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Not seeing the wood for the trees On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme (on Monday’s show – if my memory serves) there was a story about the destruction of the forests of Eastern Europe.
The BBC journalist would refer to forests in country after country and talk about how the trees were “illegally cut down” and the timber “illegally imported into Western European countries”.
I noticed something about the BBC man’s remarks. In each Eastern European country he discussed he talked about the ‘national parks’ or the ‘national forests’ – never once did he talk about privately owned forests being destroyed.
Whether forests are owned by old aristocratic families or by private companies (as in the State of Maine) there is no question of them being destroyed for a quick buck – ownership (as opposed to licences, or ‘rights to’ or other nonsense), brings concern for the long term.
Of course the BBC man did not notice this – he just claimed that ‘things’ would be improved when the Eastern European nations joined the European Union and there were even more regulations than there are now.
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You must be a permanent resident of La La Limbaughland if you actually think Murdoch’s Sunday Times is reliable or respectable. It’s the domain of fusty old colonels and incontinent retired headteachers.
And Brussels, bureacracy, red tape etc have nothing whatsoever to do with plans to ban hunting with dogs. They’re just there to whip readers into a righteous frenzy. Banning hunting WAS however twice in the election manifestos of the government, in 1997 and ’01. Clearly such a mandate is irrelevant to the freedom loving Mr Murdoch.
I agree that the ST’s apparent support for what sounds suspiciously like threats of terrorism is quite interesting, particularly as the Countryside Alliance is the plaything of the UK’s biggest private landowners.
You know, the ones who sacked tens of thousands of agricultural workers and funded a party which utterly wrecked the rural economy.
Strange that they were so quiet about those issues – not.
“ownership brings concern for the long term”
Not necessarily. There was an old timber company in northern California which owned a huge amount of land covered with redwoods. They’d been harvesting them on a sustainable basis, and replanting.
But there were some problems for the owners, and they decided to sell out. Another company bought all those assets, but the price was huge and they’d had to finance much of it with bonds. The only way they could produce enough revenue to pay the interest was to cut the timber much more rapidly.
What it meant was that they ended up treating that timber as if it were a mined resource (akin to a coal deposit) instead of a sustainable resource (like farming) when doing their financial planning. If they’d calculated it as a sustainable resource it would have had more long-term value but less short term revenue generation, and they could not have raised as much money to buy it.
The government stepped in and prevented them from overharvesting.
Conservation is a tricky issue, but one thing is sure – “illegal” logging is far more likely with a State owned forest than a privately owned forest. The former will be ripe for corruption, and enforcement will be minimal. On the other hand, just try going into a privately owned forest and stealing half the timber ….
I got into a long argument in a series of comments a while back over contractual restrictions and property rights in the form of Texas deed restrictions. It seemed to me that the proper libertarian position was not crystal clear. Others, very strongly, disagreed. At the risk of incurring similar wrath, I bring up the following:
We are having another situation in Texas that also seems very ambiguous to me. It has to do with our forests. Across much of rural SE Texas, there are thick second growth pine forests. The trees are tended by the land owners, who do some minimal (compared to food crops) cultivation and tending of the trees as a crop. After about 20 years of growth, the trees can be cut and sold for pulp wood and light pine lumber. Currently, I believe an acre of healthy robust trees is worth about $30,000.
So far, so good. The problem lies in the very large, recently merged timber companies, flush with money, who have bought up much of the countryside. The people who live there have hunted and fished on the timber land for the last century and a half. The older local timber companies permitted them to do so, and in fact, bragged in their public relations releases about ‘Multi-use’. The newer owners, however, have put up no-trespassing-no hunting-no fishing signs and have closed the land to the locals. Part of the reason for this is fear of lawsuits, but part is, I suspect, also a manifestation of the arrogance of affluence.
The locals who live there, have an advantage of sorts over the landowners who do not. Where poaching has been effectively restricted, there has been a surprising increase in forest fires.
From a pure property rights point of view, the landowners are completely justified and the locals are not. But there seems to me to be a question of whether having a lot of money should give the holder the ‘500 Lb Gorilla’ advantage in property rights questions. Did the locals have some sort of easement, based on a century or more of unrestricted use? I suppose they could force free hunting and fishing laws through the local county governments, but that is not something a libertarian should support. That would just be the political equivalent of the forest fires. It seems to me that, in the real world property rights should be asserted with some sense of restraint, lest a reaction is provoked endangering those same property rights.
It makes me wonder who is cutting down the East European timber. After all, in recent history, the only arrogant property owner in that area was the State-who owned and very likely restricted use of the ‘National Parks’ and ‘National Forests’.
Analogue Voter is a schmuck… a honking great yellow edged divider between articles and he still puts his comment on the wrong one. Duh.
Doug makes a very interesting observation about property rights and what you might call social obligations. I live in the country in Wisconsin, and it is a fairly consistent pattern that farmers and landowners extend some hunting rights to their neighbors as a courtesy.
I see no contradiction between supporting untrammelled property rights and decency and civility all at the same time. The new property owners in Texas are learning the price of being jerks. This is not to defend the arsonists, who are breaking the law. Libertarians should not be blind to human nature, though, and it is entirely predictable that if you piss off your neighbors they will find a way to get their own back.
Just because you have rights doesn’t mean you have to exercise them to the limit at every opportunity.
I fully accept that there can be bad or stupid private owners (I should have made that clear).
However, I do not think that governments should step in. Governments tend to be rather bad at conservation and conservationists (many of whom are rather wealthy) are quite free to buy out bad or stupid land owners.
On “established rights”. Yes indeed the common law has long recognised this area.
If one buys land round a person one has not bought the right imprison him, or deprive him of light and air.
Ditto established rights-of-way and hunting rights (at the traditional level). Unwritten contractional obligation.
Nice article