Privatize Profits, Commonize Costs

By George Wuerthner, 6-19-08

For the past few weeks I have been traveling around the West where I have seen numerous examples of where private companies and individuals have reaped great profits from exploitation of public lands, while the negative consequences of their activities are left to the public to live with or fix.

This is what Garrett Hardin called the PPCC—privatize profits and commonize costs.

On the Olympic Peninsula in Washington where once stood some of the most magnificent old growth forests in the West, we now have stump fields and numerous hillsides covered with young forests—but none of the huge trees that once blanketed the region. The trees were hauled away leaving scarred hillsides, and wrecked salmon streams. The timber barons got the money, the land was degraded, and judging by the worn out appearance of the logging towns, most of the wealth surely didn’t stay in the community.

One of the costs externalized has been the loss of the region’s abundant salmon and steelhead runs. And it’s not just fishermen who have suffered. Research has shown that the dead salmon carry nutrients from the sea back up these rivers and deposit them when they die in small headwater streams. The roots of the trees that sustained and protected the watershed then absorb nutrients released by dying salmon. Without salmon the forest is slowly being nutrient starved.

But it goes beyond the loss of salmon and nutrients. Big old growth trees are important structural components in rivers. Logs create most of the habitat for young fish. And logs also protect the stream banks from erosion during floods. Big logs, because they take longer to rot provide greater structural support than small logs. However, in the “managed” forest that dominates the Olympic Peninsula outside of the national park, trees are cut in such short rotations that big old growth logs are no longer being created.

You still see some big logs in the rivers, but these are “historic” relics. Once they rot and disappear, they will not be replaced. With most of the old growth gone, the streams are losing their structural components.

Similarly there are still fish in the streams, but most of them are sustained by hatcheries, not natural production. This is a techno fix designed to obscure the real problem—loss of old growth forests. Hatchery fish are not nearly as well adapted to local streams as wild fish.

And who bears this cost of hatchery fish production? Not the timber companies who reaped the profits by scalping the land of its verdant forests, but who transferred most of the costs of their operations to the public. The old PPCC—privatize profits, commonize costs strikes again.

But the loss of the Olympic Peninsula’s old growth forests is typical of the way things are done in the West and certainly not an isolated case.

Another widespread example of the old PPCC is how we deal with predators on public lands. Ranchers are permitted to graze their livestock on public lands to their benefit. They privatize the profits. But they externalize one of their costs of doing businesses—reducing predator opportunity—by killing the public’s wildlife—namely predators, thus commonize the costs.

I recently read about a number of livestock companies in the Ketchum Idaho area that were being lauded for working to protect wolves. Instead of immediately shooting the wolves, they would try to harass them. But even this is a cost to the public, who for the most part, prefers to see wolves on their public lands than someone’s domestic sheep. Why is harassing wildlife even legal? These ranchers are out degrading public resources for their private benefit. They are not doing me any favors.

Of course, in most of the West, there is not even an attempt to harass wolves—they are simply shot—the ultimate in the old PPCC—privatize profits while you commonize costs.

As with the logging of the old growth forests, the livestock companies are having more impacts than merely the loss of wolves when they are shot. Domestic animals have other indirect impacts on predators that are never mentioned, even by groups supposedly out to protect predators. Many of these groups promote “predator friendly” livestock operations instead of questioning the very idea that anyone should be permitted to destroy public lands and wildlife for their private profit.

There is no such thing as “predator friendly” livestock operations. All livestock operations hurt predator if for no other reason than domestic animals are consuming forage that would otherwise support native wildlife. There is no free lunch. Grass going into the belly of cows and sheep is that much less for native ungulates like elk.

Also elk and other ungulates avoid areas that are actively being grazed by livestock. They are socially displaced. Therefore when a “predator friendly” livestock operation moves into the area, it tends to force natural prey from the area, leaving less food for wolves and other predators.

Not surprisingly, predators are often left with no choice but to prey on domestic livestock, but pay for such transgression with their lives.

The bottom line for is that the public loses valuable resources and/or must accept a degraded landscape as these costs are externalized while the resource exploiters get to keep the profits. It’s time to change public policy to CPPC or commonize profits and privatize costs.