In Ron Arnold's book, Undue Influence, on page 105 again:BTW, when I say activist lawyers, I mean environmentalists, as they have hijacked the entire environmental agenda.Blurbs for Nature's Services say about the authrors: Their findings clearly demostrate that these services--providing clean wate, pollination, pest control, climate regulation, flood control, and fisheries, to mention only a few--are not only valuable, they are irreplaceable. While insufficient information was available to calculate the economic value of all--or even more--ecosystem services, those which could be quantified measured, at a minimum, many trillion dollars annually." You make the generic claim that Ron Arnold has a hidden agenda. That's funny. That's the same thing the foundation-fed enviro sharks are saying. He does seem to be positing one idea you share with him: the property owner must take the Moral High Ground of Environmentalism back from government and activist lawyers. NP, p. 373 Though Arnold suggests taking it from the environmentalists.
My view of Ron’s agenda is surely different than the enviro-sharks:
Ron left the environmental movement. He has seen the damage that they do. He doesn’t like it. He did his homework and exposed these people as destructive crooks. He has taken a LOT of heat for it. He has a huge ego and doesn’t take to being called an enemy of nature kindly. He personally hates these people. He wants revenge. He gets it by attacking their ideas as stupid and crooked.
Ron wants to sell books. He wants to sell them to those who feel threatened and makes his money sounding alarm. That’s all he does, sound alarm. The more noise, the more books, speaking engagements, radio shows, and hopefully legal action to bust these crooks. If you talk to him (as I have for several hours), you find out that he doesn’t really want a solution, at least not so badly that he has a cogent idea what it would be. The best you can get out of him is some sort of Teddy Roosevelt fantasy; i.e., that things could “go back” to what they were. What he would do to change the system he doesn’t really address. BTW, he may well have gotten that Moral High Ground phrase from me. I sent him an early draft of my book in 1999.
Gretchen Daily says Nature provides these services. She is correct in the aspect that the services are provided. She is also correct in that they are enormously valuable. The question is: who owns them? I say that the property owner owns them and provides those services by various degrees. She thinks “Nature” provides them as if it was some third party that could only be claimed by all. She effectively turns all nature into a commons and has NO IDEA how to calculate a just pricing system other than by gathering lots of smart people together and imposing one by the power of government. My system derives pricing organically and seeks optimal combinations by simply operating according to the laws of economics. It also uses those laws to try to reduce the cost of providing those services.
Ron immediately slams Daily as if her observation weren’t correct and doesn’t see the opportunity in it. That is because he can see nothing more than a scam and a power grab in it and makes his money belittling these people. He is indeed so predisposed to the point that he has blinded himself.
From Natural Process I read that you are suggesting property owners begin the necessary data collection on their property to be able to fight back against the government, to be aware of the cost of events on their property that currently have no price on them, but have been collectively bagged into a commons. Judging by what the enviros say about Nature's Services the road to certifying those events on private property will he a tug-of-war between two opposing factions.Closer, but not quite there. Besides the discussions in Part III, Chapters 4 and 5, there are two critical sections in the last chapter: Own the Data and It’s a Process that describe how a market in uses develops. My system starts on one’s own property USING THE DATA TO DESCRIBE IT AS IF IT WERE A PROCESS REACTOR. It is by characterizing it in the time domain and how it interacts with other property owners, that networks can develop, capable of dealing with complex large scale impacts quantify those interactions dynamically. Investments are then made to recombine overlapping use contracts that may be regional or even global. Various Ph.D. types are quite taken by these sections because they show how what they want only happens with a motivational system and how it develops organically through the blessings of liberty. The property owner remains the key indivisible unit. The property consists as a right to use. How it is owned, managed, and traded changes completely.So tell me if I'm closer in your opinion to having read the book.
I think he makes his point that foundations do have an unearthly amount of power to influence policy. And he did question why they didn't price what your thought-model on the volcano tried to price--nature's disservices.
But turning to the idea of instilling peer review, a better science, for ESA action: Arnold's book mentioned the global warming is-isn't debate, in particular, the manner in which then aspiring VP Albert Arnold reacted when the science he embraced was questioned by other scientists.
You probably recall how Gore's affiliation with Roger Revelle, Gore's teacher at Harvard, and Revelle's paper, authored with two others, Fred Singer and Chauncy Starr, became a stumbling block for Gore. The trio's article: What to do about Greenhouose Warming: Look Before you Leap concluded "We can sum up out conclusions in a simple message: The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify action at this time." Undue Influence page203.
Clearly, when it comes to the issue of global warming, the science could be questioned as to what is "the best available science" were that science to be used to enforce ESA action. Peer review, in that case, would provide a kind of checks and balances.
(You mentioned ownership of the oceans. I read in NP:The UN is claiming control of the world's oceans as commons. So how does Century 21 advertise ocean property?)