Thanks to the folks at PERC for giving us this round-up of what they’re currently working on.
Each of us can pick and choose what positions of theirs they support. I like their views on voluntary conservation efforts and “pay to protect.” Also I support charging international visitors more to visit taxpayer-supported National Parks. And anyone who takes on Wild Horse and Burro policy voluntarily deserves some credit. I would think almost everyone would find one PERC position that they can support.. PERC supports conservation leasing, a priority for the last (D) Admin, so it seems they are generally libertarian/free market regardless of political party. My general view is that if folks can work things out (making peace) by exchanging funds (not taxpayers’ funds) isn’t that better than court cases, competing op-eds, attorneys’ fees, and ultimately somewhat random outcomes, appeals and so on?
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On National Parks: By empowering outdoor recreationists and visitors to take a more direct role in the care and maintenance of our national parks and other public lands, PERC believes we can make these treasured places less reliant on the whims of political funding decisions and ensure they are well taken care of for generations to come.
- Report: How Overseas Visitors Can Help Steward Our National Parks
- Report: Fixing National Park Maintenance for the Long Haul
- Op-ed: How to Save Our National Parks
- PERC Reports magazine article: Virtual Transformation
- *We’ll be announcing the recipients of our Virtual Fence Conservation Fund later this month.
On wildlife conservation and the ESA: The presence of certain species on private lands can impose significant costs on landowners, such as forage loss and depredation, or burdensome environmental regulations that limit land use. As a result, private landowners often view wildlife as a liability to be avoided instead of an asset to be protected. And because most species depend on private lands for habitat, these negative incentives can adversely impact wildlife. PERC seeks to increase ESA recovery rates by making wildlife an asset rather than a liability and giving private citizens clear incentives to invest in habitat conservation.
On forest health and wildfire mitigation: A century of fire suppression has disrupted natural fire cycles and impaired forest health, leading to the crisis of catastrophic wildfires we experience today. To reverse these trends and foster more resilient forests, we must increase the pace and scale of active forest management. Prescribed fire and mechanical thinning are two essential tools in the forester’s toolbox, but expanding the use of these tools on both public and private lands is often hamstrung by overlapping regulations, litigation, and inadequate funding. By reducing existing regulatory hurdles and finding more creative funding approaches, we can fix America’s forests.
- Short film: Good Fire, Bad Fire
- Report: Does Environmental Review Worsen the Wildfire Crisis?
- Report: PERC Wildfire Risk Map
- Report: From Range to Ranch
On public lands/conservation leasing: Conservation is a legitimate use of public lands that people should be empowered to pursue. PERC believes a better, market-based approach to federal land leasing would allow competing groups to negotiate with or bid against each other to determine which use has more value to prospective leaseholders, whether that be traditional uses like mining or grazing or new uses like conservation or restoration.
Solutions to Restore the Great Salt Lake: PERC is actively working with Utah’s Great Salt Lake Commissioner’s Office to help find sustainable solutions to restore the lake. A recent report explores the potential of voluntary water leasing.
“On public lands/conservation leasing: Conservation is a legitimate use of public lands that people should be empowered to pursue. PERC believes a better, market-based approach to federal land leasing would allow competing groups to negotiate with or bid against each other to determine which use has more value to prospective leaseholders, whether that be traditional uses like mining or grazing or new uses like conservation or restoration.”
Of course PERC would support a policy of essentially allowing public lands management to be controlled by the highest bidder. And that is precisely what drove massive opposition to the BLM’s conservation leasing rule last year and why the Trump admin is rescinding it. Because public lands are supposed to benefit all Americans, not just whatever group has the deepest pockets. Management of public land is fundamentally a politically question, and in a democracy, that means land managers have to consider the opinions and interests or ordinary people, not just wealthy corporations and NGOs.
One thing people always forget about in these discussions is recreation. Auctioning off management of public lands to the highest bidder may make some cursory sense if you only think about big environmental groups fighting big oil and gas companies for control. In that fight you’d have large, well-funded organizations on both sides, so the contest would be at least somewhat fair. But what happens when the fight is big, billionaire funded environmental NGOs with effectively infinite money vs. grassroots dispersed recreation users?
After having largely defeated logging, oil and gas, and mining interests in previous decades, the big ENGOs have increasingly focused in recent years on opposing and eliminating recreational use of public lands. Motorized recreation has borne the brunt of this, but rock climbers, mountain bikers, campers, and hikers have faced it too. While these groups often have small non-profits representing their interests, none of them have anywhere near the financial resources or political clout of the big ENGOs. If it was put up to a bidding war whether a particular parcel of federal land would be managed as say, an open OHV area or a mountain bike trail system vs. a wilderness area or protected wildlife habitat supported by the big environmental groups, it’s a foregone conclusion which side would win.
Should groups like SUWA or the Wilderness Society be given the right to come in and shut down treasured recreation areas like the Sand Hollow OHV area or the mountain bike trails around Moab, just because they have the money to outbid recreation users? Why even bother having the BLM or Forest Service go through the effort of drafting things like travel management plans which are supposed to objectively balance opposing interests, when the Wilderness Society could simply buy the management rights to entire National Forests or BLM field offices and close every road and trail in them? That is precisely where the BLM’s conservation leasing rule was headed and why recreation users were so scared of it. And I’m incredibly glad that rule is now being rescinded before it could really be implemented.
I believe conservation leases would have to be consistent with a land management plan, but I’m not familiar with how those plans address travel management compared to the Forest Service (or what role travel management plans might play for BLM).
As to the size of the war chests of the oil and gas industry and the non-profits, it’s hard to imagine donees in the same league as huge profit-makers. And is there a reason to believe that interest groups representing OHVs like the Blue Ribbon Coalition are starved for dollars?
Some folks have looked at that, more from the oil and gas vs. against oil and gas, but there’s stll familiar names. https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/analysis-activist-groups-take-nearly-10-times-much-funding-fossil-fuel
Never heard of them, but ,”Overall, we rate Just the News Questionable and Right Biased based on story selection that mostly favors a conservative perspective. We also rate them Mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks and the promotion of conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda.” https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/just-the-news/
Failed fact checks aside, I think in this case they are comparing apples and turnips: “for every dollar that was received by oil and gas industry groups and climate-skeptical conservative and libertarian nonprofits, $9.60 went to nonprofits who fight against the use of oil, gas and coal.”
This is about “what was received.” Only some of the environmental donations go to fight the use of oil, gas and coal, and there are lots of other issues the named groups are involved in. All of what is received by oil and gas industry groups presumably fights for it.
The latter is primarily about the donations to organizations that support oil and gas, rather than the companies themselves. They purport to minimize what the uber-wealthy companies themselves choose to pay. If they are spending less than environmental groups, it’s because that’s all they need to spend to protect their interests – there’s a lot more where that came from.
Oh yeah, motorized organizations have only a tiny fraction of the funding that the wilderness/environmental orgs on the other side do. BRC is the biggest motorized advocacy group, and they only recently were able to hire their first staff attorney. Opposing groups like SUWA have dozens of staff attorneys and interns and have for ages. BRC is entirely funded by members and small donors, whereas groups like SUWA, the Wilderness Society, etc. have basically unlimited funding from a whole network of leftist billionaires, foundations, and federal grants. For example this article from a few years ago delves into SUWA’s funding from billionaires like Hansjorg Wyss and Bert Fingerhut. https://www.rangemagazine.com/features/summer-21/su21-monetizing_the_scenery.pdf.
As for the relationship between conservation leases and land management plans in the BLM conservation rule, that was left pretty ambiguous. Nominally conservation leases were required to comply with the RMP, but it was completely unclear how they would relate to implementation level plans like travel plans or how recreation would be managed on leased land in general. The rule only provided that “casual use” recreation would usually continue to be allowed on land subject to conservation leases. As best we could tell, the term “casual use” did not include motorized recreation, which left it an open question whether a conservation lease could override the travel management plan and close roads the BLM designated as open.