Summary: “Privatization: Best Hope for a Vanishing Wilderness”

This file is a short policy essay and advocacy survey. Reprinted from The Freeman, Lawrence W. Reed’s 1988 article argues that wilderness preservation is not chiefly a function of state ownership; it is often the achievement of owners, donors, firms, and voluntary associations whose incentives make conservation durable. The opening move is conceptual: environmental care is framed as a problem of responsibility. Public ownership can become no one’s ownership, while private title or private funding creates an identifiable steward.

The truth is that many of the very best examples of environmental preservation are the products of private groups and private property.

Reed’s evidence proceeds by case study. The first and most important is The Nature Conservancy, described as a nonprofit real-estate operation that buys significant habitat rather than seeking political command. His admiration is directed not merely at the acreage but at the mechanism: acquisition, donation, dues, and gifts turn ecological preference into enforceable title.

While radical environmentalists noisily lobby Congress for more “public” land, TNC goes about the preservation business in a quiet, capitalist fashion.

TNC’s meaning is sharpened by Clifford Messinger’s contrast between legislative victories and ownership. Reed treats property as a temporal technology: it fixes a conservation decision beyond the electoral cycle.

“I began to realize that you can win a victory today in Congress but lose it eight years later. But if you actually own the land, it will stay protected.”

The National Audubon Society broadens the argument. Reed acknowledges its political activity, especially against the Garrison Diversion project, but emphasizes the Paul J. Rainey Sanctuary because it complicates the assumption that conservation requires excluding commerce. Audubon’s monitored contracts for oil and gas extraction support his claim that ecological protection can coexist with productive use when rights and responsibilities are specified.

There has never been a blowout, an oil spill, or any measurable environmental damage to the 400 acres affected.

The middle cases shift from nonprofit preservation to profitable stewardship. Sea Lion Caves, Inc. is presented as a for-profit enterprise whose tourist revenues helped preserve a rookery once endangered by a state bounty. North Maine Woods shows multiple-use forestry and recreation at large scale, while Deseret Land & Livestock supplies Reed’s strongest example of profit-seeking management internalizing ecological knowledge. The point is not that markets automatically protect nature, but that owners who value the future capital of land have reason to manage for renewal.

This nurturing of the property’s long-term integrity and productivity is a natural result of the private owners’ direct financial interest in the capital value of the land.

Deseret’s cattle, elk, deer, beavers, reservoirs, and fisheries embody Reed’s rejection of a simple opposition between extraction and conservation. The ranch is valuable in the argument because the profitable activity is not adjacent to stewardship; it is redesigned by it.

Conventional wisdom used to teach that cattle and wildlife are competitors, but Deseret’s wildlife operation has proven that they can be entirely compatible—and profitably so.

The final three sketches—Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, and Conservation International—test the thesis where outright ownership is weaker. Reed concedes that they often work through easements, leases, restoration projects, public land, and international negotiation, yet he still classifies them as privatizing forces because private donors, expertise, and organizational discipline repair failures of state management. Conservation International’s Bolivian “debt for nature” swap is the most innovative example, turning financial markets into a conservation instrument.

This first “debt for nature” swap may well establish a pattern for reducing a major portion of the Third World’s financial obligations.

The essay’s structure thus moves from theory, to large private land acquisition, to politically active nonprofit management, to for-profit preservation, to hybrid private rescue of public resources. Its relevance lies in its early articulation of free-market environmentalism: Reed does not deny ecological crisis, but challenges the presumption that public ownership is the natural solution. His examples are selective and polemically arranged, but the core conceptual move is clear. Conservation becomes a question of institutions that make care accountable.

So it is that private people and private property can be the best of friends to Mother Nature.