By MATT KELLY
Staff Writer
As humans provide for their basic needs, they produce waste.
Attempting to prevent this waste is impossible, but finding an efficient way to use or dispose of it is more plausible.
When talking about environmental policy, property rights become the pivotal issue regarding environmental legislation.
The near extinction of the Buffalo in the nineteenth century makes the case for the efficiency of private property rights with regards to environmental protection.
Large herds of Buffalo existed in the commons.
Hunters claimed ownership of these animals by killing them to the point of near extinction.
There were no laws preventing such action. What saved the buffalo was the invention of the fence.
As people started to fence in their properties they added buffalo to their livestock.
The ownership of live buffalo created incentive to protect them and thus ensured their survival.
In the same way that laws have been created to protect citizens’ property rights, other laws have been created throughout world history to legally plunder private property.
The biggest problem when creating and implementing environmental policy is the problem of the commons.
When people share a common resource such as air or water, no one individual holds the ownership rights to that resource; therefore, the laws that govern and protect such resources can become clouded, often leading to bureaucratic manipulation.
An example is an Idaho farmer named Ronald Rawlins. In 1989, the EPA charged and found him guilty of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
He did this by applying a registered pesticide to his alfalfa crop.
A flock of geese landed on his field and began eating his alfalfa, which resulted in their death.
Even though the geese were there to destroy his crop, the government pushed aside any concern for his private property and source of income, in exchange for the protecting a living entity, despite the threat they posed to his crops.
How is a farmer supposed to survive, when he is not allowed to protect his own private property?
The laws that have been created to protect the environment are plundering the rights that the constitution claims to protect.
Human rights are irrelevant compared to the health of the planet.
According to Bill McKibben’s book, The End of Nature, he states, “Until Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”