Today, I am posting a comment on Tibor Machan's excellent article on private conservation, Environmentalism Without Government, that appeared yesterday on the Mises Institute website. It is obvious that private land ownership results in better stewardship. Sadly, some people just think it means that the badly managed public lands are simply being run by the wrong people. Anyone who believes that, well, I have some lakefront property I'd like to show you.

Consider if you will the following historical imaginings:

• As soon as the spotted owl was discovered to have been nesting in old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, the Sierra Club marshalled its resources to purchase thousands of acres and encouraged the timber companies who owned the remaining forests to wait until the end of the breeding season to log the timber in exchange for their publicly-awarded "Friend of the Forest" seal-of-approval. Once some of the logged forests regrew (as forests tend to do), the Sierra Club purchased replanted land for the owls in their woods for which to migrate before they sold their own lands for logging.


• Maritime law was expanded to explicitly recognize property rights. Those fishermen who could establish right of first use were awarded ownership. Although rights were vigorously contested at first, and a few plots were awarded unfairly, eventually much of the oceans were owned by fishermen who now had the incentive to harvest catches in a sustainable fashion. Some owners traded rights to more efficient operators to harvest certain kinds of seafood in their plots, and some employed technological means to improve breeding grounds. The result was an explosion in increasingly available (and thus affordable) seafood. No longer was any specie in danger of being fished to extinction.

Property rights produce win-win-win situations for producers, consumers, and the environment.