Post by Greg on Jun 8, 2022 9:29:59 GMT
In 1904, you could hitch a ride on a street car from downtown Seattle to the outskirts of the city and step into Ravenna Park, a pristine forest of Douglas fir trees.While loggers were busy cutting the timber for which the area was famous, these special trees were preserved in the park.Trees there grew as thick as twenty feet in diameter and as tall as four hundred feet.The park quite literally was an urban oasis for nature lovers.At the time, Ravenna Park was not a national park or even a state or local park.For the Becks, Ravenna Park’s beauty provided both a sense of pride in ownership and a source of income.The Becks measured and fenced the trees.They even named the more magnificent specimens.To further entice visitors, the Becks built a pavilion for concerts and nature lectures and added paths, benches, and totem poles depicting Northwest Indian culture.Ravenna Park quickly became immensely popular.Even with these relatively high fees, 8,000 to 10,000 people visited the park on a busy day.As Seattle’s population grew, so did sentiment for city parks.Local politicians acquired more land to provide ’free access’ public parks.Toward this end, the city of Seattle sought to acquire Ravenna Park.Not long after the transfer to the public domain, the newly created city park changed dramatically.According to newspaper accounts, the giant fir trees in Ravenna began disappearing.He conceded that the large ’Roosevelt Tree’ had been cut down because it had posed a ’threat to public safety’ and sold gitlab.tails.boum.org/henriettae/planning-your-business/-/wikis/Bing]for cordwood to defray costs of removal.The federation asked a University of Washington forestry professor to investigate.When the women brought the professor’s finding that a number of trees had been cut to the attention of the Park Board, the board expressed regret and promised the cutting would stop.By 1925, however, all the giant fir trees in Ravenna Park had disappeared, replaced by grass, playground equipment, and tennis courts.Controversy arose over what caused the trees to vanish.Some tried to blame their disappearance on natural causes, such as wind and disease, while others said it was caused by pollution from automobiles and chimney smoke.In fact, it was the bureaucracy that destroyed what the Becks had preserved.Park employees took advantage of their access to the park and cut down the trees to sell as firewood.The lesson from this story is tied to the incentives faced by the two different owners of Ravenna Park.Because the natural beauty was a source of income for the Becks, they preserved it.By destroying the giant trees for immediate gain, they would have received less income, and their wealth would have declined.Even an outcry by a watchdog group was unable to prevent their destruction.On a calm day in 1880, Captain William Cox rowed his small boat into a grotto along the Oregon coast.He was so fascinated with the resident Steller’s and California sea lions, bird rookery, and natural greens, pinks, and purples of the cavern walls that he returned to explore it several times.Acting on his instinct that the area was worth preserving, Captain Cox purchased the grotto, known as Sea Lion Caves, in 1887 from the state of Oregon.In size and beauty, the caves are reputed to compare to Italy’s famous Blue Grotto of Capri.From the top of the headland above the caves, a spectacular ocean vista is favored as a point for viewing killer and gray whales.In addition to their beauty, the caves and surrounding rocks are the only known breeding and wintering areas of the Steller’s sea lion.Approximately two hundred Steller’s sea lions reside at the grotto, where they are joined in the fall and winter by another twenty to fifty California sea lions.The area also serves as a rookery for sea birds, most notably Brandt’s cormorants and pigeon gillemots.While owned by the Cox family, the caves remained inaccessible except to the most adventuresome.Clanton purchased the grotto with the intent of opening it as a business.Clanton thought the caves would captivate visitors just as it had Captain Cox years earlier.Jacobson, risked all that they owned to build a safe access to the grotto.The impact of tourists, however, is minimized by fencing them out while allowing the resident mammals to migrate in and out freely.Not only have the owners of these caves provided habitat for the Steller’s sea lions, they have helped to protect them from hunting.For many years, it was thought that sea lions posed a serious threat to the commercial salmon fishery and therefore had to be exterminated.Toward this end, the state of Oregon paid a bounty of $5 per sea lion killed.The extermination efforts might have been successful if the caves had not provided a safe haven for the sea lions and if the owners had not put a great deal of effort into driving off bounty hunters.Their efforts were eventually combined with legislation to protect sea lions along the Oregon coast.The daily entrance fees are $6 for adults and $4 for children aged six through fifteen.The Lane Humane Society of Eugene, Oregon, has praised the continuing stewardship of the area.When entrepreneurs see opportunities to make a profit, they develop innovative contractual arrangements to capitalize on their vision.The potential for private provision is even greater when we consider that other individuals were motivated by their commitment to conservation rather than profits.The fact that loggers were cutting large amount of trees in the Midwest does not necessarily mean that they were violating conservation principles.Based on the informational brochure ’A Brief History of Grandfather Mountain,’ available from Grandfather Mountain, Linville, North Carolina.The Market Process and Environmental Amenities.A Reconciliation, ed.A Case of Incomplete Contracting.Free Market Environmentalism.Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy Research.Nature’s Yellowstone.University of Arizona Press.An Informal History of Dude Ranching.Colorado Associated University Press.The Lighthouse in Economics.Charles Scribner’s Sons.Past Times and Pasttimes.Hodder and Stoughton.A History of Our First National Park.Yellowstone Library and Museum Association.Johns Hopkins University Press.The Creation of Yellowstone National Park.Simpler Way of Life Now Gone.Report on Huron Mountain Club.Huron Mountain Club.The First Hundred Years.Huron Mountain Club.The Story of the Hamilton Stores and Yellowstone National Park.The American Experience.University of Nebraska Press.Trains of Discovery.Railroad Signatures across the Pacific Northwest.University of Washington Press.The Ultimate Resource.Princeton University Press.Yankee Jim’s National Park Toll Road and the Yellowstone Trail.Leaders such as John Audubon and John Muir, especially, believed that natural resources were not being husbanded and that markets were contributing to the problem.The slaughter of millions of bison, the decimation of bird populations, and the harvest of ancient trees led them to conclude that market forces could not be trusted to conserve nature’s bounty and, worse, that those forces would lead to its destruction.This combination of a conservation ethic and scientific management gave birth to modern environmentalism, as premised on the idea that good stewardship requires governmental control of resources.However, some mavericks in the conservation movement were willing to play within the rules of capitalism.Recognizing that incentives matter at least as much as ethics, they tried to harness incentives through private ownership.They bought the conservation movement’s ends, but believed that markets provided a better means to that end.The topography and the prevailing winds in the area make Hawk Mountain an ideal place to observe hawks on their southern migration.Unfortunately, Hawk Mountain once served as a killing field for hawks.Hoards of gunners gathered in the fall on the mountain’s top to kill hundreds and even thousands of hawks in a single day.Their actions were legal in Pennsylvania, where most raptors, including hawks, were considered vermin because they preyed on ’good’ birds.Indeed many state governments and game associations encouraged killing hawks by placing a bounty on them.A few local conservationists voiced concern about the slaughter at Hawk Mountain as early as 1900, but it was not until the late 1920s that sentiment really began to build for the hawks passing by Hawk Mountain.Sutton, then Pennsylvania’s state ornithologist, drew attention to the issue by publishing two articles in a professional journal.Then, in the early 1930s, Richard Plough, an amateur ornithologist, visited Hawk Mountain and began to spread the word about the site to a wider audience of birdwatchers.Plough’s efforts were reinforced by Rosalie Edge, a leading conservationist, birdwatcher, and suffragette who had taken up the cause of protecting nongame species.