The previous post stated that changes in thinking about environmental preservation and remediation policy increasingly embraced by the current US administration deserved careful thought.

After decades of muddled policy divorced from material reality the US is proposing insightful policies that use the nature of material reality as an ally to achieve superior and durable environmental remediation.

This Conservation In Practice article Making Conservation Profitable by Katherine Ellison and Gretchen C. Daily, is one of their most popular, most reprinted articles. It describes the still controversial efforts of some environmental activists to harness the interests of individuals and organizations.

Philanthropy and government regulations alone simply aren't up to the task of rescuing nature, and it's time for some well designed appeals to people's self-interest.

This isn't a new idea. The earlier post, Mouse-based Monitoring referenced an old Wendell Berry essay, Private Property and the Common Wealth, which made a similar argument.

The answer is obvious: you cannot get good care in the use of the land by demanding it from public officials. That you have the legal right to demand it does not at all improve the case. If one out of every two of us should become a public official, we would be no nearer to good land stewardship than we are now. The idea that a displaced people might take appropriate care of places is merely absurd: there is no sense in it and no hope. Our present ideas of conservation and of public stewardship are not enough. Duty is not enough. Sentiment is not enough. No mere law, divine or human, could conceivably be enough to protect the land while we are using it.

If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it. If-as the idea of commonwealth clearly implies-landowners and land users are accountable to their fellow citizens for their work, their products, and their stewardship, then these landowners and land users must be granted an equitable membership in the economy.

Berry focused on the personal efforts of owner operators who preserve and conserve to assure their continued livelihoods. The principle underlying Berry's older ideas is the same as that of the CIP article: conservation is most effective when it is in the interest of people to conserve. Our societies require policies and institutions which leverage self-interest.

To do this it is necessary to develop mechanisms to determine the value of ecosystem services and establish markets for them. The CIP article investigates a variety of current efforts with local, national and international scope which seek to develop markets and exchanges. One of the more interesting efforts is the Katoomba Group.

Despite the controversies, markets for environmental services have continued to develop. A leading supporter of the trend is an unusual coalition of scientists, business executives, and professional conservationists known as the Katoomba Group, after the site of its first meeting, a resort town outside Sydney, Australia. It was there, in April of 2000, that Adam Davis first unveiled his plan for the Con Ex. To his delight, his new colleagues understood and even applauded his vision.

The group's members, led by founder Michael Jenkins, who is also president of a nonprofit Washington, DC conservation group called Forest Trends, are united in the hope that selling ecosystem service credits from forests can not only help combat climate change and protect biodiversity but conceivably relieve poverty in undeveloped parts of the world where local residents might earn income as stewards of the land...

"The idea is private dollars on private lands, for public benefit"...

The previous post stated that "Critics are flumoxed since they have no idea how this works, have no grasp of society, economics or human behavior". Many are reasoning in good faith but don't have the mental tools or knowledge base to comprehend these ideas which seem to contradict their core beliefs and political aversions to market behaviors. They see self-interest as something to be suppressed rather than leveraged to achieve public benefits. This conflict will not be resolved soon since there is a large body of political and social philosophy, as well as many believers, that share this confusion and distrust of individual and group interests.

» Powerful Interest from Crumb Trail
Even the hoary old BEEB seems to sometimes go off message and print something interesting. [via Conservation News] The potential for indigenous people to help curb the destruction of forests is being overlooked by the international community, accordin......[read more]
Tracked: July 23, 2004 11:20 AM