VOLUME 86
By Prof. Brian Child Key Takeaways * "Use it or lose it": African conservationists argued wildlife could survive only if communities living with it also benefited from using it. * Centralization backfired: Kenya banned hunting in 1977 and lost two-thirds of its wildlife — the opposite of what was intended.
VOLUME 83
By Prof Brian Child Key Takeaways * Conservation was imported. Colonial powers transplanted American-style parks and state-owned wildlife through the London Conventions of 1900 and 1933. Little has changed since. * Fences, not hunters, did the damage. Livestock, farming, and fences drove the real historical losses. * Early rangers were not
VOLUME 81
By Prof Brian Child Key Takeaways * Wildlife recovery requires long-term financial investment, with reliable funding mechanisms that support management, habitat protection, and enforcement. * When local communities, landowners, and governments receive tangible economic returns, they have a powerful incentive to protect wildlife and its habitat. * Across North America and much
VOLUME 79
By Prof Brian Child Key Takeaways * We killed almost everything first. Market hunters cut bison from 60 million to a few hundred and slaughtered 25,000 passenger pigeons a day. Modern conservation was built on the wreckage. * The men who saved wildlife misread why it was dying. Roosevelt blamed greedy
VOLUME 77
By Prof Brian Child Key Takeaways * Wild resources are taxed and regulated in ways no farmer would tolerate for livestock. A South African farmer needs 17 permits to sell a springbok and one to sell a sheep. That asymmetry shifts land-use decisions against wildlife. * Wildlife is priceless to society
VOLUME 75
By Prof Brian Child Exchange and specialization as the basis of wealth Published in 1776, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. He showed that wealth is created by converting raw materials, often drawn from the environment, into goods people want. The secret to wealth creation was the productivity of
VOLUME 73
By Prof Brian Child Key Takeaways: * Because wildlife is unpriced or underpriced, the market systematically underproduces it. * Subsidies for agriculture, combined with the absence of property rights for wild resources, tilt the playing field against wildlife and produce the wrong outcomes at massive scale. * Sustainability is fundamentally an economic problem.
VOLUME 71
By Prof Brian Child Wildlife and wild resources are priceless but worthless because environmentalists and economists have excluded them from the mainstream economy. Conservationists abhor the dollarization of wildlife, while economists treat the economy as a closed system, ignoring the true costs of the waste they dump into oceans, rivers,
VOLUME 69
By Prof Brian Child Key Takeaways: * Public ownership of wildlife has become the norm as the rights, capacities, and confidence of local communities to manage forests, wildlife, and fisheries have decayed. * Public governance is historically dominant but is overstretched and underperforming. * Regulations are worse than worthless unless they can be
VOLUME 60
By Prof Brian Child Economic efficiency results from clearly defined property rights and exchange in free markets and is independent of who owns the resources. Nonetheless, Coase (1960) and others acknowledge that the question of who owns the resources is also important. Ignoring these distributional issues gives free market economics
VOLUME 55
By Prof Brian Child The last few centuries have seen the most rapid transformation of human society in history. The misery of an agrarian economy based on feudal ownership was replaced by the current era of prosperity and personal freedoms that so many of us are fortunate to enjoy. This