Some who worry about the impact of humans on wildlife might find it reassuring that — according to a new study — humans make up just 0.01 percent of the biomass on earth. But most of that biomass is trees and other plants, which make up 82 percent of life on earth.
Those who wish to be more alarmist focus on the study’s finding that humans and their domestic livestock make up 96 percent of the biomass of mammals on earth. All mammalian wildlife make up the other four percent.
The study also found that humans have wiped out 83 percent of mammals, which leads some to say we are decimating wildlife. In fact, we decimated it millennia ago, whenever humans entered a new ecosystem, while today extinction rates for mammals at least have slowed. (Most of the high extinction rates you hear about are of insects.)
It strikes me that, instead of mourning the 4 percent of biomass that is wild, we should celebrate the 60 percent that is domestic livestock and ask ourselves: what is the difference? One answer is that domestic livestock can be owned and its owners have incentives to care for and see its populations grow.
In contrast, under what is known as the North American wildlife conservation model, most wildlife are “owned” by the public, which means they are a commons. No one has an incentive to care for the populations because, if they do, anyone else can come and take them for themselves. Instead, the model relies on the “public trust doctrine,” in other words, an assumption that benevolent bureaucrats will automatically do the right thing.
The problem with this is that bureaucrats do what their constituents want, and for a long time what people wanted was to be rid of wildlife pests such as wolves and grizzly bears. Even now, the federal government has a program known as Wildlife Services (distinct from the Fish & Wildlife Service) whose job is to kill hundreds of thousands of coyotes, prairie dogs, birds, and other wildlife to save private landowners from the anxiety of having to live in proximity with nature. Since the government has a lot more resources than private owners, it is likely to kill a lot more than private owners on their own would kill.
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Instead of giving people incentives to care for wildlife, the Endangered Species Act penalizes people if they own land on which rare species of plants and animals are found. This is not conducive to wildlife conservation. As the Antiplanner found twenty-two years ago, the ESA had cost people a lot of money but actually saved very few species of wildlife.
At least some of the species that the Fish & Wildlife Service claimed to have saved were actually saved by other agencies for other reasons: the bald eagle and peregrine falcon were saved when the Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT, which happened before Congress passed the Endangered Species Act. Similarly, the American alligator was already recovering, due to the state of Florida’s ban on hunting, when it was listed as a threatened species in 1973. Nine other species were listed, then delisted when it was it was found they were never really endangered in the first place.
A recent paper from the Heritage Foundation updates this study, finding that eighteen of the forty species that the Fish & Wildlife Service claims to have recovered were actually never endangered in the first place. The point is that the Endangered Species Act isn’t really working and we need a new system to protect rare species.
Property ownership in wildlife should play a critical if not the key role in that new system. The advantage markets have over the public trust doctrine is that markets work to protect a resource even when only a small minority of people want that resource. Markets can also help to resolve conflicts between, say, wolves and domestic livestock. While wolves are far from endangered in Canada and Alaska, they are rare in the contiguous 48 states, and people are willing to pay to be able to view them. If private owners can monetize that, they can (and do) compensate livestock owners for losses to predation.
On too many issues, people take a position based on supposedly moral reasons without asking what works and what doesn’t work. The Endangered Species Act was passed on moral grounds and, even though it isn’t working, is still defended on those moral grounds: either you are for the act or you are against wildlife. It is time to recognize that those who support the act are doing the most harm to wildlife and those who support property rights can see a better solution.
90% of all life on Earth is microscopic. You may cause a mass extinction every time you wash your hands. Now of that 10% remaining, get rid of plants and fungi, after all we’re focusing on animals. Now of the remaining animals, separate vertebrates from invertebrates (jellyfish, worms and other ugly, slimy things). Only 3% of animal’s are vertebrates. Now separate from vertebrates, the fish, the lizards, amphibians that are slimy, scaly and smelly. And what you have left are mammals and birds and that’ is what gets most of the money. But that doesn’t mean humanity is insignificant, we’ve converted nearly a billion acres of what used to support some 10-20 million species towards agriculture. Only an idiot would deny that.
There are 1,800+ species currently on the American endangered species list. Out of those 1,800, only 41 have been removed from the list that in and of itself gives you a clue as to how effective the legislation works. Now of those 41, Nine are extinct……oops. Sixteen were put on the list by mistake. So that leaves 16 that were on the list as success stories. Really? Of those 16, three are kangaroos……that live in Australia. Three are birds in Palau that were miscounted. Three are birds that recovered solely due to the Federal government’s ban on DDT (Bald Eagle, etc.), that accomplishment was the EPA, not the Endangered Species Act. One is the American Alligator, scientists overestimated the threat they faced, combined with the fact that they’re bred commercially for food, leather and tourism by the tens of thousands means they’ll probably never go extinct even if Disney bulldozed the Everglades to build an Everglades themed attraction. Louisiana has far less legislation put into place for the protection of alligators, despite this they enjoy a higher population of gators. One is the Robbins Cinquefoil, a species of New Hampshire plant that was saved by simply planting some and redirecting a few hiking trails so backpackers didn’t step on them. One is the Columbian white tailed Deer and sub-species of Canadian Goose, all of which were handled with local hunting restrictions, something easily done without super duper federal bureaucracy. One is the Tinian Monarch, a bird whose habitat had been literally blown away by B-29’s but was fine by the time the government bothered to count them decades later. One is the Gray Whale, we can thank the petroleum industry for saving Whales in general, by producing oil without having to gut thousands of whales annually. And the Hoover’s Wooly Star, a California plant thought under threat from land use for petroleum drilling and invasive species. Put on the list in 1990 but removed from the list in 2003 when the discovered other populations across California yet still listed as a success story even though they didn’t do anything.
There are only three countries where wildlife populations have ever grown in the last 100 years…..US, Canada and South Africa; where hunting big game is perfectly legal. Fact is, Eco-tourism does little in terms of conservation. Namely most of the financial resources go towards upkeep of the very luxuries that are supposed to be environmentally superior. Hunting on the other hand requires no luxuries. Taxes and fees and tribal right to hunt exchanges pay for the exact purpose they’re meant for. Eco-tourism and parks aren’t working. Because the African Savannah at nearly a million square miles is simply too big to patrol. The African rainforest is too treacherous and exhausting to be tourist friendly. And corruption is widespread, For a thousand dollars which is more than they might see in years of work, they can overlook the fact you shot a 50,000 dollar rhino. When the rhino’s are privately owned, incentive springs up to protect and proliferate rhinos.
I hate being a slave in this Idiocracy, for me it’s by circumstance of time & place. For you teahadi’s it’s by choice :$
In many ways, free markets align with the “greater good”. Some of this is by design – they distribute power more evenly (assuming absence of regulatory capture), they reward quality, they reward differentiation (thus promoting innovation). But in other ways, they are utterly indifferent to a society’s health, and if they happen to align with it, it’s an accident.
I think your wolf example above fits in this second paradigm: it’s not owing to some characteristic of free markets, but rather to some peculiarity of humans that this market-based scheme might be effective; i.e. it’s a peculiarity of our time and society that some people are willing to pay money to witness healthy, wild populations of animals live how they’ve evolved to live in healthy versions of the ecosystems they’ve evolved to live in. If wolf fur suddenly became very popular, then free markets would just as quickly promote the destruction of wild wolf habitats, and these days would probably replace them with ecosystem-degrading factory wolf farms. While market capitalism inherently promotes distribution of power, quality, and innovation, it doesn’t inherently promote environmental stewardship.
If you’re willing to at least entertain the possibility that preserving long-existing “natural” ecosystems is in our society’s best long-term interest, and that the alternative (destruction of these habitats to be replaced by totally human-controlled, infinitely simpler and thus less resilient ecosystems) could have catastrophic consequences, then I think that market incentives aren’t enough to ensure our well-being; that some form of collective action is required (not that it needs to take the form of the ESA – I’m with you on those criticisms).
How many bureaucrats have jobs due to the ESA? The only endangered species they care about is themselves.
This reminds me of the bloated Agriculture Dept. where one desk-bound bureaucrat asks his co-workers: “How is our farmer doing this year?”
I hate being a slave in this Idiocracy…
And no doubt the inverse is true.
You proved my point :$