Government regulation of land
in the western United States on balance,
doesn't protect the environment from industry.
It protects industry from having to compete
in the free market.
Why can't environmentalists acquire the land
that they want to preserve?
Often, because it's illegal.
Shawn Reagan is the vice president of research
at the Property and Environment Research Center,
which is a leading advocacy group
in the free-market environmentalist movement.
He says preservation groups are often willing to compete
with industry on a level playing field.
They are looking to use markets,
to use property rights, to use voluntary exchange,
to essentially get what they want,
which is preserving natural amenities,
conserving wildlife and open space.
So in the case of public lands,
we see groups trying to acquire rancher's grazing permits,
we see groups trying to buy federal energy leases
to keep the resources in the ground.
We even see groups trying to bid for timber leases,
but to keep the trees standing rather than harvesting them.
In many cases, though, they've been thwarted
by rules that basically make that illegal.
Most people think of public lands in the west
as being national parks or wilderness areas,
but really most of the lands in the west are managed
by other federal agencies
and they're fundamentally political lands.
Reagan says that these lands are often leased
through public auctions,
but environmental groups that want to pay for the right
to preserve them are frequently excluded for participating.
Too often, natural resource management is biased
towards resource extraction because rules that were created
in the 19th century essentially require rightsholders
to harvest, extract, or graze the resource
rather than to conserve it.
Because federal agencies
don't consider conservation to be a beneficial public use,
environmental groups are locked out.
Reagan says that in a free market,
the highest bidders should win
even if their intention is to leave the land untouched.
Our idea of a beneficial use is much broader.
A lot of times the highest valued use
would be a community coming together to decide
that a forest should be left standing rather than harvested,
or conserved for some recreational opportunity.
Reagan points to one case
in which environmentalist successfully preserved land
in Bozeman, Montana by outbidding the competition.
The state offered up a timber sale
on some state-owned lands, south of town,
and a community group formed to oppose this project.
But rather than trying to litigate or regulate,
they attempted to outbid the timber company
instead of harvesting the trees.
And the local group raised enough money
to purchase this lease.
They outbid the timber company.
And for 25 years,
they have the right to keep these trees standing.
And yet the Montana Legislature's response was
to change the law to prevent environmentalist groups
from competing against timber companies in the future.
In the case of the Bozeman timber sale,
the community group paid more than the logging company.
So taxpayers in Montana earn more from this nonuse right
than they would have from a timber sale.
And I think that's an important distinction here is that,
just because we're leaving trees standing
doesn't mean that we're not going to generate
as much revenue.
It's, in fact, the only way that this lease
would have moved forward,
is if the group outbid the logging company.
The lease that the group purchased is good for 25 years.
And so after the 25-year period,
they'd have to acquire another similar lease
and the state would stand to earn even more revenue
from another Conservation License.
Whereas, if the lease had gone to the logging company,
it would take a hundred years
before that forest would regrow
to the point where it could potentially be harvested again.
By excluding environmental groups, Reagan says,
we get a distorted picture about the value
of our natural resources.
The point is not that resource development is bad.
It's not that extracting energy is fundamentally wrong
or harvesting timber is fundamentally wrong.
We all live in a house likely that's made of wood.
But rather, it's that environmental values are real
and they're legitimate
and we need to find ways to allow for those values
to be expressed through markets
and through voluntary exchange.
I think a system of non-use rights
where markets can help resolve these competing demands
is a system that can help us allocate resource extraction
to places where it makes the most sense
and do conservation where it makes the most sense as well.