At 10:52 AM 6/7/96 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

... As any free market economist would tell you, the way to stop a resource from being destroyed is not to pray that people won't buy it but to assure that someone has an ownership stake in the resource, thus assuring that their investment would be destroyed if the resource vanished. Thats why, for instance, timber companies happily clear cut government land that they have leased (after all, not clear cutting would mean that they wouldn't extract maximum value for their lease under the idiotic terms that the leases are made under) but will almost never clear cut their own lands, because that would reduce their long term value.

I find this analysis a bit superficial because it does not consider the difference between short-term and long-term value. To use Perry's example of the timber industry. Before the late 1980s, the lands owned by Pacific Lumber were managed for long-term production. When the company was taken over as part of the "maximize present value" movement in the late 1980s, the management goals changed to increase timber production without regard to long-term production. (I seem to remember that the takeover was one of Michael Milken's deals.) My conclusion from this example is that if your interest is in the long-term preservation of ecosystems, you need institutions that are structured so they take a long-term view, and can not be subverted by short-term trends in markets. As far as I can tell, the US National Park Service, for all its faults, does as good a job of preserving ecosystems as any other institution, and better than most. (If you disagree, please provide examples of institutions that do as well.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA