This book argues, quite forcefully, that owning nature is the best hope for true environmental protection. Ownership doesn’t only facilitate stewardship, Ms. Brubaker argues, it encourages it.
Category Archives: Property Rights
Trees in the city
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Toronto City Council could not have thought up a surer way to destroy the urban forest than to pass a bylaw forbidding property owners to sell trees without the city’s permission.
Property Rights in the Defence of Nature
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By Elizabeth Brubaker
This book draws on cases from England, Canada, and the United States, showing how the common law of property has for centuries been a force for environmental protection, while contemporary statutes have allowed polluters to foul private lands and public resources alike. It argues that individuals and communities should be entrusted with the task of preserving the environment and that, with stronger property rights, they would regain the power to prevent much harmful activity.
Published by Earthscan Publications Limited and Earthscan Canada, 1995
Property rights in the defence of nature
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Over a century ago, in 1885, Antoine Ratté filed a lawsuit against several of Canada’s most notorious polluters. That suit and the government’s reaction to it established a shameful pattern that governs pollution across Canada to this day.
Nature’s Case for Restoring Strong Property Rights
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In this presentation to a Student Seminar on Public Policy Issues in 1994, Elizabeth Brubaker describes the ways in which individuals and businesses use property rights to protect the environment and how, when governments take away property rights, the environment suffers.
Reforming environmental assessments
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Environmental assessments and the public hearings that should scrutinize them were intended to empower the public to bring forward its concerns over projects that threatened their communities. Regrettably, environmental assessments—which are generally produced by promoters to justify their projects—often became cosy arrangements in which industry and government negotiated deals behind the public’s back, and circumvented public hearings. The result of those closed door arrangements were fiascos such as the Darlington nuclear power plant, which was never needed and which now threatens Ontario Hydro with bankruptcy, and the subsidized clear-cutting of old growth forests, which simultaneously ravaged our heritage and our economy.
Economy versus environment: What gap?
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In arguing that there is no inherent gap between the economy and the environment, Terence Corcoran cites Environment Probe’s work on property rights. Continue reading
How they killed our rights to clean water
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SUMMERTIME, and the beach is polluted. Fish aren’t jumpin’, and no one can swim. If your daddy’s rich, maybe you’ve got a pool. If not, for most people along the shore of Lake Ontario around Toronto, and along the shores of many other lakes and rivers across Canada, the story is "No Swimming," thanks to decades of using the waters as a sewer for industrial and human waste.
Property rights: the key to environmental protection
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In 1949, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a pulp and paper company in Espanola, Ontario, to stop polluting downstream waters, ruling that the property rights of the affected fishermen, farmers, and tourist operators must be respected. The Ontario government immediately passed new legislation allowing the pulp mill to continue releasing chemicals. For good measure, the government—anticipating that the court might rule against the company—had several months earlier also changed the Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act to encourage courts to allow pulp mill pollution.
Protecting the Environment with Property Rights: The K.V.P. Story
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The controversy surrounding the K.V.P. pulp and paper mill in the 1940s dramatically illustrates both property owners’ common law rights to clean water and governments’ tendency to override these rights. Three court cases and two laws involving K.V.P. concerned the right of landowners to sue the company for polluting the river adjacent to their land. A brief explanation of “riparian rights” will clarify these cases and the subsequent events.
Markets and the Environment
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An interview, for CBC Radio’s Ideas program, with Lawrence Solomon about the ways in which competition, privatization, property rights, and other market mechanisms can work to preserve the environment.
Business searches for a symbiosis with the planet
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Our panel of two executives and one environmentalist agrees that unsound practices can be corrected by an evolving price system. After pressure from industry and business, the federal government is now conducting cross-country hearings on the environment. Financial Times staff writer Jeb Blount spoke with three Canadians concerned about the relationship between business and the environment — Adam Zimmerman, chairman and CEO of Noranda Forest Inc., Peter Allen, president and CEO of Lac Minerals Ltd., and Larry Solomon, executive director of Environment Probe, a Toronto environmental think-tank — about environmental policy in Canada.
Environment Probe 