Bruce Campbell: Legendary B-Movie Actor, Temporary Redditor, Free market environmentalist?
April 14th, 2011
As a redditer one of the most exciting subreddits is r/IAMA (I am an x). People who do or have done strange things will post what they have done and give a blanket “ask me anything,” and often people will post AMA requests if they are going through a certain situation and would like advice or would like the chance to ask a celebrity a question.
So when of such films as the Evil Dead series, Army of Darkness and more recently USA’s tv series, Burn Notice, people rushed to ask all ranges of questions from the sincere to the banal.
Most of the questions were pretty boilerplate fandom or silliness, but . Bruce’s response of his only eating bison meat is fascinating: “By eating bison, I will create a market for it, thereby creating a value for it, thereby helping it survive. By killing the bison, I will save it. Please do the same.”
This concept in its generalized form is the free market environmentalist position. He notes that by consuming a resource he is incentivizing entrepreneurs to create a sustainable market value in bison. When they are unowned/owned by everyone there is very little benefit to preserving or effectively utilizing the resource because one cannot successfully internalize the benefits of doing so.
I believe the free market environmentalist position to be a good approach for dealing with some ecological and resource management problems but I also find the work of Elinor Ostrom on decentralized and multijurisdictional commons to be quite compelling. Not only are there legitimate cases of the commons but it is in many cases a more effective way of management than traditional private property or the state’s bureaucratic oversight. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses in application but both models successfully reflect libertarian values and provide positive alternatives to the oft-suggested method of utilizing centralized state action to protect environmental goods.
In any case, Bruce Campbell astutely implies that incentives matter. People generally won’t preserve a resource out of the goodness of their heart, but by providing them a venue through which to entrepreneurially create sustainable internalizable value in a resource one will ensure that said resource will not be squandered, but preserved!
Bruce Campbell is one sharp guy for understanding this phenomenon and positing the preservation of bison through markets and property rights. Hail to the king, baby!
