By and large,, conservation groups in the United States cannot buy or lease federal land or water rights and apply them to conservation goals. That is, they cannot obtain cattle grazing rights to let bison roam; “mining rights” to leave the minerals in the ground; timber leases to stop cutting trees; or federally supplied water…
Search Results for: habitat
The Snail Darter Is Back
Remember the snail darter (or, more likely, hearing about it)? In 1975, the Endangered Species Act temporarily halted construction of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River because it would endanger the habitat of the snail darter, a three-inch fish (shown above). The snail darter will be taken off the list, reports Dino Grandoni…
Prosperity Improves the Environment (We Knew That but Many Don’t)
The 2020 Environmental Performance Index shows a close relationship between environmental success and a country’s GDP. This annual index, developed jointly by the Yale Center for Environmental Policy and Law and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, ranks 180 countries. Writing on HumanProgress.org, Ethan Yang finds that wealth and environmental…
‘Wild Horse Annie’ Rides Again
Once again, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is faced with opposition to its way of dealing with wild horses on public rangeland. For many decades, wild horses and burros have proliferated on public lands—descendants of escaped horses going back as far as the years of Spanish exploration, plus horses lost or abandoned by settlers…
Biden’s ’30 by 30′ Plan: 30 percent of U.S. Land ‘Protected’ by 2030
President Biden plans to raise the percentage of land “protected” in the United States from about 12 percent to 30 percent over the next nine years. That would mean protecting an additional area more than four times the size of California. From the White House fact sheet: “The order commits to the goal of conserving…
The Surprising Spread of Free Market Environmentalism
This is the second post by Shawn Regan of PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center, on “what free market environmentalists support.” Those who support the role of property rights and markets in environmental protection may not realize how many organizations agree with them. Here are a few examples (for others see Part I of…