Preemptive Habitat Destruction under the Endangered Species Act

Lueck, Dean; Michael, Jeffrey A.

doi:10.1086/344670

Cited by 153 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Anecdotes about this phenomenon abound, but I am aware of two studies that document systematic evidence of the behaviour. One is a study of the red‐cockaded woodpecker by Lueck and Michael (2003), and the other, by Margolis et al . (2004), is about the pygmy owl.…”

Section: Progress Strikes Backmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulation and the Natural Progress of Opulence

Peltzman

2010

Economic Affairs

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Adam Smith taught us how government regulation can counteract the market forces that produce economic growth. Here I explore a more complex interplay between regulation and economic growth. Regulation creates behavioural incentives that weaken or offset entirely the goal of the regulation. Growth produces many of the benefits ascribed to regulation while also hiding the costs and failures of regulation.

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Section: Progress Strikes Backmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulation and the Natural Progress of Opulence

Peltzman

2010

Economic Affairs

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“…Second, land users may recognize the correlation between regulations and the presence of intact habitat and wildlife populations, and thus pre-emptively destroy habitat and wildlife to reduce the probability of future regulations (Lueck & Michael 2003). Despite the simple theory, protected areas may fail to generate as much avoided pressure as anticipated.…”

Section: Regulatory Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic instruments for nature conservation

Barrett

Bulte

Ferraro

et al. 2013

Key Topics in Conservation Biology 2

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The labour of Nature is paid, not because she does much but because she does little. In proportion, as she becomes niggardly in her gifts, she exacts a greater price for her work. Where she is magnificently beneficent, she always works gratis." (Ricardo, 1817) conservation of nature. In addition to the conventional "efficiency" concerns that are the bread-and-butter of economists, issues like inter-generational equity also come into play.Conservation of nature might "pay" from an economic perspective: it may be rational to conserve natural capital, rather than to convert it into alternative forms of capital or to consume it today. Some forms of natural resource use leave natural habitats more or less intact -think of reduced-impact logging or sustainable fishing -while others convert natural systems into something completely different (plantation cropping, intensive farming, etc.).An overview paper that compares the profitability of various forms of land use (Balmford et al. 2001) identifies many examples where investing in nature pays: sustainable management of ecosystems yields a greater discounted flow of benefits than going for short-term gains (where discounting a flow of benefits implies carrying future benefits forward to the present, so that they are commensurate with current benefits and costs-for this purpose economists employ a discount factor). 1 To observe that nature conservation pays does not imply there are no incentives for resource managers to destroy it (or to convert it into other forms of capital). An important reason why nature may be destroyed is that many of the valuable services and benefits nature provides are "free" in the sense that they are not marketed. This is an obvious case of market failure. Even if nature is valuable, as long as it does not command a flow of money, its value tends to be ignored by private parties. Examples include the air purifying qualities of ecosystems, but also non-use values associated with biodiversity conservation.Environmental economists have developed methods to attach monetary values to ecosystem services, but that is not the same as money-in-the-bank. The point is that even if the social 1 Of course counter-examples also exist; sometimes converting natural capital to financial capital provides higher returns. This is particularly probable when natural resource stocks are plentiful, and when the perspective of private investors or resource owners is adopted (see below).

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“…With respect to the interface between politics and forestry/natural resources, recent contributions include the demonstration by Laband (2001) that voting in the political commons generates over-supply of environmental regulations targeting private landowners, analyses showing that special interest group politics influenced both congressional voting on the Endangered Species Act amendments in the United States (Mehmood and Zhang 2001) and congressional support for restrictions on imports of Canadian softwood lumber (Zhang and Laband 2005), a study by Tanger et al (2011) showing that congressional support for environmental legislation in the U.S. over the period 1970-2008 was influenced by macroeconomic conditions, and superb contributions by Lueck and Michael (2003) and Zhang (2004) demonstrating that private landowners in close proximity to Red-cockaded woodpeckers (RCW), listed under the Endangered Species Act, preemptively harvest timber to preclude development of suitable habitat for RCW.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-Faustmann Forest Resource Economics

2013

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An adequate economic theory of sustainability cannot be based on the neoclassical paradigm that is at the root of most sustainability issues. A new economic theory, rather than a new public policy based on the old theory, will be needed to guide humanity toward sustainability. The challenge to economists, with the help of other social scientists, is to build a new dominant economic paradigm based on a more organic, holistic, and integrative approach. The book series Sustainability, Economics, and Natural Resources aims to integrate the concept of sustainability fully into economics and to provide a foundation for that new economic paradigm. The series is designed to reflect the multi-and interdisciplinary nature of the needed paradigm and will cover and integrate concepts from different streams such as agent-based modeling, behavioral economics, chaos theory, complexity theory, ecological economics, evolutionary economics, evolutionary game theory, institutional economics, post-Keynesian consumer theory, social choice theory, S-matrix theory, and quantum theory. The series will be a forum for new ideas and concepts concerning recent developments and unsolved problems in sustainability and the applications of these ideas to the policy scenario. Each volume in the series is selfcontained. Together these volumes provide dramatic evidence of the range of approaches to sustainability issues found in economic thinking.

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Preemptive Habitat Destruction under the Endangered Species Act

Cited by 153 publications

References 18 publications

Regulation and the Natural Progress of Opulence

Regulation and the Natural Progress of Opulence

Economic instruments for nature conservation

Post-Faustmann Forest Resource Economics

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