But free-market environmentalists have plenty of ideas they'd like to implement. Cato has proposed creating a stock market for what are now government lands and issuing shares to the public at large to spread as wide as possible an ownership interest in nature's bounty. That includes user fees for national forests, national parks and other public lands. It also means altering public land permits to recognize conservation so that people don't feel obliged to extract the last ounce of value from leased resources lest they lose the right to use them at all. That raises a smaller version of the same problem that troubled the environment in the old Soviet bloc, where nobody owned anything, so it all got gobbled up by government shoe factories.
Litigation is a blood sport.
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