The answer to environmental protection may be gleaned by observing special interest behavior. Let's take the example of the paper companies who log America's national forests. The US Forest Service, with our tax dollars, builds three to four times as many logging roads as hiking trails, so that vast sweeps of our precious forests can be felled by paper companies with little cost and only token replanting.

     However, on lands which they own privately, the paper companies suddenly become staunch environmentalists! They replant so that their own forest acreage increases each year – while the national ones dwindle. In the South, International Paper makes as much as 30% of its profits from recreational uses of its forests.

     Why is there so much difference between how paper companies treat their own land and the way they treat public property? When a paper company is allowed to log a national forest, it has little incentive to harvest in a responsible and sustainable manner. After all, the paper company has no guarantees that it will be allowed access to the same forest again. Without ownership, long-term planning and care of forests just doesn't make economic sense.

     Owners, on the other hand, profit from long-range planning because they will eventually reap the fruits of their conservation efforts. Even if they don't wish to keep a property, selling it becomes more profitable when it is well cared for, and this includes forest property.

     With this in mind, we can propose a two-part strategy for environmental protection which can turn each person's greed into a desire to nurture Mother Nature:

1. individual ownership of the environment, and

2. personal liability for damage caused to the property of others.

Owning A Piece Of The Earth: The British long ago learned how to stop pollution of their rivers. Fishing rights in British streams and rivers are a private good that can be bought and sold. For the last century, polluters have been routinely dragged into the courts by angry owners and forced to rectify any damage they may have caused. Every owner on these rivers has in fact become an environmental protector – because each stands to profit from nurturing the environment.

     In the Gulf of Mexico, shrimp fishermen once claimed parts of the ocean as their property in the time-honored practice of homesteading. They formed a voluntary association to keep the waters productive and to avoid over-fishing – until the US government took over as caretaker in the early 1900s.

     Just as the US government took over the fisheries, so too have Third World governments taken over the rainforests and handed them over to special interests. An important element in protecting the rainforests is to respect the homesteading rights of the native peoples who have consistently exhibited a history of sustainable use. Conservation publications, such as Cultural Survival, recognize that upholding the property rights of native peoples is absolutely crucial to saving the rainforests. Private ownership encourages preservation of endangered species as well. For example, Zimbabwe respects the homesteading claims of natives to the elephants on their land. Like other private property, elephants and their products can be legally sold. As a result, the natives jealously protect their valuable elephants from poachers. The natives have every incentive to raise as many elephants as possible so they can sponsor safaris and sell elephant ivory, hide, and meat. As a result, the elephant population has increased from 30,000 to 43,000 over the past ten years. People will protect the environment when they own it and can profit from it.

     On the other hand, when governments try to shepherd wild animal herds, disaster is the predictable result. For example, the Kenyan government claims ownership of all elephants, and hunting has been banned in Kenya. While Zimbabwe's herds thrived, elephants in Kenya have declined 67% over the last decade.

     Environment that is "unowned," suffers a condition described by Dr. Garrett Hardin in a 1968 paper as "the tragedy of the commons." He revealed that property that belongs to "everyone" is the responsibility of no one. Ocean fish, for example, are considered to belong to anyone who catches them; consequently, everyone tries to catch as many as they can today, before a competitor gets them tomorrow. If the ocean could be homesteaded, as with the shrimp fisheries described above, owners would have an incentive to make sure the fish population was maintained and even expanded.

Making Polluters Pay: If someone pollutes or destroys that piece of the earth owned by another, he or she should be required to restore it. In practice, this could be so expensive that a polluter could be bankrupted by his or her own carelessness. If corporate officers were made personally responsible for deliberate acts of pollution, they would have little incentive to poison the air, land or water. Making polluters, not taxpayers, responsible for the damage they do takes the profit out of pollution.