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The tragedy of the panicked enviro II; understanding the "tragedy of the commons"

August 28th, 2009 No comments

This is the first of several follow-up posts to my post “Grist and the tragedy of the panicked enviro“, where I try to clarify the institutional frameworks for understanding and addressing resource problems, in response to confusion in comments by others.

cyberfarer
Posted 2:58 am
27 Aug 2009

I’m sorry, but the “tragedy of the commons” is utter B.S. The Western
world has pursued a course of private property and has managed to leave
ecological catastrophe in its wake. The “tragedy of the commons” and
other simplistic market morality fail to understand the essence of that
which it seeks to moderate, the capitalist consumer market premised on
profit and only profit.

The rate of exploitation and the decline
of resources, water, energy, fisheries, soil, minerals, etc., all
occured under a free market, private property paradigm. That is the
facts and the reality. Pretending it isn’t true and wishing for a
morality that doesn’t exist within the free market is juvenile and
counter-productive.

The “tragedy of the commons” represents a
hypothetical situation that does not occur in real life. In real life,
corporations own, or vie to own, resources or access to them for the
purpose of extraction and profit and they seek to maximize profits
through economies of scale, that is industrial extraction methods,
drift netting, blowing up mountains, tossing mining waste into clear,
pristine lakes. The money is in the resource and when the resource is
exhausted they will move on to the next one.

 

TokyoTom
Posted 1:38 pm

27 Aug 2009

Cyberfarer,

Thanks for your comments on the “tragedy of the
commons”. Though you are way off base, you provide an opportunity for
deeper discussion.

The tragedy of the unmanaged commons paradigm
is BS?  My flip response?  Go tell it to Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate,
who posted a perceptive essay in May on the tragedy of the commons
dynamics that are affecting climate
and global climate policy
coordination. 
Did you miss this and the relatively productive discussion thread?

Sure,
the Western
world has managed to create many environmental problems, but we`ve
largely cleaned up our own messes, haven`t we?  While it by no means
excuses our own faults, far worse environmental problems have been
created and are still stewing in Russia and other state-directed
economies, and it`s no coincidence that the vast pollution being
created in China and India are tied to governement-owned enterprise and
an inability of injured people to sue for damages or to stop harmful
activities.  And the great waves of extinctions created as man spread
around the globe tens of thousands of years ago can hardly be laid at
the foot of either the Western world or of private property rights (nor
can the collapse of earlier civilizations).

The
“tragedy of the commons” is NOT a “simplistic market morality”, but a
description of cooperation problems and incentives relating to shared.
open-access resources.  The tragedy of the commons and problems of
cooperation – and theft – are not even limited to mankind, but permeate
nature.  This perceptive article by Bruce Yandle touches on competition
in nature, and links the ascendance of man to our evolution of
relatively enhanced cooperation:
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-commons-tragedy-or-triumph/

The
“tragedy of the commons” paradigm is useful to analyze, but the
paradigm doesn`t “seek to moderate” anything, and is just as useful in
looking at the ways Western nations still contribute to environmental
problems around the world (as I point out here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/09/28/too-many-or-too-few-people-does-the-market-provide-an-answer.aspx) as it is in examining:

– environmental devastation in Haiti (which has little or no property rights, and vast free-for-all “government” holdings),


deforestation in Indonesia and the Amazon:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/05/24/capitalism-the-destructive-exploitation-of-the-amazon-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-commons.aspx,

– pollution in China: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=china, and


crashing fisheries around the world as a result of government of marine
resources (producing free-for-alls and fleet subsidies) and a
free-for-all for other unowned or unprotected resources:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=fish.

On fish, you might note what the organization Defying Ocean’s End (cofounded by Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy,
Natural Resources Defense Council, The Ocean Conservancy, Wildlife
Conservation Society, The World Conservation Union, and World Wildlife
Fund) recently said:

http://www.defyingoceansend.org…

“Overfishing,
high bycatch rates, the use of gear types that damage habitat (like
trawls and dredges), and the large subsidies supporting fisheries
(totally over $15 billion per year) are all symptoms of an underlying
problem. In most fisheries that are exhibiting declines in
landings and revenues, overfishing, bycatch, and habitat damage,
actions that result in the symptoms are actually rational given the way
the fisheries are managed. In these fisheries, secure privileges to
catch certain amounts of fish are not specified, so naturally
individual fishermen compete to maximize their individual shares of the
catch. No incentives for conservation exist in this situation, because
every fish conserved can be caught by another fisherman. The
competition to maximize catch often results in a fishery “arms race”,
resulting in the purchase of multiple vessels, the use of powerful
engines and large vessels, and the use of highly efficient gear like
trawls.

“Most of the solutions that have been implemented or proposed to fix the world’s fisheries center on command-and-control
measures: regulators or courts telling fishermen how to fish through
the imposition of controls on effort (e.g., fishing vessel length,
engine horsepower, gear restrictions, etc.). Prescriptions like these
work against strong economic incentives for maximizing catch, which are
not addressed by such measures, and are of course usually resisted by
fishermen. Often, prescriptions create incentives for “work-arounds”
and set up a cat-and-mouse game between fishermen and regulators
– for example, if regulators impose a restriction on vessel size,
fishermen may purchase two vessels to maintain high catch levels.

As
in most natural resource problems, more effective solutions will
address the fundamental drivers of unsustainable fisheries. In this
case, the key necessary reform will be to designate secure catch
privileges.”

You
say: “The rate of exploitation and the decline
of resources, water, energy, fisheries, soil, minerals, etc., all
occured under a free market, private property paradigm.”  This is
clearly demonstrably wrong, and draws entirely the wrong lessons. While
private property is certainly no panacea, neither are they what is
wrong.  Very often, is is governments that have been and are wrong,
though there is certainly some learning going on.

While
Garrett Hardin`s “The Tragedy of the Commons” certainly represents a
hypothetical situation, it is actually a very powerful analytical tool
for understanding and fashioning solutions to countless “real life”
problems. See Elinor Ostrom et al., Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges, Science, 04/09/99 http://conservationcommons.org/media/document/docu-wyycyz.pdf

“In real life,
corporations own, or vie to own, resources or access to them for the
purpose of extraction and profit and they seek to maximize profits
through economies of scale, that is industrial extraction methods,
drift netting, blowing up mountains, tossing mining waste into clear,
pristine lakes.

What
you describe here is a conflict between preferences over how resources
are used.  Do you prefer a free-for-all, or a situation where those who
use a resource can protect it, negotiate with others who wish to see
other values preserved, and who are responsible for negative
consequences caused to others (not always a part of some property
rights systems), or perhaps a situation where governments make all
resource exploitation decisions?”

“The money is in the resource and when the resource is
exhausted they will move on to the next one.”

The
money is never in the “resource”, but in the ways that people can use
it or otherwise value it (and of course people also value pristine
environments).

 

Categories: Adam Sacks, commons, Grist Tags:

Grist and the tragedy of the panicked enviro: stop and think, about whether resources are OWNED and protected

August 28th, 2009 No comments

The Grist online environmental magazine lent its pages this week to a pessimistic climate change activist, Adam D. Sacks, former director of the Center for Democracy and the Constitution.  Mr. Sacks, echoing a despairing piece (“Beyond the point of no return”) by Ross Gelbspan in Grist in Novermber 2007, in a piece entitled “The fallacy of climate activism” paints a remarkably grim and obviously heart-felt picture about the prospect of unstoppable climate change and other environmental challenges. 

While we may indeed be irretrievably embarked on what prove to be a very bumpy climate voyage, it`s Sack`s policy prescriptions that are most startling. Here are excerpts of the chief points:

In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest,
the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change
is accelerating—this despite all of our best efforts.  Clearly
something is deeply wrong with this picture. …

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and
concentrations.  Since global climate disruption is an effect of
greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable.  But it
is also a mistake. …

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases
are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do
little but leave us with a devil’s sack full of many other symptoms,
possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our
relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing
technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical
and colonial civilizations.
This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless
growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat,
led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to
commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on
Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom.  But if
planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with
ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly
short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water,
air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans;
nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a
few. 
(While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified
by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause. …

The second error is our stubborn unwillingness to understand that
the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently
framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so.

There are three primary components of escalating greenhouse-gas concentrations that are out of our control …

The most expert scientific investigators have been blindsided by the
velocity and extent of recent developments, and the climate models have
likewise proved far more conservative than nature itself.  Given that
scientists have underestimated impacts of even small changes in global
temperature, it is understandably difficult to elicit an appropriate
public and governmental response….

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. 
Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending
in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most
likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to
acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is
100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our
version of life on earth has come to an end.

Moreover, there are no “free market” or “economic” solutions.  And
since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in
order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth.  The only
socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the
problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our
responses. 
That’s why framing the global warming problem as
greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. 
We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the
hardest collective task we’ve ever faced.  It has given us the
intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under
natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years—but
none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora’s Box tightly shut. 
We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our
bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand
nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life.  It is past
time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally
and sustainably.  Living locally means we are able get everything we
need within walking (or animal riding) distance.
We may eventually
figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to
bring things home, but our track record isn’t good and we’d better
think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local
resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic.  We have much
re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears
who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways
that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand

Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions
here, only wishful thinking—the tools that got us into this mess are
incapable of getting us out.

All that being said, we needn’t discard all that we’ve learned, far from it. But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue
orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish
us—if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth.

 

Wow.  It strikes me that though Sacks might very well be right the we have irreversibly embarked on a bumpy climate ride, are we to conclude not only that the best solution is to abandon civilization as we know it and live as hunter-gathers, but that we can actually persuade anyone to abandon the use of energy?  Not only does Sacks offer no prescription from getting here to where he thinks we need to go, but he completely ignores the institutional setting of the problems that concern him (tragedy of the commons), and thus any discussion of potential solutions (fprivate or community property institutions). Certainly environmentalists may wish to start experiments in alternative living – this might provide useful knowledge or even necessary in dire situations – but unless such experiments prove that they can provide shelter and sustenance for the world`s population, they will not address the needs of others who will make their own choices, based on modern civilization and technology.

I left a short message on the Grist comment thread, as follows:

ATokyoTom
Posted 2:32 am
27 Aug 2009

I`m with Dave, and more so.  There are no useful takeaways from
thise piece, because the author, while showing an understanding of
climate science, evinces no understanding of the institutional factors
that are driving climate change and other resource problems.

Garrett Hardin largely nailed the problem decades ago – the “Tragedy of the Commmons” that results when there are no clear or enforceable property rights (private or communmity) that enable users to protect resources from destructive exploitation.

(Examining
the environmental nightmare of the formerly communist countries, the
resource abuse in kleptocratic developing countries, and incompetent
bureaucracies, sweet insider deals and poorly managed “public” lands
and fisheries have subsequently informed us of the corollary problem –
the tragedy of the government commons.)

We understand both the nature of our problems, and the directions in which solutions lie.  Let`s have at at `em.

BTW, I realize that we have barely begun to scratch the surface on addressing climate change; this is a tragedy of the commons problem on which it appears we can have only marginal impacts at best.

Categories: Adam Sacks, commons, Grist Tags:

If you visit Japan, leave your pocketknife at home; if you bring it, certainly don’t ask the police for directions!

August 28th, 2009 No comments

Visitors to Japan beware:  in the U.S. we’ve got the Second Amendment that protects citizens’ rights to protect themselves; but under changes of law that have recently come into effect, in Japan it is now clearly illegal to carry around a knife with a blade of longer than 5.5 cm (2 1/4 inches, measured from hilt to tip), including a penknife or pocketknife, or practically any type of double-edged knife, including an oyster knife. This prohibition would apply to Swiss Army knife and many other multi-tool devices. (The police apparently also have discretion under another ambiguous law to confiscate smaller knives.)

The change of law was brought to foreign residents attention in a fairly appalling set of circumstances, confirmed by a reporter for the Japan Times, that landed a 74-year old tourist in jail.  Such an arrest of a foreign tourist is notable precisely because it is relatively rare, so it`s hard to know what exactly motivated the arrest and subsequent detention. My precis of the news article:

– An elderly (74 years) American tourist who was making his first visit to Japan (to visit a son presently living here), asked some officers at a police booth near a busy train station for help finding a nearby bookstore.

– Much to his surprise, the tourist received not directions, but a challenge as to whether he was carrying a knife! Replying honestly that he had a pocketknife and presenting it to the officers, the blade was measured and found to exceed the limits of a new law.

– To the further surprise of the tourist, when he failed to sign a statement in Japanese offered by the police, he was arrested and held in detention for 10 days!

– When his son was informed several days later of his father’s arrest and came to visit him, he was instructed to speak Japanese to his father, as the police did not have an interpreter available to help them understand English!

– He was then released without being charged, and without explanation or apology.

– Apparently the U.S. Embassy tried to help this gentlemen, as well as two other younger Americans who were also arrested the same day for the same offense at or near the same police booth.

– Neither the father nor the sun seem interested in rocking the boat or making public statements.

There is considered speculation that the the officers were trying to meet a quota for busts of one kind or another, and that the lengthy detention may have been due simply to the tourist`s inability to speak Japanese (and lack of English competency by the police), as it appears to be the practice here that, unless the violation of law is a very serious one, that the police release people who have been arrested as they soon as they sign a statement recognizing and apologizing for their breach of law.  In this case, the elderly tourist spoke no Japanese and was apparently unwilling to sign something in Japanese that he didn’t understand, which may have flummoxed the officers who detained him and made them reluctant to simply confiscate the knife and warn and release him. Thus the tourist may have been inadvertently (and absurdly) complicit in his own detention.

The news article quoted a number of lawyers who were surprised at the police behavior, but said that, unfortunately, once someone has been arrested that a 10-day detention is a typical holding period for prosecutors to determine whether they wish to prosecute.

Takeaways?  Do NOT bring a pocketknife to Japan (you can buy kitchen or other knives here, but keep them wrapped up and in your suitcase in your hotel).

I’ve just measured all of my pocket knifes and figured out which ones are seem to be small enough to carry around, and which I need to keep at home – or inaccessible to me in the bottom of a backpack if I`m travelling on my way to go hiking or fishing.  (More investigating will be needed to figure out what I need a permit for.)

By the way, the the Japanese prosecutorial and judicial systems are certainly not without their flaws, including the ability of police and prosecutors to put intense pressure on a suspects to confess, and a pronounced penchant by police, prosecutors and judges to treat people who do not confess as criminals. This has produced a number of cases where persons who have insisted on their innocence have been railroaded completely through the system, and prompted a recent Japanese film on precisely this problem, in the context of a mistaken prosecution for groping, called “I Just Didn`t Do It“.「それでももボクはやってない」.

But at least the police here aren’t running around with tasers!

More reporting and speculation here:

http://current.com/items/90736538_welcome-to-japan-now-go-to-jail-pocketknife-lands-74-yr-old-in-japanese-jail.htm

http://www.debito.org/?p=3962

and a similar story: http://matadortravel.com/travel-blog/japan/justin88/jail-in-japan-tales-of-pocket-knives-bathtub-antics-and-utter-cluelessnes

Categories: Japan, knife, police Tags:

Strange But True III: In which your intrepid reporter bravely discusses "tragedy of the commons" and "property" with corrupted climate scientists and AGW co-religionists!

May 13th, 2009 No comments

[some snark in the title, reflecting the heat of the fight over the wheel of government]

Further to my prior posts, here is the full list of my comments over at the remarkable RealClimate thread started by climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, to specifically discuss the “tragedy of the commons” paradigm in the context of domestic and international wrangling over climate policy. 

 

So far, comments by yours truly are as follows:

134. TokyoTom Says: 

Gavin, thanks for a thoughtful post that I hope will be brought to the attention of every so-called “skeptic” – none of whom has any basis to deny that there are simply NO property rights protecting the atmosphere (or the oceans).

As a result, to prevent a continuing “tragedy of the commons” the nations of the world, we need to make a collective effort to manage what is, after all, a shared resource.

It`s nice to see that others see that where there are no formal or informal property rights or similar mechanisms, all incentives point to ruin.

 

171. TokyoTom Says: 

Property rights are not an end-all or be-all, but they are a linchpin in understanding the dynamics of the tragedy of the commons problem. Resources that are owned – formally or informally, in common or privately – are husbanded, at least much better that when they are not.

This is a key point to keep hammering home with “conservatives”, “skeptics” and ordinary people, whom can all recognize that market demands produce a tragedy of the commons whenever valuable resources are not owned (or cannot be protected) by those who use them.

When there is ownership, (1) users have incentives to invest in protecting what, after all, supports their own livelihoods and, even further, (2) those who also care about the resource have an ability to also protect the resource – by investing it themselves, or by making other private, market decisions, such as to boycott particular owners and to favor others.

When there is no ownership, there is very limited ability by anyone to protect the resource directly, and what we are left with is a battle of words.

Of course a corollary problem that requires attention is that when resources are “publicly” owned, such resources may in fact be treated as a commons, or something that politicians and bureaucrats dole out to whomever is in favor – witness the environmental destruction in communist states, the logging of “public” tropical forests, and our own continued mismanagement of public lands.

In that case of fisheries, this is so readily apparent that even the mainline environmental groups are now calling for giving fishermen property rights in the fish they catch in order to end the destructive race to catch them:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/01/15/for-crashing-fisheries-coalition-of-mainline-us-enviro-groups-calls-for-property-rights.aspx

Meanwhile, concerned citizens continue to misunderstand the key dynamics of environmental problems, and to miss opportunities to rub the faces of “market” fundamentalists and “conservatives” in the obvious lack of property rights in the atmosphere (and a related inability of those adversely affected by using the atmosphere as a dumping ground to seek redress from those who profit from using it as one):

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/12/overlooked-by-those-warmed-by-climate-rhetoric-quot-alarmist-quot-or-quot-skeptic-quot-the-fact-that-our-most-important-commons-have-no-property-rights-rules.aspx

 

 

194.  TokyoTom Says: 

Chip, the last time we chatted, you were going to look into why Rob Bradley had decided – in the middle of an exchange of comments with you on a previous post at his supposedly “free market” Master Resource blog – to block a libertarian like me from commenting, even taking that decision away from you:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/11/rot-at-the-core-rob-bradley-at-quot-free-market-quot-masterresource-blog-shows-his-true-colors-as-a-rent-seeker-for-fossil-fuels.aspx

Do you fail to understand that the fact that Master Resource is a soapbox for the coal industry, which has up to know had the political establishment in its pocket (a small investment that has created great profits while shifting costs to the public and future generations)? Or that this affects the willingness of people to listen to you?

Your hope for a deus ex machina government investment program to somehow save us further illustrates your lack of understand how markets malfunction with respect to unowned resources.

Far better for the government to simply impose rebated carbon taxes, as both Exxon (which no longer funds Rob Bradley`s ventures, BTW; see link above) and Jim Hansen have called for, than to have government itself try to guess what technologies to invest in.

 

240.  TokyoTom Says: 

#195: “The tragedy of the commons isn’t actually a tragedy of the commons – it’s a tragedy of the free-for-all. There are any number of ways to overcome the tragedy of the commons – from Mutually Assured Destruction, to consensual co-operation – (and in many societies around the world, the latter has worked for centuries to millenia), but the free market ain’t one of them.”

This is confused. The “free market” certainly pulls on the chain of destruction where resources are not owned or managed, and may, by introducing new technologies, even accelerate the destruction of commons and to the breakdown of communal systems. But broadly speaking, where there are adequately defined and protected “property rights”, the free market does not itself generate the destruction of commons.

And property rights, broadly speaking, are simply instituitions that societies have gradually developed to side-step tragedy of the commons situations

 

241:  TokyoTom Says: 

#196 Tamino, I share your sentiments.

Many of those who profess to be interested in protecting “free market capitalism” really have no clue themselves as to how it works, and why it DOESN’T work in the case of environmental problems.

By likewise, many “environmentalists” have very little understanding of how and why markets can go wrong.

A little discussed aspect of the problem is that there is also a rather apparent tragedy of the GOVERNMENT commons, as governments both tend to do a poor job of managing assets and frequently end up either serving special deal to special interests or as public battlegrounds (since different people can`t simply do independent deals to accommodate their differing perspectives).

It`s the battle to influence and win favors from government that leads to partisanship (and “ludicrous rationalization”), which is often hijacked by special interests.

It`s not clear to me how much Chip Knappenberger understands markets, or understands how his posts provide cover for fossil fuel firms/investors who profit while shifting risks to all of us.

But there`s plenty all around. I note that even Jim Hansen strongly favors taxes over cap and trade bureaucracy and green pork.

 

278.  TokyoTom Says: 

#188 / 245: Neal & Jim, thanks for the references to the successful experiments in Iceland, NZ and the Alaskan pollock fishery to replace the tragedy of the government commons with property rights approaches that gives the fishermen a stake in protecting the resources they harvest, instead of simply an incentive to invest in a mad race to catch fish before others do in a continually shrinking fishery with shorter and shorter seasons.

I continue to have problems with the spam filter (links and bad words?), so I have excised most of this post and put it up separately at my blog, linked at my name above (with links to some of my other posts on fisheries)

 

282.  TokyoTom Says: 

#262 Cardin, do you seriously think that there is ANY possibility of “the U.S. cap[ping] emissions independently of the rest of the world”?

US legislators (and presidents from Bush Sr through Clinton and Dubya) have made it crystal clear that we won`t act alone.

Rather, we face classic collective action problem with respect to a shared resource – like fishermen regulating a fisheries, ranchers agreeing on how to manage a range or farmers managing streamflows – with respect to which we have long been the major user (and remain so by far on a per capita basis), and very few are willing to act (other than to posture) unless we are.

We have long recognized that there are shared gains (in the form of avoided losses to ecosystems and economies) to acting to limit human-induced climate change and ocean acidification, and to improved environmental management in the third world – real costs that your “cost-benefit” analysis neatly ignores), and we have ample carrots and sticks to persuade others to follow.

The problem is that the wheel of our own government has long been captured by the investors and industries that reap short-term profits while shifting costs to all of us and future generations.

IOW, the supposedly cool and rational approach is, at its core, a mask by which particular interests continue to hijack the rest of society.

It`s this fact that drives others – frequently wealthy – who are not invested in fossil fuels to support the PR campaigns of Gore and others (not enviro-facists out to destroy capitalism).

 

284.  TokyoTom Says: 

270: Hank, what you`re bemoaning is the “property” is only as good as one`s ability to defend it. The battle we all face with spam is another example.

The rest of creation has long confronted the same, unending battle over resources; unfortunately nature is relatively defenseless before mankind, and our continuing technological/organizational innovation continues to ramp up our assault on “wild” nature.

The flip side is that progress also makes it easier for us to identify polluters and to protect assets.

 

288.  TokyoTom Says: 

#145: Jim, it seems to me that you and others have misunderstood Rene and are attacking strawmen rather than his points, which are fairly general – and fully acknowledge the undeniable point that resources that are unowned or unmanaged are abused.

Rather than seeing common ground or exploring how to address these classes of problems, you ll prefer to offer what are essentially red-herrings about how private property is itself imperfect, which is not a point that Rene has at all contested.

“Yeah, let’s just domesticate and privatize everything, that’ll solve it! You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, either with regard to endangered species protection, management of a commons, or the interaction between the two. Zip.”

Is Rene or anyone saying that we have to privatize all resources? Rather, he is giving you a great talking point for all those supposed “free-market” “skeptics” out there, who fail to recognize that markets don`t work with respect to resources that nobody owns or are not collectively protected/managed.

You are all so ready to fight that you are having great difficulty distinguishing friend from foe.

 

322.  TokyoTom Says: 

I`ll let Rene correct me if I`m wrong, but I don`t think that Rene has asserted that all resources MUST be privatized (as opposed to being owned and managed by communities or subject to some public regulation) or that private ownership is perfect, but that he`s simply pointing out that resources that are un-owned and are subject to open-access commons exploitation get trashed.

There is ample room for disagreement over the best approaches to such resource problems, as corruption, favoritism and incompetence are inescapably linked to government action. I think Rene was referring to this in connection to tropical deforestation, where what others call “commons” are in fact either lands held by indigenous peoples and stolen by government, or otherwise government-held “parks” and “reserves” that are liquidated by elites (look at the the Amazon, Kalimantan and the sources of the Marcos family wealth, for example).

But Rene is clearly on the side of those who want to see resources protected, and he should be credited for trying to give you guys tools to fight your real enemies – the so-called “skeptics” and “conservatives” (like George Will) who think that “markets” will magically solve problems relating to un-owned (and un-managed) resources (and who serve as deliberate or unwitting fronts for those who are happy to take profits now but leave costs for others).

I keep trying to make this point – see the post linked at my name – but some of you seem to be in “full hackles” mode, certain that you see an enemy, and single-mindedly dedicated to chasing your own tails.

 

325.  TokyoTom Says: 

#320: Jim, I think I just answered you in a pending post – the REAL point is that the REAL enemy in the climate change struggle are people ((VERY DIFFERENT from Rene) who think that modern markets work great but forget to note that they undeniably produce destruction where resources are either UNOWNED or UNMANAGED.

On bison and whales, I invite you to a quick read of my own writings:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/12/16/bison-markets-the-tragedy-of-the-commons-and-the-indian-war.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/02/15/whales-and-fisheries-quot-standing-up-to-japan-quot-or-enclosing-the-commons.aspx

I think I have provided links upthread on fisheries, but the people who understand these issues best are the free market environmentalists at PERC who have documented how Indians used to own and manage fisheries and other resources. If the tribes` treaty rights and traditional rights to salmon, etc. had been respected, then there would be a resource owner that would have every incentive and right to sue landowners for destruction of watershed habitat; instead, the resource became a state-owned free-for-all, subject to further federal mismanagement.

As Mike G has noted, the successes in marine resource management have all come by restoring some measure of private ownership to “public” resources, which is the reason, as I have already noted, the even the mainline environmental community is united in calling for more property rights-related approaches to crashing fisheries.

 

328.  TokyoTom Says: 

Let me link to a post that makes my point – and I think that of Gavin`s extended metaphor – fairly clear:

“Overlooked by those warmed by climate rhetoric (”alarmist” or “denialist”) – the fact that our most important commons have NO property rights rules”

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/12/overlooked-by-those-warmed-by-climate-rhetoric-quot-alarmist-quot-or-quot-skeptic-quot-the-fact-that-our-most-important-commons-have-no-property-rights-rules.aspx

The point is not that “property” is an easy panacea to every problem, but that the biggest problems lie where there are no property rights (or other mechanisms that give users incentives to invest in sustainability) in place.

Why don`t you guys see that using this as an argument on climate change is what like throwing holy water in the face of almost every climate change vampire?

#326: Hank, who say there IS a purely private solution to every problem? Certainly not me.

 

336.  TokyoTom Says: 

#333: Yes, Silk, there are still “a few people are willing to take the Exxon dollar and sell their soul.”

However, as I noted upthread, Desmog Blog has shown that Exxon no longer funds Robert Bradley or his blog where Chip appears:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/11/rot-at-the-core-rob-bradley-at-quot-free-market-quot-masterresource-blog-shows-his-true-colors-as-a-rent-seeker-for-fossil-fuels.aspx.

It wouldn`t surprise me if Exxon is joining others in pushing for oil & gas development at home, but for now they`re no longer funding climate denial shops – and like Jim Hansen actually calling for carbon taxes!

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/08/exxon-rex-tillerson-no-longer-willing-to-be-quot-conservative-quot-on-climate-risks-advocates-carbon-taxes-and-invests-in-carbon-lite-tech.aspx

So where is their money going? How about the Stanford University-centered Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), the world`s largest privately-funded effort to conduct basic research on energy technologies to reduce GHG emissions, which they are funding over 10 years to the tune of $100 million?

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/03/08/exxon-rex-tillerson-no-longer-willing-to-be-quot-conservative-quot-on-climate-risks-advocates-carbon-taxes-and-invests-in-carbon-lite-tech.aspx

Exxon is now a climate change story that the right no longer wants to hear, and is one of the reasons I`ve been banned from the “MasterResource” blog.

 

337.  TokyoTom Says: 

#328: “You completely ignore the numerous examples that have been given of property owners trashing natural resources for a quick profit.”

Nick, no I haven`t. Rather, as I note in 327, I`m making a different point, that as Gavin points out with his metaphor, one of the best arguments to make to denialists and skeptics is that, as their OWN principles tell them, the “market” reality is that the worst cases of resources abuse are where there are no property rights at all.

Unchecked by property rights (and consumer pressure, regulation, trade agreements), markets are very effective machines of destruction, as I have tried to explain elsewhere:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/09/27/too-many-or-too-few-people-does-the-market-provide-an-answer.aspx

It`s a lack of understanding of this that makes market conservatives right / enviros wrong on SMALL issues (such as Ehrlich`s bet with Julian Simon on commodity prices), but wrong on the BIG ones. Those ranting about “neo-Malthusians seeking to destroy civilization” are simply not ignoring or are blind to how consumer and other markets are destroying unowned, unmanaged Nature around the world.

This partisan blindness is readily understandable; after all, we see the same thing here among enviros!

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/07/06/mind-games-how-an-absence-of-functioning-markets-means-that-i-m-right-but-you-re-a-delusional-neurotic-quot-zealot-quot.aspx

 

376.  TokyoTom Says: 

#338 Ike, thanks for the interesting link on Polynesia.

But spare me the slave economy argument, not only because slavery is hardly something libertarians would find at all morally justifiable, but because it`s unrelated from my point – and, I think, Gavin`s – which is not that there is an ideal form of ownership/management, but simply that, where resources are unowned or unmanaged, they tend to get trashed.

This is a long, tragic and continuing story. The primary point is that we need to start better managing our commons, including our shared atmosphere. The ancillary point, for the purpose of political jousting, is that it is highly effective to ask skeptics to show you where the property rights (or other management mechanisms) are in the air that ensure there is is no tragedy of the commons. This is a show stopper, because you`re talking a language
is familiar to them, but they are forced to realize that the market system does NOT work for the atmosphere, because it is a commons and without property rights.

Are you with me?

[I responded to this before, but it apparently didn`t post.]

 

378.  TokyoTom Says: 

#331 : “Nah… it’s the same gut reaction I have when folks are asserting that Jesus loves me, or giving me free links to mises.org… not my religion, and I’m beyond redemption thank you very much. I like to live on the reality side of things.”

I can understand your “gut” reaction, but it`s rather obviously getting in the way of your higher faculties. I am barely tolerated by many at Mises (to whom I come off as a commie left enviro Nazi fascist) and offer links only to my own thoughts there, and similarly have been shown the door by RedState, Freepers, NewsBusters and now the place that Chip Knappenberger blogs from. And I`ve spent many a comment thread at Mises battling similar nonsense that people concerned about climate change have drunk the the Koolaid of some religion or another; e.g,http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/07/06/mind-games-bret-stephens-of-the-wall-street-journal-panders-to-quot-skeptics-quot-by-abjuring-science-and-declaring-himself-an-expert-on-quot-mass-neurosis-quot.aspx

Feel free read further or test me.

 

382.  TokyoTom Says: 

#349: John, George Reisman is your uncle? I`ve had the nerve to joust with him on the LvMI pages and my own blog over the past few years on environmental matters, where he is simply emotional and not reasonable:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=reisman
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005916.asp

Thanks for your various questions and observations. I don`t think that we are actually that far apart, but we are drifting a bit off-thread. Let me make a few specific responses.

“Mankind did not create the resources so by what right has he to own them? People own oil, but oil is being drilled and used to its inevitable extinction of the resource. It might be better to think of the global resources as being lent to us by the mere fact of the existence of such resources, so what right of ownership should exist?”

My own view is that “ownership” is chiefly not so much about our individual relationships to “property” (can we really “own” any other life form? aren`t we just as much owned by the bacteria in our gut, parasites, diseases and predators that use us for food?), but more humbly about our relationships with each other regarding relative priority of claims to make use of particular things we find valuable. What those things depends upon place, time, culture and individual.

“Many owners have exploited a resource wile abusing it and destroying its capacity to survive simply to finish with it and move on to another resource to exploit.”

I don`t disagree. In fact, I think that this is endemic whenever there are open-access commons remaining for such exploiters to move on to. (In this regard, we differ from the rest of nature only in the leverage that technologies give us to wreak devastation.) While we have developed property rights institutions (communal and private, informal and formal) precisely to get a handle over tragedies of the commons (and even evolved possessive and cooperative behaviors) only a blind ideologue would assert that creating property has somehow changed human nature. But it is worth noting that property IS helpful, as it makes it possible for others to acquire and manage more beneficially resources that others mistreat.

“There is also ample room to see that corruption, favoritism and incompetence are inescapably linked to corporate greed through over manipulation of markets. The users and the looters are not always the government and the belief systems, they are also corporations.”

Again, I agree; my point is not that all use of government should be avoided (indeed, it might even be needed), but simply that use of government itself no panacea, but fraught with danger – as corporations and their owners are far more effective in Washington than the citizens who continually have to organize to do battle with them. Some corporations (not all, by any means) are looters, and use government to achieve their ends.

This goes back a long way, with the chief roots in the grant of limited liability to shareholders for bad acts by corporations:http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=limited+liability

Sorry, but I need to wind this up.

 

383.  TokyoTom Says: 

#354: “So the protection of your property DEMANDS an overwhelming force and a force that no other power can bring against you.”

Mark, this is too simplistic. What is “property” and how it can be defended depends on context. In close communities, people don`t lock their doors, do deals based on handshakes and reputation, and little resort is made to law, police or courts. In other cases, weapons – or thick contracts or physical or technological locks – and constant vigilance are required.

Maine lobstermnen have an easier task defending their resources than do indigenous fishermen or forest-dwellers.

So what will work in the case of climate depends on available technology and the level of trust (and enforcement) that can be established.

 

385.  TokyoTom Says: 

#365: “Just as the Newfoundland fisherman remained blind to the consequences of their actions. In both cases, what was happening was obvious, yet in spite of the evidence of diminishing resources, they cut/fished as if there were no problem whatsoever.”

JSM, thanks for bring us back the tragedy of the unmanaged/government commons. Who owned the fishery, the government or the fishermen? Except in places where fishermen are being given transferable harvesting rights (or being completely locked our – very rare) government-management fisheries are all crashing, which is why mainline environmental groups are calling for more property rights in fisheries.

Ironic captcha: bickers Salmon!

 

416.  TokyoTom Says: 

#391: “A corporation which takes other factors than money into account can be taken over with money when their book value gets too high for their stock value. You forget that some resources are too large for a single owner (and single owners eventually die), and so crowd theory takes over. In a sense, corporations are a tragedy of the commons for everything they own.”

Richard, these are extremely important nuances, to be sure, but it is still helpful for Rene to generalize by saying that “Those who own a forest are not compelled to harvest it against their wishes.”

Rene was talking about what ownership of a forest (or a transferrable fishing permit, first use water rights, etc.) implies – and was surely correct – while what you are talking about what we mean by ownership of a public corporation, which is also an important area of inquiry.

Starting with the first state grant of limited liability to investors/owners for damages that corporations do to third parties, to other extensions of unlimited life, unlimited purposes and the Consitutional right as a “legal person” to lie and to purchase influence, moral hazard and risk-shifting has become rampant in the businesses closest to government:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=limited

Back to resources, what we typically mean by “ownership” is the right, vis-a-vis non-owners, is to determine who has access to the resource and the terms under which they can use it. The nature and preference of the individuals, community or government that owns the resource may make all the difference between how well a resource is used and protected, but markets do allow people and groups with differing preferences to make deals regarding ownership and management.

It`s where there is NO ownership, or where ownership is in the hands of a kleptocracy or poorly-run bureaucracy that either the “tragedy of the commons” takes place, or deals cannot be done and everyone is stuck in a struggle for control over the wheel of government: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=wheel

“Private” and “community” property systems that put control in the hands of users are by no means perfect, but they avoid the worst of the tragedy of the commons, which is why mainline environmental groups are now together calling for property rights in fisheries (as linked above).

 

417.  TokyoTom Says: 

#373: “The increased logging clogged many salmon streams, in many cases permanently degrading them. This has been a large factor in the collapse of West Coast salmon fisheries (along with increasing diversions of water to agriculture and rising river water temps).

Now, if the salmon fishermen owned the redwood forests that surrounded all the salmon streams, they might have had a very different take on what the best thing to do was – a very different view from Wall Street bond traders. Which one is right?”

Good questions, but you`ve missed an important one – what would the result be if salmon fishermen actually owned rights in their FISHERY (as opposed to land, as you query), instead of just being allowed to catch fish when the government allows?

Wouldn`t they have an ability to sue landowners for messing up streams, and to make deals with then to enhance and maintain habitat? This (and water rights) in fact underpin river and stream fisheries in various parts of the world and US. It`s mainly the government ownership of the resource – after stealing it from the Indians – and the fact that users have no rights that they can protect or trade that is the reason why the great salmon fisheries are surely dying:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/07/23/destroying-the-salmon-the-socialized-commons-and-climate-change-part-ii.aspx
http://www.perc.org/articles/article249.php
http://www.perc.org/articles/article884.php

 

433.  TokyoTom Says: 

#424 “Markets have their place, but they give individuals and corporations influence in proportion to their wealth – thus in practice, giving only corporations and very rich individuals any influence at all. This is why “libertarians” love them so much. “Propertarians” would be a far more accurate term for their views.”

Well said, but with more bark than bite. Consumer preferences on green issues – expressed by individual purchases and by group action – have done a great job of influencing markets and products provided, and there is ample room for more.

See Walmart working with fishermen and a sustainability certification group re: Copper River salmon:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/12/09/save-wild-fisheries-buy-your-certified-sustainable-salmon-from-walmart.aspx

What we desperately need right now re: bluefin and other fisheries are consumer boycotts and demands for sustainability labelling.

 

#439:  TokyoTom Says: 

#429 Jim, people turn their backs on the rules because the rules create incentives for destruction and no incentives for compliance.

See what Defying Ocean’s End (cofounded by Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Ocean Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, The World Conservation Union, and World Wildlife Fund) says about protecting fish:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/01/14/for-crashing-fisheries-coalition-of-mainline-us-enviro-groups-calls-for-property-rights.aspx

These crazy, dedicated cionservation groups are all pushing for poerty rights approaches to end the tragedy of this government-mis-managed commons.

[this is a short repost as it seems my initial post has been lost]

Libertarians to lefty-enviros: without community-based property rights, sustainable fisheries are impossible

May 11th, 2009 No comments

Readers from RealClimate, thanks for your visit.

Here`s my comment with embedded links:

#188 / 245: Neal & Jim, thanks for the references to the successful experiments in Iceland, NZ and the Alaskan pollock fishery to replace the tragedy of the government commons with property rights approaches that gives the fishermen a stake in protecting the resources they harvest, instead of simply an incentive to invest in a mad race to catch fish before others do in a continually shrinking fishery with shorter and shorter seasons.

Don Leal and other free market environmentalists (particularly at PERC in Bozeman) have long been leaders in this field, and interest is finally growing, as the serial collapse of important fisheries continues.

Elinor Ostrom has also been a leader in documenting the ways that a community of users (NOT the dread and sloppily misused “soc-ial-ism”) may effectively manage a shared resource.

Readers might be interested in the World Bank`s Oct 2008 report, “The Sunken Billions; The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform”.

With support from the World Bank, PERC is in the middle of hosting a conference on approaches to sustainable fisheries (and on ending the massive overharvesting and wasted subsidies and malinvestment under current regulatory approaches).

I also urge readers to look at what the organization Defying Ocean’s End (cofounded by Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Ocean Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, The World Conservation Union, and World Wildlife Fundhas to say about protecting fish:

“Most of the solutions that have been implemented or proposed to fix the world’s fisheries center on command-and-control measures: regulators or courts telling fishermen how to fish through the imposition of controls on effort (e.g., fishing vessel length, engine horsepower, gear restrictions, etc.). Prescriptions like these work against strong economic incentives for maximizing catch, which are not addressed by such measures, and are of course usually resisted by fishermen. Often, prescriptions create incentives for “work-arounds” and set up a cat-and-mouse game between fishermen and regulators – for example, if regulators impose a restriction on vessel size, fishermen may purchase two vessels to maintain high catch levels.

“As in most natural resource problems, more effective solutions will address the fundamental drivers of unsustainable fisheries. In this case, the key necessary reform will be to designate secure catch privileges. It is important to understand that such privileges can be allocated to different kinds of entities in different ways, and indeed, they should be tailored to specific fisheries and communities to fit with local customs, traditions, values, and social structure.”

I`ve linked a number of my other posts on fisheries here

Categories: fisheries, property rights, RealClimate Tags:

For crashing fisheries, a coalition of mainline US enviro groups calls for …. property rights!

January 15th, 2009 No comments

In a recent post, Andy Revkin, a New York Times reporter who blogs on energy and environmental issues at his “Dot Earth” blog, asks “When whale species, like the minke, are no longer rare, can they be both admired and eaten — as North Americans do with bison — or is it simply wrong to kill whales at all?”

In a comment in response, I noted that as whales are unowned, the problem of how to manage whale stocks shares much in common with the problem of ocean fisheries – viz., open access tragedies of the commons, and politicized management – further noted that the main US environmental groups have very clearly recognized, somewhat surprisingly, that implementing property rights systems is vital to ensuring the long-term protection of fisheries.

Mainline enviros pushing for property rights?  Has the world gone crazy?

I copy below my comment, which quotes the key fisheries statement by the enviro coalition (emphasis added):

Andy, of course the real problem with whales, bluefin tuna and most other ocean resources is that no one owns them, so catching them for one dinner plate or another is frequently a classic tragedy of the commons or, if governments regulate catch, a race to catch within season all while trying to make sure limits are not set too low.

This is the reason why whaling stocks crashed and whalers agreed to a moratorium. The fact that whales remain unowned but further takings are decided by a committee of nations is what ties the dispute to a political process – a process that frankly serves no one’s long-term interest and is a distraction from the more important problems of protecting crashing ocean fisheries in general.

The clear way forward is in establishing rights to the particular stock of whales or fish, so that those who value the resource can invest in protecting it. This holds true just as much for whales as for fish.

This is what the organization Defying Ocean’s End (cofounded by Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Ocean Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Society, The World Conservation Union, and World Wildlife Fund) has to say about protecting fish:

http://www.defyingoceansend.org…

“Overfishing, high bycatch rates, the use of gear types that damage habitat (like trawls and dredges), and the large subsidies supporting fisheries (totally over $15 billion per year) are all symptoms of an underlying problem. In most fisheries that are exhibiting declines in landings and revenues, overfishing, bycatch, and habitat damage, actions that result in the symptoms are actually rational given the way the fisheries are managed. In these fisheries, secure privileges to catch certain amounts of fish are not specified, so naturally individual fishermen compete to maximize their individual shares of the catch. No incentives for conservation exist in this situation, because every fish conserved can be caught by another fisherman. The competition to maximize catch often results in a fishery “arms race”, resulting in the purchase of multiple vessels, the use of powerful engines and large vessels, and the use of highly efficient gear like trawls. Capital costs for vessels and gear increase as a result. At the same time, the competition to maximize catch often results in supply gluts, as most fishermen land large catches at the same time during seasons that become shorter and shorter due to the excessive number of vessels participating in the fishery. Prices paid to fishermen are reduced by the glut, and the quality of fish supplied to consumers declines as well (from fresh to frozen). The non-market costs associated with this kind of behavior — such as habitat damage, overfishing, and bycatch — are passed on to the fishery and onto society as a whole.

“Most of the solutions that have been implemented or proposed to fix the world’s fisheries center on command-and-control measures: regulators or courts telling fishermen how to fish through the imposition of controls on effort (e.g., fishing vessel length, engine horsepower, gear restrictions, etc.). Prescriptions like these work against strong economic incentives for maximizing catch, which are not addressed by such measures, and are of course usually resisted by fishermen. Often, prescriptions create incentives for “work-arounds” and set up a cat-and-mouse game between fishermen and regulators – for example, if regulators impose a restriction on vessel size, fishermen may purchase two vessels to maintain high catch levels.

As in most natural resource problems, more effective solutions will address the fundamental drivers of unsustainable fisheries. In this case, the key necessary reform will be to designate secure catch privileges. It is important to understand that such privileges can be allocated to different kinds of entities in different ways, and indeed, they should be tailored to specific fisheries and communities to fit with local customs, traditions, values, and social structure.”

FWIW, I’ve blogged on whales and fishing any number of times:
http://mises.org…
http://mises.org…

The problem of crashing fisheries is a far greater one than what to do about whales, so it is a real shame that the environmental community, Japan (which consumes much of the world’s fish) and other nations cannot see fit to bury the hatchet – at least on whale populations that are growing (perhaps by applying a property rights regime that would allocate ownership rights not only to whaling fleets but to conservation groups) – and work together on setting up sustainable, property-rights based harvesting regimes on imperilled ocean fisheries.

Somali piracy flows from the greater and continuing Western theft and abuse of Somali marine resources

January 7th, 2009 3 comments

The January 4 Huffington Post carries a perceptive column by Johann Hari, a writer for the Independent , who explains that Somali piracy (which I have commented on here and here) has roots in the Western theft and abuse of Somali marine resources – in the form of ongoing massive Western and Asian fishing and illegal dumping of toxic waste along the 3300 km Somali coast – and in efforts by Somali fishermen to respond (even as such piracy has now morphed into an industry in its own right, and not closely connected to the suffering fishing industry).

Hari’s post raises difficult questions about the ownership and management of open-access resources, and the obligations (if any) of Western governments to make sure that such resources are not plundered merely because local peoples are unable to defend them.  (A report by a Canadian observer to a 1998 UN mission provides background information and raised these issues here.)

While neocons and others make rousing cries for Western governments to stiffen their spines at the impudent pirates (they’re terrorists, barbarians and “enemies of mankind”, after all) and send in their navies to provide free cover for those poor Western shipping interests who seem incapable of fending off the pirates, no one seems to care much about reining in Western fishermen or toxic waste dumpers.   The St. Augustine quote I referred to in my preceding post begins to seem even more apropos:  “what are kingdoms but great bands of brigands?  Unfortunately, this type of resource exploitation is the rule rather than the exception when markets meet unowned or inadequately defended resources.  I have made a number of blog posts on related issues:  salmontunaother fish and whales.

I quote from Hari’s column (emphasis added):

In 1991, the government of Somalia – in the Horn of Africa – collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste.

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the [Mauritanian diplomat who is] UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia’s unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the men we are calling “pirates” have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a ‘tax’ on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and it’s not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was “to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters… We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas.” William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking – and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country’s territorial waters.” During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause – our crimes – before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia’s criminals.

A little digging finds ample credible support for Hari’s piece ( actually, I noticed some in connection with my earlier posts, but declined to refer to it then).

More background is here:

“It’s almost like a resource swap,” said Peter Lehr, a Somalia piracy expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the editor of “Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism.” “Somalis collect up to $100 million a year from pirate ransoms off their coasts. And the Europeans and Asians poach around $300 million a year in fish from Somali waters.”

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-somalia-pirates_salopek1oct10,0,6155016.story

http://www.skogholt.org/blog/archives/67

http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=pKmWzpTu8N4C&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=Clive+Schofield,+%22Plundered+Waters%22&source=bl&ots=bYYy-Zz2kU&sig=iLqa6DxqiotxfGNVzmfPnAmUtMo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA109,M1

http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1143999933&cid=4&

http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Military-and-naval-science/Plaguing-the-waves-Rising-piracy-threat-off-the-Horn-of-Africa.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,594457,00.html

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVV_gQDsp1m8v7nPcumVc5McYV-Q

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/fishing-fleets-are-pirates-too/2008/11/23/1227375062168.html

http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/features/3061246/what-i-learned-from-the-somali-pirates.thtml

http://www.fao.org/fishery/countrysector/FI-CP_SO/en

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2008/10/2008109174223218644.html

http://dotcommonsense.blog-city.com/who_are_the_real_pirates_of_the_african_horn__not_who_you_m.htm

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5is1GjnzYGI9cen-oyLiMPZdY6NFg

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gVV_gQDsp1m8v7nPcumVc5McYV-Q

http://www.garoweonline.com/artman2/publish/Opinion_20/Somalia_The_Physiology_of_a_Nation_at_War.shtml

http://sommusings.blogspot.com/2008/12/unlicensed-and-undocumented-privateers.html

http://www.enews20.com/news_Dialogue_not_military_might_solution_to_Somali_piracy_14836.html

 

Tragedy of the ocean commons: stocks of giant Atlantic bluefin tuna look ready to crash, like the once rich cod fishery

November 28th, 2008 No comments

Despite an 80% drop in populations of east Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna since  the mid-1970s, and continued massive overfishing above agreed quotas, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), under pressure from fishermen in the European Community,  on November 25 approved tightened 2009 fishing quotas that nevertheless exceed the recommendations of ICCAT’s own scientists by 50%.  Quotas were cut from 28,500 tonnes in 2008 to 22,000 tonnes, and the ICCAT also approved other measures designed to bring illegal fishing under control, but it is unclear whether these measures will be sufficient – particularly as illegal fishing in the past has been at multiples of quota levels.  ICCAT scientists had recommended that the quota be cut to 15,000 tonnes.

The EC praised the results, in the face of opposition by the US, Canada and Norway, which had supported the quota recommended by scientists.  Environmental groups of course were disappointed and called for tuna boycotts and suggested that all the member nations to the CITES convention (on trade in endangered species) should consider listing bluefin tuna as an endangered species – which would bring all commercial exploitation to a halt.

I looks like the pressure is on – both on the valuable bluefin tuna resource and on the relevant national governments, fishermen and consumers to better manage it.  The west Atlantic stocks of bluefin have apparently already collapsed, due to mismanagement by the US government.

As I noted on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog:

Andy, this is an ongoing shame, the roots of which are not human greed but, as indicated by your reference to a “tragedy of the commons”, a lack of any ownership of the resource by those fishing it. The result is wasteful investment by fisherman in a race to catch fish before others do, no incentive for fishermen to invest in managing stocks sustainably, pressure by fisherman on governments for higher quotas, catches that exceed quotas, and government subsidies to keep unprofitable fishermen from losing their livelihoods. If we managed our agriculture the same way, we’d have a race to harvest, but nobody planting. More here: http://mises.org…

The answer clearly lies in finding ways to link the interests of the fishermen more closely to the resource that they rely on; while this is difficult in the case of international fisheries, there have been a number of success stories for fisheries that are managed by various countries. Transferable fishing quotas (and an ability to keep track of catches) have been the key: http://www.ifqsforfisheries.org/.

Given all of the different governments involved it may be difficult to expect agreement tighter and more meaningfully enforced quotas, but a key possibility lies with Japan, which buys most of the bluefin tuna. As the chief purchaser (of course there are a variety of private purchasers involved), Japan is in a position to insist on purchasing only tuna caught by boats that properly record their catches and to unilaterally limit its own purchases to a sustainable level. Since the Japanese do not want to see the tuna fishery collapse, they have finally begun to support tightening quotas and finding other ways to improve management of the tuna stocks: http://www.seafoodsource.com/NST-3-50140600/ICCAT-Discusses-Sharp-Tuna-Quota-Cuts.aspx

Consumer boycotts and pressure on Mediterranean governments to end subsidies to fishermen (a problem George Monbiot has noted [see the Mises link above]) are other leverage points.

Is a semi-privatization of the fishery, by allowing fishermen to transfer the quotas they receive (including purchase by interested consumer and environmental groups), possible?  Can Japanese consumers (and other sushi eaters) in particular bring pressure to bear?

More on the science of the bluefin tuna stocks here and here (the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics).

Fauxtography? While the oceans swim in plastics, Pollowitz calls those who photograph the results liars

November 21st, 2008 No comments
In a brief comment entitled “Fauxtography?” in the conservative National Review blog on November 18, Greg Pollowitz (founder/CEO of iQ Venture Partners Inc.), remarks on a recent article and photo purporting to show the fatal ingestion of plastics by albatrosses.  http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjk3M2ZlNTE0ZDRjMGFiYWFjMWYyMWQ0MDk4ZTM3MGU=.  Pollowitz notes that “The caption on the pic suggests the bird did eat this much junk, but I don’t see how that’s possible,” and so blithely opines that “Junk in the oceans is a huge problem, but alarmist fauxtography is not the way to a solution.” (my emphasis)
Here’s the photo in question:
 
It is nice to know that Pollowitz shares with the Greens the view that “junk in the oceans” – mainly extremely long-lived plastics – is “a huge problem”, but it is very disappointing that when confronted with a graphic photo he prefers to trumpet his ignorance by questioning the veracity of those in the field who are documenting the level and pervasiveness of the problem. 
 
But what are blogs for, if not for opinionated people to shoot their mouths off on matters they know nothing about personally and can’t be bothered to investigate?  Hopefully this does not represent the kind of due diligence that Mr. Pollowitz conducts when making investments – even as it may usefully indicate both how much he values his own reputation and the degree of credibility we should give to the National Review.
 
Even a modest scratching through the web finds plenty of hard information on the accumulation of plastic and other junk in the ocean, plus a fair number of the kind of photos and graphic videos of dead birds that Pollowitz finds difficult to believe. While it is difficult to know what may happen to birds at seas, it is rather easy to document that the chicks of certain seabird are dying (since they die on land) as a result of being filled up by their parents with indigestible plastic garbage.  Here is just a small sampling of information, photos and videos.
 
Jean-Michel Cousteau made the following observations regarding his visit to Kure, a remote atoll in the far reaches of the Hawaiian islands:  

There is grim news we must all face. Many of you who have been following our logs, or reading and viewing news reports, are aware of the shocking scenes that we found along the shoreline and reefs of these islands. Hundreds of seabirds, mostly young albatross, lie dead along the beaches with an endless variety of plastics lodged in their decomposing bodies. On almost every island we explored, the landscape was littered with the discarded products of human society from thousands of miles away -cigarette lighters, golf balls, toothbrushes, children’s toys, and fishing floats among others.

While the NWHI are largely uninhabited, the North Pacific gyre, a convergence zone of the entire North Pacific Ocean acts as a “pollution highway,” bearing plastic debris along its path. These plastics become encrusted with fish eggs and are plucked from the ocean by albatross adults seeking food for their chicks. They swallow the eggs encasing the plastics, return to their chicks, and regurgitate the deadly combination into the hungry mouths of their young. These young birds simply cannot digest plastic materials and the accumulation of plastics over the first six months of their lives can result in starvation and possible death.

Here is some reporting by the BBC this year from Midway, which along with Kure is part of the new 1200 mile long wildlife refuge and Marine National Monument newly declared by Pres. Bush

The Midway Islands are home to some of the world’s most valuable and endangered species and they all are at risk from choking, starving or drowning in the plastic drifting in the ocean.

Nearly two million Laysan albatrosses live here and researchers have come to the staggering conclusion that every single one contains some quantity of plastic.

About one-third of all albatross chicks die on Midway, many as the result of being mistakenly fed plastic by their parents.

I watched as the deputy manager of the wildlife refuge here, Matt Brown, opened the corpse of one albatross and found inside it the handle of a toothbrush, a bottle top and a piece of fishing net.

He explained how some chicks never develop the strength to fly off the islands to search for food because their stomachs are filled with plastic.

Award-winning wildlife photographer David Liittschwager took photos similar to that which Pollowitz calls fauxtography:
 
One photo from Kure Atoll shows a dead, 6-week-old albatross chick, its open abdominal cavity jammed with discarded plastic cigarette lighters, bits of PVC pipe and other human garbage.  … Liittschwager watched researchers conduct a necropsy.

“When the bird was opened up, it was immediately obvious what had happened,” he continued. “Its stomach was easily four to five times the size it should have been, and when you touched it, it was crunchy. There were two visible ulcers where sharp objects had ruptured its stomach from the inside. Seventy-five percent of its left lung was damaged with scar tissue and infection.”

Human carelessness killed this and dozens of other chicks. Our plastic castoffs were caught up in the same ocean currents and intermingled with the squid and flying fish eggs gathered by adult albatross off the North American coast. The parent birds inadvertently scoop up the toxic flotsam while flying thousands of miles to forage for nourishment to fly back and regurgitate to their young.

“This is the most remote island of the most remote island chain in all the world,” Liittschwager said. “This is as far away as you can get, anywhere, from human civilization.” 

Liittschwager further noted in his book Archipelago (emphasis added):
 
The contents of Shed Bird’s proventriculus weighed 340 grams, more than 80 percent of this was plastic. Imagine: Three plastic bottle caps weigh approximately 5 grams, and a regulation baseball weights about 140 grams—two baseballs’ worth of plastic in Shed Bird’s stomach!  An albatross chick’s proventriculus is designed to hold huge amounts of food, as there may be many days between meals while the parents are out foraging. Chicks eat whatever their parents feed them, plastic included; if these items accumulate in their proventriculi, they will feel full and may not beg properly. Albatrosses eat indigestible items that exist in nature, like squid beaks, and a well-fed chick will have a proventriculus full of these items, which it eventually throws up as a bolus at about the time it’s ready to fledge. …. After the death of Shed Bird, I found and examined 60 Laysan albatross chick carcasses on Kure Atoll. Most to them contained more than 200 grams of plastic
 
Greg, an apology is in order – to Ms. Cynthia Vanderlip,
the biologist and Manager of the State of Hawaii’s Kure Atoll Wildlife
Sanctuary, who snapped the picture in question (and whom you can see
conducting one of the albatross necropsies below).  She is apparently
not a liar. Pollowitz, are you a gentleman?
More information for readers:
Albatross necropsies:
[View:http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=FinDNPopXQY:550:0]
[View:http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=6o_rtV68Yn8&feature=related:550:0]
Photos and other information:
   
BBC: 
More on ocean junk later.
Categories: birds, ocean, plastic, Pollowitz, pollution Tags:

George Monbiot: Why do governments subsidize the rush by fishermen to destroy unowned ocean fisheries?

July 9th, 2008 No comments

In the context of the latest fuel strikes by European fishermen, George Monbiot has an excellent piece in the July 8th Guardian that explores the role of governments in subsidizing the destructive “tragedy of the commons” that is ocean fisheries.

It is, however, a shame that Monbiot makes no reference to what many observers are starting to realize:  that the solution to solving over-fishing lies in getting the government out of the business of political management of the resources that fishermen depend on, and putting responsibility, control and incentives to invest in resource management back in the hands of fishermen. 

Although government interference in resource markets has been a resounding failure (witness the destruction of the US salmon fisheries), a light at the end of the tunnel has appeared in the form of privatization through “ITQs” or Individual Transferable Quotas, as noted by:

Ron Bailey, science correspondent of Reason, in “How to Save New England’s Fishing Villages; If only the fishers will allow it” (September 28, 2005) and in”Pick Your Poissons; Economic and ecological diversity for fisheries“(August 25, 2006); and by

Birgir Runolfsson, in Cato’s Regulation, in “Fencing the Oceans A Rights-Based Approach to Privatizing Fisheries” (vol. 20, no. 3, 1997).

Further, Jonathan Adler, law prof at Case Western Reserve University, has a very interesting discussion of how the enforcement of antitrust laws have frustrated cooperative fishery management  (March 2002).

While these materials focus on domestic marine fisheries, similar strategies are needed at regional levels.