anized corporations. If the land was privately held the land owner would realize that tourism would make more of a profit than logging and nature would be preserved.
The implementation of property rights provides governments with an opportunity to raise revenues. This has been illustrated by recent auctions of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum for telephony, another example of an attempt to manage a scarce resource through property rights rather than regulation. Such auctions offer an alternative to conventional taxation for funding public spending, by capitalizing the expected rent earned by the privatized good. Some economists, most notably Henry George in the 1870s, have argued that taxes on income and profits represent taxes on productivity, innovation and creativity and that we should rather tax land rents and externalities such as pollution, consumption of fossil fuels and road congestion. Environmental property rights offer a means to shift taxation from "Goods" to "bads" and rents. p> One example of free market attempt to protect the environment is The Nature Conservancy organization. It has been successful in protecting many sensitive, ecologically important places by simply purchasing them, although this practice has met with controversy in some areas. In some cases the lands are donated or sold to government agencies for management, while in others the Nature Conservancy itself manages these preserves. Billionaire Ted Turner has a similar private program that has seen him buy up tens of thousands of acres of wilderness around the United States.
There are a number of arguments against free-market environmentalism:
Historically, Tort Law has been of limited efficacy for confronting environmental problems. According to the World Bank, "tort law, based as it is on the protection of individual rights and the need to prove specific injury, has not been a significant means of preventing environmental degradation. "[5] Similarly, in" Law in Environmental Decision-Making "legal scholar Jenny Steele notes that in respect to protection of the environment, "a number of historical studies have assessed the extent of tort's impact in this respect, to generally critical effect. "[6] In the environmental law textbook," Environmental Protection ", Sue Elworth and Jane Holder argue that the most significant limitation of common law, including tort law "was, and continues to be that the protection of private property is the rationale of private law and its motivation ... Environmental protection may be effected through the protection of property rights. But private law is said to act only to protect the individualized self-interested claim, which considerably constrains legal action. The main doubt about the ability of private law to provide an appropriate means of protecting the environment is that environmental problems demand collective action, there is therefore some resistance to the idea that individual...
