Who Owns the Environment?
By Bruce Shields 

As Garrett Hardin envisioned "the Tragedy of the Commons" in his 1968 article, the environment is a good shared by all, who in turn are free to call upon the Commons without hindrance.  His parable is of a common pasture such as in a medieval village, upon which each householder grazes ever increasing numbers of animals until the common pasture is so over used it will no longer support anyone’s animals.  The American environmental movement took Hardin to heart, extracting the theorem that only powerful government regulation can prevent the Tragedy of the Commons.  Because in American politics the grouping most comfortable with expanded role of the State in everyday decision making fall to the Left of center, since the early 1970’s most environmental groups have embraced the Leftward or Statist solution to allocation of resources.  But that is not the only possible solution.

Nearly a dozen years ago, the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, sponsored a symposium with the title, "Who Owns the Environment?" Some 25 speakers over the three days explored how privitizing environmental goods can improve every feature of the natural world.  Some parts of the programs published in the festschrift following that conference, Who Owns the Environment?  ed. by Peter J. Hill & Roger E. Meiners, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, have been put into use.  For instance, the Canadian province of New Brunwick has been introducing private ownership of fishing rights in the provincial waters, leading to the restoration of a fishery which had been pronounced collapsed.  The American contrast between the abundance of lobster and shellfish (for which watermen own territorial rights) and the scarcity of groundfish like flounder (in which federal regulation controls) should cause Americans to question regulation as the solution to everything. 

Where resources are actually owned by government units, the conflicts over uses seem almost unresolvable.  In Vermont, we have had very bitter conflicts over camp leases on State lands, over land swaps between the State and various private entities, over the management plans on National Forest lands, over erection of communication towers (since the visibility of these structures has been deemed part of the public estate), and many other issues.  When something is identified as public in nature, grievious and frequently stalemated conflict erups.  When ownership is private, control is clear: whoever values (i.e. pays for) a property gets to determine its use.  The clearer and more defensible title to property is, the more responsible and beneficial to society its use is.

Economist Hernando DeSoto in The Mystery of Capital displays a satellite image of the Isle of Hispaniola in the Caribbean sea.  The north part of the island is green; the southern part, brown.  The Northern part is the Dominican Republic, in which simple laws and structures enforce property rights for all farmers.  The Southern part is Haiti, where a wretchedly corrupt bureaucracy refuses to enforce property rights for the poor.  The resulting lack of ownership has caused unthinkable environmental degradation in Haiti, whose barren denuded soils are clearly distinguishable from 1000 miles up.  Clearly, enforcement of property rights coincides with ecologically responsible management.

Unfortunately, because the Statist element of the Environmental Movement early on aligned with the Statist Left political groups, using private property techniques to enhance environmental protection has been a non-starter in the US.  Because of a fervid ideological commitment to public ownership of almost all resources, and a rabid bias against private enterprise, when policy analysts some 30 years ago began to propose methods to privatise all or some part of declining elements of the environment, the Environmental movement launched a widespread campaign to demonize those seeking privatisation.  Because the first issue to be highlighted involved ranchers seeking long term leases of grazing rights on public land, the Environmentalists satirized the ranchers’ organization as "The Wise Use Movement."  They have expanded the term to embrace everyone who favors any property rights in any environmental good.  But there has never been any organized movement operating under that banner.

An issue underlying the opposition between Statists and privatisers is the analysis by many economists of the distorting effect that public ownership has on the uses of the good involved.  One case study found that ski areas have in the past arranged to sell the land upon which their ski runs are located to government entities, then lease back the use of the trails.  This makes economic sense only if the lease is offered to the ski area at below market prices -- which given the monopsony for ski area leases is very likely.  And the government owners customarily pay only a fraction of the local taxes and rates that a private owner would.  Though often billed as boosting the local economy, these quasi-public arrangements would appear to distort the local market.

We should follow that suggestion of market distortion across all the categories of environmental good owned or controlled by government or quasi governmental agencies.  It is very possible to see that a rigorous and fairly determined policy of privatization has a fair chance of success -- success being a reduction of environmental degradation at minimal expense to society at large. 
 

Bruce P. Shields, Wolcott, VT 
bshields@pwshift.com