions and i think that's the sort of real in terms of policy work with the general public is starting to figure out how to talk about the fact that this isn't actually this isn't what ecology is ecology is dynamic in these in these sorts of ways and we have to and we should be thinking about it in terms of that rather than the sort of bedtime stories we were we were taught in elementary school and to be frank um that's going to be a long-term tough sort of change but in part it it begins it's it suggests to me at least that um revising and reviewing some of the the major policy acts could be useful and um so the simple one i think that based on our NEPA discussion is um having a procedural act to make these determinations i think is valuable but NEPA has become so complex that it's it becomes an easy way to have the most extreme position put into policy as opposed to actually weighing out the cost the environmental costs and benefits of it and so reforms to NEPA that push it in that direction i think would be useful reducing the ability to to heavily litigate over these things i think could also be useful um i think that's some of the places to start it's interesting is it is in kind of underscoring the point of the book about political entrepreneurs or groups using these laws to to achieve their very non-negotiable preferences it reminds me of a great comment that has been made was made by our colleague peter van doran who's a favorite guest here on free thoughts but you know he was asked about uh anwar when they were talking about the last alaska national wildlife reserve and whether or not there should be drilling an anwar it's very easy for someone to say for the say the seara club to say absolutely not you know there's there's no we're not going to compromise on this there's no drilling an anwar and then you give them the ability via some of these laws to gum up the works but peter peter had the suggestion to give anwar to the seara club give them the the actual land and then they can actually decide with costs and benefits that they have to experience whether or not they care that much about letting oil drilling happening in a very arctic unvisited national wildlife reserve or maybe they'll allow some oil drilling there and then use that money to save oh i don't know like the florida everglades someplace where people might actually go more often and actually try and get these groups to make trade-offs about what they value as opposed to just stating this is infinitely valuable to me yeah i mean what's interesting about that suggestion is for for a while there were some groups that were trying to do something like this and what they found was it became very difficult for them to operate in sort of the environmental sector um when that was their approach i'm thinking particularly of the nature conservancy who had done a lot of really good work about putting together private solutions to these things and who got extreme pressure to to go back to a more traditional sort of political entrepreneurship model as opposed to lots of the things that they were doing so one of the one of the most interesting things they did early on when they were when they listed the wolf in in sort of the western united states is endangered nature conservancy started a program basically to compensate ranch ranchers for livestock that were killed by wolves um and it it worked okay for a while but there started to be lots of cross pressures about that why are you compensating them for something that's that is the right part of the environment that's natural yes that's natural and then at the same time you started to see gaming of the system on the other side and so it became a hugely problematic and ultimately nature conservancy uh is doing much they're still they still have these sort of impulses to want to do it this way but they're much more the traditional um sort of environmental group model no i mean that that being no no no no no yeah exactly um i i should say that this book is it presents only one side of of the issue of there's a whole nother book that eventually i'm going to write that talks about industries pressures in the same way because it's not as though industry is exempt from these things industry um the sort of the extractors lobby for the same sorts of preferences they just have because they have a different preferred outcome they tend to be more willing to negotiate on the particulars so long as they're able to engage in their trade but they're also perfectly willing to try to get preferential treatment through political entrepreneurship when that's the avenue that maximizes their preference we're almost out of time but i do want to get to one thing uh before we go about the endangered species act yeah and maybe that's a good way of kind of finishing out the show because it is classic about as extreme of this is how things should be we have to keep nature and the balance all species are equal um we need to stop building dams in order to save the snail daughter uh and and you you think a it's it's wrong headed some species maybe should not be saved and b it might actually harm endangered species yeah no it's certainly um it certainly can harm endangered species and i'll circle back to that in a second but i think the the dynamic story of what ecology is if you look across the history of the planet it is a history of struggle and extinction it is not a history of every species continues indefinitely which is sort of the premise of the endangered species act there are some species that as they've evolved that adapted to their environment if their environment changes they're no longer well equipped to continue they no longer evolutionarily match up and extinction is both a natural and an important part of of ecology now that having been said especially at the extent of their range which is a thing you put out in a book which i never really thought about before that some there might be a bunch of canadian links in the canadian rockies but getting down into the southern rocky that's right on the edge of where you'd find any of them so calling them endangered there is a little bit silly it is i mean it's and it's and again that's part of the problem of the arbitrary lines that we draw on maps and call countries or states or wherever that yeah so is that what is the population like in another location or what does it mean what is a species is how different do you have to be to actually be a species does simple local adaptation to a particular place mean that you're an entirely new species well those are tougher questions to answer but lots of these things it species have gone extinct for the entire history that there have been plant there's been plant and animal life on on the earth and they will continue to go extinct forever the bigger question is are we doing things that that could irrevocably harm sort of the course and we don't really we don't know that the answer can't be every species has to be protected probably some should but there are some that are so micro adapted to their local situation that they're probably they probably are going extinct and that that's i think it's a really tough thing to get your head around but it's it's a natural order if you look at one of the things i do in one of my in the lectures i think one of the ones you've seen trevor is i put up two pictures one of a very orderly garden and one of sort of the backyard jungle that occurs in the american south if you let it go for very long and talk a little bit about the fact that what's going on in the garden is man has tended that and each species is given its opportunity to sort of to grow to grow in its particular place in the jungle environment that's grown up in the backyard that's left alone every species is competing with one another in an attempt to propagate its own uh species forward and they are ruthless in that competition and they're pushing for other species to not get resources and that is actually the story of ecology not some story about a steady state in the past and how does the danger species act actually hurt the species well this one danger species act has the ability to create different incentives for folks that that find species on their on their property that no one else knows about it's often referred to as shoot shovel and shut up that if you find an endangered species you shoot it you bury it and then you never talk about it because of the restrictions and the problems that can come from having that that species on your land and the heavy regulatory restrictions that come into place the term the term sort of really sort of evolved from a bunch of ranchers in the west as their solution to the endangered species problem on them on their lands and as a corollary to that what you often see happening is if you don't have species but you could that are endangered on your property you engage in preemptive habitat destruction to prevent them from ever getting there so that you don't fall under it and it it creates these perverse incentives that do a lot of damage so is in a you know just sort of wrapping up what we've been discussing and some of these we've already touched on but but what do we do or maybe how do we have to start thinking about these things if we're going to do a better job of both protecting the environment and allowing for different interests to use it yeah so I think that the the the primary thing is figuring out how to shift the discussion from the world of absolutes and a focus on the balance of nature to a discussion about the relative cost of benefits of these actions I think is sort of the paramount thing to start to do and doing that is very very difficult but in the in the sort of shorter run reviewing these sorts of policies and making it explicit that the questions that we want to ask here are what are the impacts of what's going on not whether or not they're changing it from some mythical state in the past and so shifting from a discussion about a sort of retroactive comparison to a belief about it was to a discussion about what are the current impacts of what we're doing would improve sort of the implementation of these acts and allow us to really have a discussion that I think could move forward both the environmental goals and at the same time let us have a rational sort of basis for thinking about what the impacts of those regulations are thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org