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Global Warming, Endangered Species,

© Kenneth Friedman

Private wildlife conservation is more effective than government regulation, according to Cynthia Stanfield, an intern at the National Center for Policy Analysis, in Brief Analysis 338. Stanfield says that government protection of wildlife often fails for three primary reasons. First, government's effort to satisfy competing land-user interests by providing recreation opportunities on conservation land results in reduced privacy for wildlife. Second, government has a difficult time restricting public land use. Third, government is unable to act quickly to change policy or administration to meet situations that arise quickly and need rapid response.

Stanfield argues that the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which restricts use of private land where endangered species are found, encourages illegal habitat destruction and foists the expense of preservation on the landowner while the public reaps the benefits. She also argues that the perception of wildlife as common property under public ownership results in unsustainable land use while private ownership does not.

Outside the United States, several private conservation efforts seem to produce favorable results. Black rhinos on public land in Zimbabwe were hunted almost to extinction over several decades. Once rhinos were transferred to private land and landowners joined forces to form conservancies that allow for roaming rhinos on adjoining land, poaching ceased. The conservancies involve locals in the business of managing, thereby helping local economies, which discourages poaching.

Stanfield concludes that "Private wildlife conservation activities complement and often surpass government efforts. The record of private conservation in the U.S. and in other countries show that free enterprise can successfully preserve habitat and benefit wildlife."

In another Brief Analysis (337), Associate Professor of Geology and Geophysics David Deming of the University of Oklahoma calls the media negligent for hyping research that supports global warming theory and ignoring research that shows 20th-century warming as "nothing unusual." He argues that humans tend to take short-term data, such as that of a warming trend over 25 years or so, and extrapolate to "ominous doomsday scenarios." He says that instead of looking only at short-term data, we should look at long-term data and we'd see, for example, that "For 7,500 of the last 10,000 years, temperatures have been higher than today." Also, he says, "Even after the modest 1.0 degree Fahrenheit global warming of the last 140 years, present-day global temperatures remain cooler by about 1.0 degree Fahrenheit than they were when the Vikings settled Greenland in medieval times."

Global Warming is covered in depth in the September-October issue of E Magazine. This article, written by several experienced journalists, is more than enough to keep web readers busy.