Ecology and economy go hand in hand today in improving public land use. In many cases the land is worth more to the economy of the New West in its beautiful, pristine, natural state. Mark Bailey writes on the economics of the environment and brings in some of our ecologist friends to lend their point of view.
The Tragedy of the Commons
February 2011
“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Sometimes in the use of public land in the West we get a little confused about the cost and responsibility of freedom. Western land use practices are stuck in the past. The laws for grazing, mining, logging, and water use were all created when the West was first being settled and was isolated from the rest of the country and the world. Now, in a quick 150 years or so, the West is settled and is far from isolated and the laws have not managed to keep up. The law says that water left in the stream is wasted and that if a rancher decides to conserve and not graze all the grass in his allotment, then his grazing rights will be issued to a rancher who will. And now we know that water in the stream is a precious resource right where it is and that there is nothing quite as exquisite as a pristine mountain meadow. But there are folks, organized into local special interest groups and supported by local politicians, who want to keep to the old ways, for their own gain, while crying out about their freedom and rights. Since my background is in investment and economics, I like to look at the land use management issues and try to see what economic principles might be applied to come up with better policies. Principles like Jeremy Bentham’s goal of “the greatest good for the greatest number,”Garret Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons,” and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” can be used to try to figure out how we can best use the land.
In 1968 ecologist Garret Hardin wrote the seminal essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” regarding the question of population growth. It’s a handy coincidence for Torrey House Press that the tragedy of the commons is an analogy based on grazing. As Hardin explains, in a pasture open to all, each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. As a rational being, each herdsman naturally seeks to maximize his gain. More or less consciously he asks, “What is in it for me to add one more cow to my herd?” What’s in it for him has an upside and a downside. The upside is one more cow to sell; the downside is the additional overgrazing caused by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen while all the proceeds of the additional cow go to the individual herdsman, the downside for each herdsman adding another cow is small compared to the upside. The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course of action is to add another animal to the herd. And, by the same logic, another and another regardless of the effect of overgrazing on the commons. Nonetheless, this is the conclusion of all of the herdsmen and therein lies the tragedy. It’s a paradox that certain freedoms, like the freedom to graze the land all you want, bring ruin to all.
Hardin’s arguments were so cogent that they spurred into action such improvements in practice as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. In the late 60’s, we had rivers catching on fire in the Midwest and all the fish dying in the Great Lakes, entire bird populations collapsing and growing air pollution across the country. Pollution is also a tragedy of the commons, and Hardin helped the country to understand the notion. In order to prevent the tragedy, it helps to understand it.
The tragedy of the commons presents a kind of rebuttal to Adam Smith’s classical construct of the “invisible hand.” In one of the most concise and useful summaries of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) I have ever seen, Hardin explains how the idea that an individual who “intends only his own gain” is, as it were, “led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest.” Smith famously offered that it is not just the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, and the baker that puts your dinner on the table. It is in their interest to provide the best meat, beer, and bread for your money so that you keep coming back. In this case, self-interest clearly provides for the public good. So why doesn’t the same self-interest of the herdsmen work for the commons? Here we have the “it’s the public; no one owns it” factor. As Hardin suggests, private property was invented as a concept to prevent the tragedy of overusing common land. Once the herdsman becomes a land owner, he has a different calculation. All the cost of overgrazing goes to the owner, and the owner learns to optimize the use of his land and not abuse and ruin it.
I find it useful to parse the problem of limiting the freedom to use the land by considering who owns it and who is bearing the cost of its use. If the land is public and is being used for economic gain by private individuals, we need to watch out: the economic incentives are not in balance. Economists warn of the same when they note that we often privatize the profit and communize the cost when it comes to public land use. In Hardin’s illustration of society’s proclivities, he points out that while the tragedy of the commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture, even at this late date it still goes on. He observes that “cattlemen leasing national land on the Western ranges demonstrate no more than an ambivalent understanding [of the concept], in constantly pressuring federal authorities to increase the head count to the point where overgrazing produces erosion and weed-dominance” [emphasis mine]. As far as the vast majority of the tax paying public goes, the rancher’s “right” to overgraze the land ends where our public noses begin.
Of course, once we rule out the solution of private ownership to protect the land, as we have with the public lands of the West, we need to decide another way to make decisions about land use. The problem with turning the decisions over to regulators is, as Hardin suggests, Quis custodies ipsos custodes? –who shall watch the watchers themselves? As I discussed here previously, policy decision-making often falls victim to regulatory capture where the regulated become the regulators. Bentham argued that the best policy is one that creates the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Seems we might be able to accomplish that if we include more stakeholders than just ranchers at the policy table: let’s turn the decisions over to the greater number in the public market.
There’s an easy middle ground solution to the rub between the tragedy of the commons and the inability of the invisible hand to do its good work for the public trust: a more market-like solution, where, in the case of grazing and water for instance, the rights are treated as a private property right whose owners are allowed to sell them. The individual rancher could decide, without coercion, to sell his grazing rights into conservation. Conservation agencies could provide the funds which have in turn been provided by individual, private, contributors. The rancher wins, the land wins, and the public wins.
-Mark Bailey
Cool Water
The Ecologist:
“All day I’ve faced the barren waste, without the taste of water. . . .” Cool Water
Water is the ultimate mixer. It mixes well with various substances: jello, powdered milk, lime to make concrete and other liquids. Frozen, it chills drinks, can be skated on, and locked up as a glacier, it stores paleo-archaic history: frozen mammoths, pollen, and a sequential record of atmospheric gases and particles. It is the probably the most valuable simple compound molecule on the planet because it is the superstructure of our carbon-based existence. But water may well be one of the most wasted combinations of elements.
Precipitation on the Colorado Plateau varies by altitude and aspect. But much of the Colorado Plateau is certainly arid and often mislabeled as a desert. It has desert ecotypes but in general, on average, it is just an arid place. I think what makes people think the Plateau is a desert is that plants are sparse on many ecotypes on the Plateau and also that much of the red rock portion of the plateau are, well, rock. Precipitation roars off of rock cliffs forming spectacular pour-offs (ephemeral waterfalls).
The soils on a lot of the plateau are either volcanic, sand, or marine shale all of which tend to be dry. The lack of vegetation results from a combination of factors including low soil nutrients, lack of organic matter, and low soil moisture (it seeps or flows away). The upland and mountain sites are lush with plants and animals.
Where I grew up in the four-corners in Colorado, there wasn’t enough water to waste any of it. We gathered water from our roofs and stored it in cisterns. When there was water in the ditch we diverted it into these cisterns or, lacking either source during a dry period, we hauled water from Mormon Spring close to the New Mexico line. Our huge gardens were well watered but for us kids baths were weekly! Irrigation water did not run down the side of the road almost all summer like it does now in some rural communities on the Plateau. Even in drier, hotter areas on the Plateau—places like Kanab, Moab, and Vernal, Utah; Fruita, Colorado; and Farmington, New Mexico–people have Kentucky Bluegrass lawns, golf courses, water slides. One would think that residents of the Plateau and the West would conserve water rather than waste it but. . . . .
Some statistics:
- Utah is the second driest state in the US following Nevada
- Utah residents use more water per capita than people in any other state. The national average is 75 gallons; Utahns use over 250 gallons per day per person.
- Over 60% of Utah’s per capita municipal water usage is consumed for yard irrigation
From information provided by the USU Extension Service and the Utah Water Conservancy
These statistics refer only to treated municipal water but, in fact, most of the water used in this state is for agriculture, poured on hay fields and other crops that have little economic value. All across the Plateau, stacks of moldering hay dot hay yards and corners of hay fields. Some have been in place long enough that they could be subject to laws governing antiquities. But hay is easy to grow as long as you have a lot of water. If you have irrigation water rights, you get up on the first spring day that the irrigation company says is time to irrigate, and you start your sprinklers. The only time they are turned off, during the irrigation season, is when you need to swath, bale, and stack your hay, and then the water is poured back on. Sprinklers run 24/7 regardless of wind, rain, or even hot days that see more moisture evaporate than hit the ground.
This is not cheap water in hydrologic, ecologic, social, or economic terms. For example, Central Utah irrigation water cost the taxpayer several thousands of dollars per acre foot to develop, and the hay farmer pays five or so dollars per acre foot. An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover one acre one foot deep. This is approximately 325,850 U.S. gallons or enough to supply an urban user for 1303 days!
Much of our irrigation and some culinary water comes from aquifers that are hard to replenish such as the Navajo Sandstone aquifer that has a recharge of as much as 10,000 years. In other words that water is glacial! The rest comes from streams and rivers that are seriously over-allocated due to changes in points of diversion that allow water owners far from the basin to use Colorado River Basin water. Much of the water from the Colorado River is used outside of the Plateau by communities in western Utah, Nevada, and southern California. A lot of water used on the Plateau is dumped on hay.
However, there are a number of opportunities to reduce the consumption of water and improve the recharging of aquifers. Improving aquifer recharge is a simple as restoring the integrity (biodiversity over time) of the shrub-steppe ecotypes which facilitate percolation into the soil rather than overland flow. Reducing overland flow also keeps soil on the site instead of depositing it in reservoirs. Cleaning out silt from reservoirs is very expensive by factors of tens compared to replanting grasses, forbs, and shrubs on deteriorated shrub-steppe lands. Plus, reseeding native landscapes not only reduces the potential for massive fires and increases percolation: it could also be highly instrumental as a major carbon sink to sequester carbon. Research in other shrub-steppe sites across the planet strongly suggest that these mixed grass/shrub ecotypes sequester more carbon per cubic meter of soil surface than any other ecotype on the planet.
We can make choices to use water sparingly but more productively and in a way that helps the economies of rural areas on the Plateau. We can restore the biodiversity of shrub-steppe sites and increase their potential to sequester carbon and store water. Or we can mix a bourbon and water, serve our guests jello and alfalfa sprouts, and watch our Kentucky Bluegrass transpire more moisture than the same volume of native grasses and shrubs. ~A.J. Martine
The Economist: A.J., I have always loved that tune. My folks had some old cowboy crooners recorded on vinyl in their collection and it was a favorite of my brother’s and mine back in the early 60’s. Check out Marty Robbins doing his version in the late 1950’s on YouTube. Some of this old stuff is just good and awful.
Water and grass on the Colorado Plateau have a lot in common. Both are vastly misused and the management of both could be dramatically improved by a simple change in the law. As it is right now, it is the law that both must be used up. Just like with grazing rights, if you don’t use your water rights the state is required to take those rights from you and give them to someone who will. In the West, leaving water in the stream is legally “wasting” it. They are old laws for a bygone time and, unlike your tune, it’s more awful than good.
As I learned about water in the West I was struck by three rather astonishing facts that I don’t think most people know. The first point is that, as you mention A.J., almost all the water in the West, eighty percent or more, is used for agriculture, not for our homes and lawns. Agriculture uses almost all the water, yet makes up less than three percent of Western economies. The second point is that the mighty Colorado River no longer makes it to the sea. The third point that can easily get under a taxpaying environmentalist’s skin is that the relatively small portion of water that is used for urban lawns is controlled by strange special interest groups called water conservancy districts – unaccountable, politically appointed agencies who can and do tax you and then charge you for your water and want you to use more so they can further develop it. Since what we are concerned with here is the health and beauty of the Plateau, let me just mention the urban water district thing briefly. All water issues in the West, urban or rural, are about money. As the saying goes, in the West water flows uphill toward money. In Utah, along the urban Wasatch Front, there is enough water for 20 million people or more. There is plenty of water. And yet the Central Utah Water Conservancy District wants you to spend another billion dollars further diverting the Bear River thereby drying up the beautiful northern Utah wetlands and wildlife refuges, for water that is otherwise easily available. I want to spend more time on the strange corrupt nature of the District on another Palaver. For now, let’s look at water on the Colorado Plateau.
Water on the Plateau, left alone, would gather and flow into the Colorado River, nourishing the land the whole way. Much of the water doesn’t make it that far because it is pulled out of the streams to be poured on grass and hay. Like you said A.J., water that cost the taxpayers as much as $1,000 an acre foot to develop and deliver is used by farmers for around five or six dollars, or less. It’s not like farmers could afford any more. Most of the farmers in the West are barely getting by; in fact nearly all of them have a second job to pay the bills. But if they don’t use the water by getting it out of the stream (legally called “beneficial use”) they lose their precious water rights (“you can have my wife, but don’t touch my water”). Now, isn’t it interesting that these farmers who are engaged in a practice that is arduous, low paying, and environmentally damaging are not even getting by economically? What about these poor guys? Isn’t there a better way?
There is. And it’s so easy, and for water, just like grazing, it just takes some small changes in the law to let price and markets do their thing. Markets are self organizing: they don’t require top down command and control or even extensive organizing and fund raising. Just open up the laws a bit to let the folks who value the water more than five or six dollars per acre foot buy it from the farmers who need the money. To do that all you have to do is tip your hat to the farmer’s vested interest in his water rights and either buy or rent those rights from him. There are some very thirsty downstream states in the West who, again as with grazing rights, are standing by, ready to pay the farmers more for their water than they can make growing hay. How to get the water all the way from the Plateau to the thirsty Western states? Turn off the sprinklers, leave the water in the streams, and let the farmers cash their checks. That’s it. Legally and economically it’s so easy. Change the law and the economics will happen. The farmer makes some much needed currency, taxpayers save on subsidies, and the environment benefits–even the planet cools down. The only thing hard about it is the politics of water, but hey, that’s why we elect politicians. If they don’t get it right, elect someone else. If we set the farmers and ranchers economically free to sell or rent their water and grazing rights, everyone benefits, including the farmers and ranchers.
Let me wrap up with the benefit to the environment. Naturalists tell me that eighty percent of all wildlife in the West is supported by rivers for at least some portion of their life cycle. When water is withdrawn from the rivers, streams, and riparian lands it starts a sorry cascade of manmade death and failure. The landscape slowly becomes not much more than New York’s Central Park. For example, when the Colorado River doesn’t make it to the Sea of Cortez and the delta at the river’s mouth dries up, an ecosystem dies affecting the entire planet, particularly globally migrating bird populations. The river system, from source to mouth, is worth more today, naturally intact, than it is when used for growing hay. Much, much more.
That’s where we come in at Torrey House Press. Most folks don’t know about the beauty that is lost because of archaic laws regarding the management of all the public land in the West. People don’t want to hear any more environmentalists harping about it or pink faced Sagebrush Rebellion zealots puffing and snorting about it. But they do enjoy reading a good story or tale and don’t mind gaining a bit of appreciation along the way. So, come on, let’s find the next Norman Macleans, Edward Abbeys, and Wallace Stegners and tell some good stories. ~Mark Bailey
Previous Posts:
Roots October 22, 2010 Link here
Gaze or Graze November 4, 2010 Link here
The Fox and the Henhouse December, 2010 Link Here
