"The diversity of life forms, so numerous that we have yet to identify most of them, is the greatest wonder of this planet. The biosphere is an intricate tapestry of interwoven life forms. . . .The loss of diversity, this loss of this biodiversity, carries an urgent warning that we are rapidly altering and destroying the environments that have fostered life forms for more than a billion years.
"The current reduction of diversity seems destined to approach that of the great natural catastrophes at the end of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. In other words, the most extreme in the past 65 million years. In at least one important respect, this modern episode exceeds anything in the geological past. In earlier mass extinctions, which some scientists believe were caused by large meteorite strikes, most of the plants survived even though animal diversity was severely reduced. Now, for the first time, plant diversity is declining sharply."Dr. E. O. Wilson, Biologist, Harvard University
September 1986 Forum on BioDiversity at the Smithsonian and National Academy of Sciences.
Speech given by Randal O'Toole at the Smithsonian Earth Day Conference
on Biodiversity, April 22, 1995.
have six points to make followed by a brief proposal
for using incentives to protect biodiversity. But first I would like to
add my two cents worth to the debate over takings. We've heard people talk
about the legality, constitutionality, and morality of takings, but I am
not interested in those. Nor do I care what the Supreme Court says about
takings.
What I care about is what works to protect biodiversity.
A society in which the government has the power to take, seemingly at random,
50 percent, 20 percent, or any percentage of a person's property without
compensation will not work very well. We've already seen signs of that in
the wise-use backlash against the Endangered Species Act.
Imagine that freedom of the press meant that the government could censor
"only" 20 percent of U.S. News & World Report or the Wall
Street Journal. Or imagine that freedom of assembly meant that the government
could forbid "only" 20 percent of all public or private meetings.
Anyone would agree that such freedoms would be meaningless under these conditions.
So what does work to protect biodiversity and endangered
species? I will present six rules that biodiversity advocates must follow
to protect rare species. Then I will outline a proposal that follows these
rules.
More than half of all listed species are largely
or primarily threatened by government-subsidized activities. Eliminating
these subsidies should be the first priority for biodiversity advocates.
But we won't get very far asking Congress just to eliminate
other people's subsidies. We have to eliminate all resource subsidies out
of tax dollars-even subsidies for endangered species. That may be a hard
pill to swallow, but the benefits from eliminating subsidies to destructive
activities will outweigh the tiny amount of money Congress appropriates
to endangered species.
This may seem obvious. But Congress ignored
the incentives created by virtually all the natural resource laws - including
the Endangered Species Act - that it passed in the past hundred years. Most
proposals for new or revised natural resource laws similarly ignore incentives.
Instead, these laws and proposals are based on the same assumptions upon
which the Soviet Union based its entire economy - assumptions that people
will do what they are told or follow some moral principle even if their
incentives run in the opposite direction.
For example, the Forest Service is supposed to practice
multiple use and protect the environment. Yet a number of laws effectively
reward national forest managers for losing money on environmentally destructive
activities - especially timber cutting. Given a national forest conflict
between timber and the environment, these incentives mean that the environment
too often loses.
Imagine that Congress tried to build the Interstate
Highway System the same way it designed the Endangered Species Act. If so,
planners would decide where the highways should go, and then all private
landowners whose land was crossed by one of the planned highways would be
required to build the road at their own expense. It doesn't seem likely
that, using this method, we would have more than a few hundred or possibly
a few thousand miles of highways today.
In redesigning the Endangered Species Act, we have to
carefully consider the incentives created by every part of the law, or we
will suffer from consequences that we don't expect and probably don't want.
There is always a powerful tendency to support
centralization in the hope that this will make sure everybody does it right.
In fact, centralization almost always guarantees that everybody does it
wrong.
A good example is the Forest Service's fire suppression
policy, developed in response to Congressional pressures, which has devastated
more public land ecosystems than clearcutting. Another example is the Park
Service's natural regulation policy, which is destroying park ecosystems
yet is being imposed on parks nationwide. Decentralization, not centralization,
is the key to protecting biodiversity and other natural resources.
A practical reason for this rule is that, in
a few years, there won't be any tax dollars for the environment. Within
two decades, all federal receipts will be consumed by social security (and
related entitlements) plus interest on the national debt. There will be
little or no money for national defense, much less natural resources.
Even if budget shortfalls weren't a problem, funding
out of user fees rather than tax dollars has the positive benefit of linking
users to managers, which insures that managers provide the resources that
users want the most. By contrast, funding out of tax dollars requires the
intermediary of Congress, which insures that managers provide the resources
that special interests want. This leads to rule 5.
Funds from user fees dedicated to biodiversity
should go straight to a biodiversity program without Congressional appropriations.
The Land & Water Conservation Fund shows what happens when Congress
has to appropriate funds each year. First, Congress fails to spend most
L&WCF funds on land acquisition. Second, most of the funds it does spend
are earmarked to Congressional pork projects, not to recreation or biodiversity
as intended.
To insulate funds from Congress, I look to the federal
reserve boards as a model. These boards do not depend on Congressional appropriations
and their members are appointed for nine-year terms so that, once appointed,
they are not beholden to the President. This makes them the most politically
independent arm of the federal government.
As with rule 2, this seems obvious. But the
Endangered Species Act debate has become so polarized that few people are
searching for win-win solutions. Polarization is such a powerful organizing
tool that few organizations can resist using it. While polarization may
be good for an organization's short-term health, however, it is bad for
the organization's long-term goals. This is because polarization is a two-edged
sword: It helps your opponents as much as it helps you.
A popular slogan during Earth Day 1970 was "We
have met the enemy and he is us." Today, polarization has convinced
many people that environmental problems result from enemies of the environment.
This leads to solutions that make the "enemies" pay but relieves
the "friends" of bearing their fair share of the costs.
In reality, the environment has no enemies; only people
with different incentives. Win-win solutions work by coordinating incentives
so that people will work together rather than against one another.
These rules suggest that something more is
needed than mere revisions of the Endangered Species Act. Instead, we need
a new philosophy of government, and of public resource management in particular.
When the first Earth Day took place twenty-five years ago, most Americans
still believed that the federal government could solve problems like racism
and pollution.
Today, two-thirds of all Americans believe that "government
always manages to mess things up." After two decades of monitoring
the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other federal resource
agencies, I tend to agree.
I have come to think like Henry David Thoreau, America's
first environmentalist. Thoreau said, "in wildness is the preservation
of the world." But he also said, "that government is best which
governs least." So I want to propose a plan to protect biodiversity
that follows Thoreau's small-government ideal and the six rules I've listed
above.
First, we can find an important win-win solution on
public lands, because most of the resources on public land are currently
sold well below fair market value. Of all resources in the national forests,
national parks, BLM lands, and fish and wildlife refuges that make up 25
percent of this nation's land, Congress allows land managers to charge fair
market value only for timber and oil & gas. (Given their poorly designed
incentives, Forest Service and BLM managers don't always charge market value
even for those resources.)
According to the Forest Service, charging market value
for national forest recreation alone would bring in more than $6.6 billion
per year. Extending this to the lands managed by the other three agencies
brings the total to $11 billion. Even if we assume that Forest Service figures
exaggerate by five times, the potential recreation fees are greater than
the receipts from all public land commodities combined.
As David Secunda pointed out in his presentation, recreation
often makes a good proxy for biodiversity. Recreation fees will give land
owners and land managers powerful incentives to protect wildlife habitat.
In turn, this will reduce the conflicts between endangered species and other
land uses.
So I propose to allow public land managers to charge
fair market value for all resources. The total funds generated will be sufficient
to fund these agencies out of their own net income-thus saving taxpayers
$5 billion per year. I also propose to dedicate 20 percent of the total
receipts to a biodiversity trust fund to be managed by a board of trustees
modeled after the federal reserve boards.
This board can use these funds - which I estimate will
be between $750 million and $1 billion per year - to do anything it feels
is best to protect and enhance biodiversity. This would include grants to
state natural heritage programs, buying conservation easements, paying public
or private land managers to use or avoid certain practices, or even pay
people bounties if they have breeding pairs of a listed species on their
land.
Some people may say that $1 billion per year is not
enough to protect U.S. biodiversity. But $1 billion per year, combined with
the proxy of recreation fees, is a lot more than we have now. If this amount
turns out to be insufficient, then the solution is to find more user fees
that can be partly dedicated to biodiversity, not to impose the costs on
a few private landowners.
Incentive-based solutions avoid all of the antagonism
and perverse incentives to destroy wildlife habitat that the current act
generates. These proposals are also appealing to Republicans and fiscal
conservatives. By changing the focus from central control to decentralized
incentives, we can protect species on a nonpartisan basis and end up with
better protection than under our current system.
Randall O'Toole is the founder of The Thoreau Institute, 14417 Southeast
Laurie, Oak Grove, OR 97267. (503) 652-7049.
