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REVIEWS
ACCOUNTING FOR MOTHER NATURE: CHANGING DEMANDS FOR HER BOUNTY
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by Terry L. Anderson, Laura E. Huggins, and Thomas Michael Power
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| Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California, 2007. Photographs, tables, index. 312 pages. $34.95 cloth. |
| Touching on subjects from the privatization of state and federal parks to incorporating market systems in the formulation of environmental policy, Accounting for Mother Nature is the latest in a slew of books from the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) — a conservative think tank that advocates for environmental policies that are based on private property rights. In the lead essay, Thomas Michael Power frames the book's purpose in terms of the "wealth of nature" — an undefined phrase that apparently refers to two things: everything that is not humanly produced for which a cash value could be derived (such as minerals in the ground, trees in the forest, views of a lake); and many things that do not yet have cash values but could, or should (such as clean air, parklands and public recreation areas, rivers with salmon) (p. 11). Power and the other authors argue that the ways we measure the wealth of nature need to be extended to more places and things, and this enlarged accounting process must then be applied to environmental policy making. |
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In an essay entitled "Maximizing the Wealth of Nature: A Property Rights Approach," Terry L. Anderson extends Power's ideas to current controversies over how best to utilize and protect federal public lands. His answer is to develop a price mechanism that determines the relative value of all claims — mining, grazing, timber harvesting, recreation, fisheries, tourism — and then open portions of the public domain to a bidding war. Theoretically, areas that are highly valued for their scenic or recreational qualities will be acquired by environmental groups, while supposedly less scenic or less "fun" areas will attract commercial enterprises. Given the amount of funds that different interests would have at their disposal, it is not hard to imagine how profoundly — and disastrously — Anderson's formulation would alter the federal public domain. Literally priceless resources (such as species, places, and ecological process that have no assigned cash value or for which there is not sufficient buyer demand) would be subsumed by other interests and most likely destroyed. Any sense of an American "public" would also be sorely diminished — and readers should hardly be surprised that David D. Haddock, in the closing essay of the book, advocates ending the national park system and turning over "sites such as Yellowstone ... to privately organized non-profit organizations" (p. 285). |
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To make their cases more palatable, the authors present their arguments — and themselves — as sensitive to environmental concerns. They like to hike and fish, they want to see special places and resources protected, and they want clean water and air. They want sound environmental policy, which simply means getting rid of too much federal regulation. Much like advocates of Intelligent Design, who promote creationism by noting a few gaps in evolutionary theory, the authors of Accounting for Mother Nature point up the shortcomings of federal policy to promote an expansion of private property rights. One need only look at the land use controversies in the Klamath Basin, Anderson and Laura E. Huggins argue, to see where a contradictory array of federal policies are the bane of everyone concerned. The solution, they reason, is to adopt a market-based system where competing interests — tribes, farmers, bird watchers, and power companies — can create a workable arrangement that leaves everyone happy, and leaves the federal government and all non-local interests out of the mix. |
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Besides the Klamath Basin, Accounting for Mother Nature takes up other subjects relevant to Oregon, including coastal fisheries, public and private forest management, and Columbia Basin salmon. Like the recent and still tenuous Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, the authors see the development of market-based management tools, like individual transferable quotas in some fisheries and recent cooperation between tribes and irrigators to restore salmon populations in the Walla Walla Basin ,as evidence for the general failings of federal public resources management. Yet these recent developments — which certainly have intriguing policy implications — do not speak to a wholesale need to privatize or commodify large portions of the public domain any more than a glitch in the theory of evolution means all biology texts should be burned. |
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While these and other arguments are poorly reasoned, the book is even more disappointing for its lack of scholarly integrity. Published by the Hoover Institute at Stanford University — where Anderson, Executive Director of PERC and the book's lead author — is a senior fellow, the book is presented as a serious piece of scholarship. Yet this is largely a masquerade, since the book is primarily directed toward amenable policy makers, PERC supporters, and like-minded property-rights advocates. Academic writing lives or dies based on the nature and quality of its sources, but most of the references in this book simply cite previous works by the authors. When counter-arguments are referenced, they invariably come from popular writings and are either presented as straw men — to be easily refuted — or out of context in order to bolster a particular point. The effect is a disappointing echo chamber where like-minded people with bad ideas tell each other how smart they are. |
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| Mark David Spence
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| Albany, Oregon |
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