Are marketplace values and business good or bad for the environment?

Many environmental groups argue that profit motives and private interests are essentially at odds with environmental protection. However, CEI’s research shows that private stewardship and free markets benefit environmental quality. These factors have ensured a growing resource base in America, despite claims to the contrary. That is because when resources are owned privately, the incentive is for owners to protect and expand those resources. In fact, private arrangements have proven useful in protecting and expanding fishery resources, elephant populations, and even offer promise for tiger protection. Such incentives also drive manufacturers to use resources as efficiently as possible because every resource saved means larger profit margins. That is why soda cans today are made with a fraction of the materials used in past decades.

Properly functioning markets also help control pollution. First, wealth creation is the key driving force for environmental protection. The data show that as wealth increases in a society, that soceity will devote more resources to environmental improvements. In addition, market systems hold polluters accountable for harms to others in society via a liability and property rights systems. Unfortunately, governmental approaches to environmental protection have largely preempted such approaches to environmental protection and have imposed less efficient, more costly regulations.

Do federal foresters do a better job protecting resources than private parties?

Because private foresters bear the costs of mismanagement, they continually replenish and wisely manage their forests. Public land managers focus on political considerations, which are often misguided.

Thanks to private management—and despite the United StatesU.S. forest resources are on the rise. For the six forest inventories taken in the United States between 1950 and present, net forest growth always exceeded harvests. Despite the federal government being the largest landowner in the United States, about 86 percent of reforestation is done by the private sector, with the remaining being done by government. being the world's number one timber producer—

In contrast, federal forests are very unhealthy because they have been guided by a politically preferred policy of fire suppression. After decades having this policy in place, we have unhealthy, overstocked forests that burn much more intensely than the lighter fires that historically were a normal part of the natural ecological workings of many forests. In Congressional testimony, Professor Robert H. Nelson provided evidence showing that more than 40 million acres of the national forest system are rated "very unhealthy" and face an extremely high fire hazard because of past fire suppression. In the southwestern region of the United States, where the Los Alamos fire burned, fully 85 percent of all national forest lands are considered in poor health and fire-prone.

What is the best way to protect species?

The current approach to helping endangered species in the United States involves outlawing hunting and any harming of endangered species and regulate land use to protect species, but it hasen’t worked. Landowners who happen to have threatened or endangered species on their lands or who simply have habitat that might be used by endangered species are routinely prevented from using their lands or property for such activities as harvesting their trees, planting their crops, grazing their cattle and even disking firebreaks around their homes. Sadly, the ESA's punitive structure creates incentives for landowners to destroy endangered species habitat, and never dare create it. As a result, many people consider endangered species a menace and are encouraged to basically "shoot, shovel and shut up" should they see one.

Providing financial compensation would eliminate disincentives and it would be more just. But in addition to eliminating the adverse incentives, we need to employ the concept in the first answer. It uses positive incentives.

Some nations have found that when they allow for a market for a species, either through hunting or tourism parks for viewing species, communities work hard to protect species. A program in Zimbabwe that promoted tourism for viewing elephants made the species so valuable to the local community that their conservation efforts led to an explosion of the elephant population. In Kenya, where the government banned all market uses of elephants, elephant populations dwindled as poaching continued and as the price for elephant tusks in the black market increased.