Enviropreneurshop: Property Rights for Environmental Benefit

• Author: G. Tracy Mehan III
• Pages: 250-253

250 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Enviropreneurshop:

Property Rights for

Environmental Benefit

By G. Tracy Mehan III

Free Market Envi ronmentalism for the Ne xt Generation, by Terry

L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal. Palgrave MacMillan . 213 pages.

From the July/ August 2015 issue of The Environmental Forum.

Twenty-ve years ago, Terry L. Ander-

son and Donald R . Leal published

their magnum opus Free Market Envi-

ronmentalism and oered the startling view

that property rights, local initiative, and eco-

nomic incentives are friends, not enemies, of

nature. “At t he heart of free ma rket environ-

mentalism is a system of well-specied prop-

erty rights to natural resources,” wrote the

two, who have been the guiding spirits of the

Property and Environment Research Center

in Bozeman, Montana, the home of free mar-

ket environmentalism.

“Whether these rights are held by individu-

als, corporations, non-prot environmental

groups, or communal groups, a discipline is

imposed on resource users because the wealth of the owner of the property

rights is at stake if bad decisions are made,” argued the authors.

is insight accounts for the fact that we are, globally and domestically,

awash in commodities of all kinds except for water. It is primarily controlled

by government—mostly municipal in the United States—and, thus, at the

mercy of politics as opposed to economics or engineering. In other words,

water is treated as a “free good” and insulated by politics from any eective

pricing mechanism that might account for the cost of service (capture,

storage, treatment, delivery, disposal, or reuse) or its scarcity value.