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Destroying The Environment: Government Mismanagement Of Our Natural Resources

National Center for Policy Analysis Policy Report #124
Executive Summary

DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT:
GOVERNMENT MISMANAGEMENT OF OUR NATURAL RESOURCES

By John Baden

The United States is generally thought of as a country devoted to the principle of private property. Yet about 42 percent of all U.S. land is owned by government -- 33 percent by the federal government and 9 percent by state and local governments.

Among the lands owned by the federal government are some of the nation's most treasured resources -- rare and beautiful tracts of land that are home for countless species of foliage and wildlife and contain some of the most ecologically interesting wonders found anywhere on earth. Yet mounting evidence suggests that the federal government has been a poor manager of our natural resources, often engaging in policies that lead to environmental destruction. For example,
  • Because of Park Service policies, the white-tailed deer, mountain lion, lynx, bobcat, wolverine and fisher all have vanished from Yellowstone National Park, and the Rocky Mountain gray wolf is now extinct.

  • The Park Service also is responsible for a serious decline in the numbers of black bears, grizzlies, bighorn sheep, mule deer and beaver in Yellowstone.
The record of the U.S Forest Service is probably worse than the record of the National Park Service.
  • About 342,000 miles of roads have been built in our national forests -- more than eight times the total mileage of the U.S. Interstate Highway System.

  • These roads, primarily designed to facilitate logging, extend into the ecologically fragile backcountry of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, where they are causing massive soil erosion, damaging trout and salmon fisheries and causing other environmental harm.

  • Because the costs of these logging activities far exceed any commercial benefit from the timer acquired, this environmental destruction would never have occurred in the absence of government subsidies.
Taxpayers also have been subsidizing environmental destruction by other federal agencies.
  • Bureau of Reclamation projects have eliminated one national wildlife refuge and others are threatened by water shortage and contamination.

  • Because of the Bureau of Land Management, more than three million acres of wildlife habitat have been cleared with huge chains and replaced woth fields of crested wheatgrass for domestic livestock.
This study chronicles some of the most serious environmental damage caused by government policies, explains why such destruction generally does not occur on privately owned land, and makes proposals for systematic privatization through which our natural resources might be better protected.

John Baden is Director of the Maguire Oil & Gas Institute, Southern Methodist University; Chairman of the Fondation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and Founder and Senior Associate of the Political Economy Research Center.

A complete copy of the study "Destroying the Environment: Government Mismanagement of Our Natural Resources" is available for $10. To order this study, plase contact the NCPA at 972/386-6272.
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