A
primer for the incoming Trump Administration: How to extract the most natural resources
possible, at a sustained yield, over the long term
Dear Mr. Trump,
You are into long term gains, right? Passing wealth onto
your children? Leaving a legacy? Alright, let’s do this with America’s natural
resources! Make America’s ecosystems and ecosystem-based economies great again!
Here’s how.
Don’t you hate stop-and-go traffic on the freeway? Don’t you
wish it would be smoother, so it didn’t have to come to a complete stop?
Pushing the envelope to extract as many resources as
possible as quickly as possible is like that. The closer to nature’s limits
that you get is when you start building a bubble (that will burst at some
point). If you speed up suddenly, you will have to slow down suddenly. Because
nature is variable. But people want reliability. Businesses need
predictability. So don’t tie your extractive economy to a variable indicator,
or else you are going to have booms and busts.
How do you insulate extractive industries from natural
variability? You back off. Don’t push the envelope. Set limits well below
nature’s.
In Natural Resources Management 101 you learn that in order
to maintain a sustained yield of natural resources, you only harvest the
interest, and you leave the principal untouched. If you start tapping the
principal, you start losing yield (and revenue). So don’t do that.
On private lands, this is called good stewardship. On public
lands, or with public resources (like water and the oceans and the air) it
requires laws and regulations (in addition to good stewardship and a
conservation ethic). These laws and regulations are good for business because they bring stability and reliability and predictability. A free-for-all benefits no one.
Because so much of America’s economy is tourism, or nature-based
(think hunting, fishing, birdwatching, river rafting, etc.), anything you leave
on the table benefits the ecosystem and those industries. So by backing off and not pushing the
envelope, you aren’t losing anything. And you are gaining reliability.
One example is in California’s Bay-Delta. Wet years leave
more water on the table than we can extract, and as a result we now rely on
those wet years to refresh the Bay-Delta and boost fish populations. If we were
able to capture that water, as new dam proponents propose we do, we’d be
killing off the only thing that is keeping our fisheries going. So we don’t
want to build new dams—it isn’t good for the ecosystem or the economy (by the way,
the dams are super expensive and usually funded with tax dollars, and managed
by powerful bureaucracies that expand government forever—as a Republican you
should be opposed to any new dams, which were a favorite socialist program of
the New Deal). Unfortunately, bad hombres and nasty women keep proposing new
dams, and suckering America’s politicians into buying them. These are huge liabilities. Huge.
The obvious question is: well, how do we know how far to
back off? We can’t extract everything, and we can’t extract nothing. Where is
the line we shouldn’t cross?
Well, luckily, there are many laws and regulations, based on
scientific research, that give us a great starting point. Let’s use those
whenever we can to maintain stability in our extractive economy.
Unfortunately—especially in relation to private lands—often we don’t have
strong laws to guide us. You mostly don’t need to worry about that at the
federal level, unless you want to throw some incentives at scientific research,
management experiments, and support state-level efforts to limit development.
Because it is additional development that creates that bubble I was talking
about.
The Great Recession was started by the housing
bubble—inadequate regulations allowed investors to push the envelope too far.
The collapse of the timber and fishing industries is no different.
People hovering around you like vultures will be telling you
to remove as many restrictions on extractive industries as possible. These
individuals trying to make a quick buck off of America are blind to long term
gains. Don’t listen to them. Those establishment politicians got us into this
mess, and now we have to make America great again. Let the professional land
managers and scientists guide natural resources policy, and guide us to healthy
ecosystems, a resilient economy, and prosperity. You’ve got professionals—use them!
And trust them—especially when it comes to climate policy.
Don’t be afraid to buck the party line and think for
yourself on this one.
