For 30 years, I was an appraiser and a frequent expert witness on the value of property. Sometimes government agencies would condemn property under eminent domain, and I would estimate what the agency should pay the owner; at other times, I estimated the value of land or easements given to a conservation group such as…
Author: Wallace Kaufman
White Moose and Public Sacrifice
What ethical and legal claims can religion can make on resources and the property of others who do not share the faith? We begin with hunting. Every hunting season brings outrage and lament at the news that a hunter has killed a “white moose.” The animal killed could be elk, deer, or any animal that…
Free Market Environmentalism Is Action, Not Theory
How a would-be academic discovered he was an ‘enviropreneur’ Wallace Kaufman, a regular contributor to this blog, describes his discovery of how profit-making projects can protect land. In the late 1950s what new college student with a social conscience didn’t think the world needed a better way of motivating people than profits? My parents had…
The Future of Wildlife Funding: Hunters and Non-hunters
This post by contributor Wallace Kaufman is a reply to Sterling Burnett’s post, “Where Are the Eco-tourists’ Dollars?” For openers, let me suppose that I am a lion, a giraffe, or a Cape buffalo. I ask myself, “Who is going to save me from a poacher?” And “Who will put up the most money to…
Will the Anti-Hunters Pay for Their Pleasure?
By Wallace Kaufman This is Part III of a three-part article. Part I is here; Part II is here. The anti-hunters, of course, have yet to put significant money in play. More wildlife and wildlife habitat have been preserved and restored by hunters than by anti-hunting environmentalists. (Environmentalists tend to focus on nearly extinct species…
Hunters’ Last-Ditch Defenses
By Wallace Kaufman This is the second part of a three-part article. For Part I see Hunters and Their Money Are Fading. For Part III, see Will the Anti-Hunters Pay for Their Pleasure? How much hunters cherish killing is demonstrated by their own boasts of how much they spend on the pleasure. Pleasure is the…