The keynote address to the Tri-State Rock Lobster Industry Conference, held in Adelaide, Australia, on September 8, 1997. In it, Elizabeth Brubaker argues that governments should put control over fisheries into the hands of fishers. She examines the political pressures and bureaucratic structures that deprive government managers of the incentives and tools necessary to make sustainable decisions. She calls for systems of self-managed ownership that remove decisions about catches and habitat from the political arena.
Tag Archives: tragedy of the commons
Property Rights in the Defence of Nature: Review in Journal of Environmental Planning and Mangement
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This book celebrates the potential of the traditional common law of nuisance as a framework for protecting the environment. Ms. Brubaker unashamedly assumes that private property owners are the best guardians for the purity of rivers and the clarity of the atmosphere. She provides striking illustrations of how those with property rights may be driven by economic common sense to protect natural resources, if they are fully informed and if they are given the freedom to act.
Property Rights and the Public Good
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An interview, for CBC Radio’s Ideas program, with Patricia Adams, Elizabeth Brubaker, and Lawrence Solomon. A discussion of the environmental, economic, and social harm wrought in the name of the public good, both in Canada and in the Third World, and of the counterbalancing protections offered by traditional property rights regimes.
Governments are ill-suited to protect our resources
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I should feel honoured that my article on the environmental benefits of private and communal resource ownership inspired not just one but four columns from a prominent environmentalist. Unfortunately, Janice Harvey’s retorts, riddled with fallacies, do no honour to the environmental cause.
Privatizing to reverse destruction of fishery is pure fiction
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As I sit down to write this third column on the topic which I (but not the headline writers) call "The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons," I am acutely aware of being steamrolled by the current daily run of articles advocating an opposite editorial point of view.
Resources need protection, not privatization
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Last week, this paper ran a full page commentary by Elizabeth Brubaker, executive director of a group called Environment Probe in Toronto. Like its parent Energy Probe, Environment Probe advocates market-based solutions, including private property rights, to critical problems facing our society. Sometimes they’re right, like in their analysis of nuclear power, which they oppose. On all counts, if the private sector were left to build nuclear plants, we wouldn’t have any.
Environment Probe 