Pushing the envelope

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.