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…
Tag: Habitat
Back to ‘Shoot, Shovel and Shut Up’: Court Drops Trump’s Common-Sense Rules on Endangered Species
“With this change, we’re back to the ‘shoot, shovel, and shut up’ status quo.” (PERC Tweet). A federal district court in California has vacated Trump-administration rules designed to make the Endangered Species Act more fair and effective. The most important rule dealt with the treatment of threatened species, which are species that are not yet…
‘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…
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…
How Do We Save the Monarch Butterfly?
Monarch butterflies hit a record low in California this winter, reports Business Insider, citing an annual count by the Xerces Society. The western Monarchs migrate as much as 3000 miles a year, arriving in California from the Pacific Northwest, usually staying in the state until March and then moving to other parts of the country….