Corporations don't want to pay full price for the water they use, the minerals they mine, or the trees they cut. Fishermen don't want to pay for the fish they catch. Citizens don't want to pay for visits to national parks. History shows that this match-up encourages them to protect a resource. We know privatization works for the same reason that owners tend to take better care of their houses than renters do, and that there is no shortage of Persian cats or chickens, even as bluebirds and Karner Blue butterflies become scarcer.
Privatization works to preserve nature in another way as well.
But the fact is that intensively managed tree plantations growing on just 5 percent of the earth's forestlands could supply all of the world's current requirements for wood products. Wilson, after offering a few cautionary words, did give a ringing endorsement to the role that genetically enhanced crops must play in preserving wildlands. The advantages of genetically engineered crops are simply enormous. In the case of privatization, a good policy falls victim to a vision of an allegedly perfect policy through which all species are saved. Environmentalists worry, with some justification, that property owners may sometimes want to use their property in ways that do not maximize species preservation goals.