"Owners with clearly defined and secure property rights have a strong incentive to care for their land."

"Our dairy farmers are constantly heckled for all manner of environmental ills despite a record unsurpassed anywhere in the world. We focus on minutiae of little consequence instead of extolling the amazing, rich environmental and social value that exists in rural New Zealand. Our total carbon footprint, despite food-miles, is away ahead of the nearest rival.

"Our farmers have set aside and now manage diligently 190,000 hectares of covenanted land under the Queen Elizabeth ll National Trust. That’s an area far bigger than most of our national parks. Riparian planting, steep slope planting, protection of waterways, enhanced wetlands, boosts to diversity increase each year at a surprising rate. Farmers are spending huge numbers of hours working in catchment groups, river care groups, land care groups.

"We need to gather this knowledge, these commitments, this mass of stewardship, this admiration of the family farm, this enhancement of the fabric of our rural communities, and “sell” it to the world’s consumers who have a growing love affair with such noble developments. It is not just empty PR from the Comms team – it's potentially high value marketing that captures hearts and minds as well as wallets.

"We are missing the exciting opportunity to tell the world what a uniquely beautiful and environmentally sound place our food and fibre comes from. We have an amazing story to tell."

~ Owen Jennings from his post 'Keep Those Brands' [emphasis added]

RELATED:

"Private property rights do not just protect us; they provide the strongest possible protection for the environment" - NOT PC

 

“That’s not because forestry is a better use of the land, but because climate policy makes it more profitable to plant pine trees than to farm sheep"

“Once the backbone of New Zealand’s economy, sheep are fast becoming an endangered species in this country,”

“Each year we’re losing tens of thousands of hectares of productive farmland. Where sheep and lambs once grazed, pine trees are taking their place....

Sheep numbers are rapidly plunging with almost a million sheep disappearing every year.

“If that trend continues, we’re not going to have any sheep left in our country within two decades. We’ll just have hills plastered in nothing but pine trees. ...Williams says the number one driver of sheep farming’s collapse is clear: carbon forestry....

“The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is effectively subsidising pine trees to offset fossil fuel emissions, and that’s pushing sheep farmers off the land, never to return....

Between 2017 and 2024, 260,000 hectares of sheep and beef country were swallowed up by pines.

“That’s not because forestry is necessarily a better use of the land, but because Government policy makes it more profitable to plant pine trees than to farm sheep....

“Climate policy is trumping food production. We’re blindly sacrificing rural jobs, local processing infrastructure, and sustainable red meat exports at the altar of carbon offsetting....

~ Federated Farmers meat & wool chair Toby Williams from his press release 'Federated Farmers launches ‘SOS: Save Our Sheep’ Campaign' [hat tip Home Paddock]

A stream bed, once with year-round full flow, now
rendered dry in summer by pine trees in background

"Global Warming, or as it’s now called, Climate Change, is a major part of recent governments’ policies. ... An Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) was the [government's] tool devised to combat the perceived global warming. ...

"Big businesses which emit carbon ... can choose to reduce carbon emissions at source or they can offset those emissions by buying carbon credits.

"The latter is their preference. That has led to the method of planting trees in large quantities, to act as a carbon sink.

"Pine trees are the obvious answer from a speculator’s viewpoint, as they’re quick growing – compared to native trees – and quickly attain a height of five metres.

"Why five metres? ... “[T]o qualify as forest land in the ETS, the trees in the forest must be species that can reach at least 5 metres in height.” That’s double the height of a standard ceiling. ... With native vegetation, some 70 species [are therefore] excluded from carbon sequestering assessments. Examples are the many species of coprosmas, hoheria, manuka, muehlenbecka, the several species of pittosporums and others.... Even grass must have a carbon sequestering value?

"Frequently farmers plant trees out of shelter or environmental or aesthetic motivation. But under 5 metres in height – they don’t count. Under the ETS, farmers are being unfairly lumbered with costly dire consequences. The dice are loaded by the impractical 5 metre height rule. ...

"Pine monocultures are environmentally disastrous with an insatiable thirst for water depleting streams to dry beds, wilding pines spread, loss of bio-diversity and acidic runoff. ...A pine tree is said to use 85 litres of water a day whereas a native tree, dependent on species, uses considerably less. Water from a pine forest with a 'bare' pine needle forest floor has quicker runoff compared to a typical native forest area with shade-loving undergrowth. In a few words, native forest has a higher water retention factor leading to natural, more consistent stream flows.

"Anecdotal evidence points to streams much reduced in flow once monocultures of pines have been established. For example, bach owners and residents in the Marlborough Sounds and the Northbank of Marlborough’s Wairau Valley have observed the same diminished flow in creeks after extensive monocultures of pine forests are established.

"But planting trees is the way to combat climate change ... An Austrian countess snapped up a sheep station near Masterton for carbon farming of conversion to pines. Swedish multinational furniture manufacturer IKEA secured a 5,500 hectare sheep and beef farm in the remote Catlins while German insurance giant Munich Re bought large parcels of land near Gisborne and in Southland. ... [S]ome of New Zealand’s biggest emitters — Air NZ,Contact Energy, Genesis Energy and Z Energy — have formed a company called Dryland Carbon which plans to acquire 20,000 hectares to plant in forests over five years. In 2020 it got approval to plant a permanent pine forest of one million trees south of Gisborne....

"[W]ith carbon prices high, more and more speculative carbon farming is erasing valuable, productive sheep and beef farm lands."

~ Tony Orman from his op-ed 'New Zealand Carbon Farming'

"Rejecting industrial agriculture would be a grave mistake."

"In 2014, 'Scientific American' published a short but ominous article titled 'Only 60 Years Left of Farming if Soil Degradation Continues.' Similar claims popped up in the 'Guardian' in 2019 and in the BBC in 2024.
    "The BBC article ... proclaims that the world’s poorest areas already 'have zero harvests left. ... But the claim that earth has a small number of agricultural harvests remaining is unfounded. In 2021, the data scientist Hannah Ritchie busted the myth for 'Our World in Data.' Not only could Ritchie find no existing scientific citation for the claim, she found that such a claim could not possibly be defended. ...
    "The claims about soil degradation would not be the first time the media has bombarded the general public with excessively bleak depictions of our agricultural future with little evidence. ... The problem is that this narrative isn’t just wrong; it is dangerous. The practices these food systems critique elevate will have worse impacts on climate, global food security, and the environment writ large.
    "Although climate change may reduce agricultural productivity compared to a world without climate change, there is no reason to believe that its impact can’t be completely negated through technological progress. ...

"Most studies ... tend to find that, on a global level, climate and CO2 changes are detrimental to yields. Even so, climate change’s detrimental effects pale in comparison to the overall productivity growth caused by technological and practical advances in agricultural production. ...

 

"[T]he past half-century has seen about 1 degree Celsius in global warming. And yet, global agricultural output has increased almost four-fold over the same period. This increase in agricultural output is responsible for the prevention of g more than 3 billion hectares of land being converted to agricultural land—about a quarter of the world’s total arable land.
    "These yield gains saved lives. We’ve seen a steady decline in hunger over the past five decades, despite an uptick in the past few years due to conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic, and, to be sure, extreme weather impacts. For example, the amount of calories produced per person globally has increased by a quarter since 1970, despite the world population more than doubling.
    "Increased agricultural yields, which came despite a changing climate, were due to technological advances. These include synthetic fertilizers, modern pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides; fossil-powered mechanical equipment; expansive irrigation systems; advanced breeding, including genetic modification; confined animal feeding; and many other technologies, drove the incredible yield growth in both staple and specialty crops, and the massive leaps forward in livestock production. And there is no reason to believe, as BTI’s Patrick Brown, Emma Kovak, and I argued in 2023, that technological and socioeconomic factors will suddenly stop impacting agricultural yields. ....
    

"There is a deep irony [then] to how critics of the world’s food systems use the supposed impacts of climate change on agricultural yields to advocate for their preferred alternatives—alternatives that are proven to have negative impacts on crop and livestock yields ... [A] global switch to organic or regenerative agriculture by 2050 would have a worse impact on food security, the farm economy, and political stability than climate change, especially when modellers account for technological change. ...

"In practice, we already have examples of what might happen if the organic advocates won the agricultural transformation they dream of. In 2022, Sri Lanka decided to ban the sale and use of synthetic fertilisers at the behest of advocates such as Vandana Shiva. The ensuing months saw failing crop yields, skyrocketing food prices, and ultimately, a public coup that forced out President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
    "To be sure, climate change will likely impact our food systems. Some prices will go up, some will go down. But, technological breakthroughs and the adoption of existing technologies will also impact our food systems for the better. Rejecting industrial agriculture would be a grave mistake."

~ Alex Smith from his post 'Will Climate Change Starve Us All? No, But Bad Science Communication and Fear Mongering Might'

"For over 30 years, NZers have believed that they produce relatively high emissions of greenhouse gases; and that our farmers are responsible for nearly half of all those emissions. No longer. Science moves on."

"For over 30 years, New Zealanders have believed that they produce relatively high emissions of greenhouse gases; and that our farmers are responsible for nearly half of all those emissions.
    "No longer. Science moves on.
    "We now find that all our climate change calculations have been based on a simple but fundamental error... [The] peer-reviewed research paper (Allen et al 2018) showed that the global warming potential (GWP) of livestock methane had been over-stated by some 400%. The old opinion that methane was 28 times more potent than CO2 was based on demonstrable errors.... Oxford Professor Myles Allen – one of the world’s best known climate scientists and dubbed by the BBC as ‘the physicist behind net zero’ – had no doubt at all that the correct multiple is about 7: “That this formula is vastly more accurate than the traditional accounting rule is indisputable.”.... Then came another peer-reviewed journal paper. Lynch & Garnet (2021), which again highlighted the 'special characteristics' and 'nuances' of livestock methane and warned against 'heavy-handed policy interventions'.... Then the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the IPCC ... squarely addressed the methane GWP issue at page 1016 of Chapter 7:

'…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent of 28, overstates the effect on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4'

"That is the final word.... the 'gold standard' of climate science has left the New Zealand authorities with nowhere to hide. If there was ever a debate, it is now over. The use of a GWP of 28 for agricultural methane is simply a dead parrot.
    "About these momentous events, the Minister has had nothing to say. Although the IPCC’s decision is clearly the news of a lifetime for all of New Zealand’s copious subsidised climate change reporters, they too have been strangely silent....
    "The GWP of methane did not matter too much to other developed countries, whose main emissions worry was CO2. But New Zealand was different. As livestock methane made up almost 40% of all the country’s projected warming, it’s true GWP was highly material to every calculation and every policy.
    "The Minister has been playing for time...."

~ Barry Brill, from his article 'What Will We Do About .... the Mammoth Methane Mistake'

"Environmentally focused governments worldwide are concentrating on reducing agricultural production..."

"[Rural ]inhabitants ... and the farming that flourishes there ... face an extraordinarily well-funded green movement that is now depicting 'industrial farming' as one of the principal villains in their ever-expanding climate melodrama. Although greens may support the notion of small farmers using artisanal methods, and the wealthy certainly can afford the much higher food prices, niche farming cannot support most farming communities or provide ordinary consumers with reasonably priced groceries....
    "Environmentally focused governments are concentrating on reducing agricultural production.... Efforts to reduce agricultural output ... could have particularly serious consequences for billions in the developing world....
    "Climate scientist Judith Curry ... suggests that reliance on wind and solar energy will consume an ever-growing fraction of the planet’s surface, particularly in rural or wilderness areas....
    "Given its dependence on the elements and low energy density, solar and wind would need to expand in a way requiring millions of acres of rural and small-town land. Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton University, recently suggested that the amount of land required to accommodate the roughly 800 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity to achieve a 'net zero' America would require 'roughly the area of Tennessee'...
    "Attempts by urban policy-makers to ... constrain [rural producers] can only generate further rural resentment, while causing devastating drops in agricultural and natural-resource production. This may be fine for the governing class and its allies, but it spells disaster not only for rural residents but for billions of people who lack basic necessities and justifiably seek a better life."

~ Joel Kotkin, from his article 'Energy Colonialism Will worsen the Urban-Rural Divide' [hat tip Tom Hunter]

Planning farming failure

"The great virtue of a free market is that it can cause tens of thousands of people to pursue promising technologies and promising ways to reduce carbon at their own expense. The market leads to discovery. Politicians, by contrast, think they know 'the' answer, and they’re always wrong."

~ David R. Henderson, from his post 'The "Shrink the Economy" Act' [for the link to farming here, read Ele Ludemann's roundup: 'More tax, Less Food']

Sri Lanka Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Green Utopianism

President Rajapaksa’s fertiliser ban wasn't the only factor behind Sri Lanka’s economic crash. But as Chelsea Follett and Malcolm Cochran explain in this guest post it's definitely part of this story -- and a a grim preview of what can result from distorting markets in the name of utopian priorities. 

Sri Lanka Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Green Utopianism

by Chelsea Follett and Malcolm Cochran

Last week, a group of Sri Lankan protestors took a refreshing dip in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s pool. It was probably a welcome respite from the steamy eighty-degree day in Colombo, as well from the unprecedented economic crisis currently devastating the country. Over the last year, Sri Lanka has experienced an annual inflation rate of more than 50 percent, with food prices rising 80 percent and transport costs a staggering 128 percent. Faced with fierce protests, the Sri Lankan government declared a state of emergency and deployed troops around the country to maintain order.

On Thursday morning, the New York Times published an episode of The Daily podcast discussing some of the forces behind the collapse. They outlined how years of irresponsible borrowing by the Rajapaksa political dynasty, combined with the damage caused by Covid lockdowns to Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, drained the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Soon, the country was unable to make payments on its debt or import essential goods like food and gasoline. Strangely, the hosts of the podcast, which reaches over 20 million monthly listeners, didn’t mention President Rajapaksa’s infamous fertiliser ban once during the entire thirty-minute episode.

Yet the fertiliser ban was, in fact, a major factor in the unrest. Agriculture is an essential economic sector in Sri Lanka. Around 10 percent of the population works on farms, and fully 70 percent of Sri Lankans are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. Tea production is especially important, consistently responsible for over ten percent of Sri Lanka’s export revenue. To support that vital industry, the country -- until recently -- was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to import synthetic fertilisers. But that was "until recently."

Because during his election campaign in 2019, Rajapaksa promised to wean the country off these fertilisers with what he said would be a ten-year transition to organic farming. He expedited his plan in April 2021 with a sudden ban on synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. He was so confident in his policies that he declared in a (since stealthily deleted and memory-holed) article for the World Economic Forum in 2018, “This is how I will make my country rich again by 2025.” It didn't. As the eco-modernist author Michael Shellenberger writes, the results of the experiment with primitive agricultural techniques were “shocking:”

Over 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilisers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85 percent experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20 percent and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose fivefold. … [Tea exports crashed] 18 percent between November 2021 and February 2022 — reaching their lowest level in more than two decades.

Of course, Rajapaksa’s foolish policy wasn’t revealed to him in a dream. As Shellenberger points out, the ban was inspired by an increasingly Malthusian environmentalism led by figures like the Indian activist Vandana Shiva, who cheered the ban last summer. Foreign investors beholden to the same ideology also praised and rewarded Sri Lanka for “taking up sustainability and ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) issues on its top priority.” ESG represents a trend (or lasting shift, depending on who you ask) in some investors’ priorities. Put simply, it is an attempt to move capital toward organisations that further a set of amorphous environmental and social justice goals instead of toward the enterprises most likely to succeed and turn a profit.

Proponents of ESG have been pushing for government mandates requiring enterprises to disclose detailed information related to environmentalism and other social goals. That distorts and harms the smooth functioning of the capital markets that keep modern economies running and, in some cases, incentivises nice-sounding but economically inefficient projects, like a return to primitive agriculture. “The nation of Sri Lanka has an almost perfect ESG rating of 98.1 on a scale of 100,” notes David Blackmon in Forbes, and “the government which had forced the nation to achieve that virtue-signaling target in recent years [has as a result] collapsed.” 

Sri Lanka, in other words, offers a grim preview of what can result from distorting markets in the name of utopian priorities.

Consider a long-run perspective. Throughout most of human history, farmers produced only organic food—and food was so scarce that, despite the much lower population in the past, malnutrition was widespread. The long-term, global decline in undernourishment is one of humanity’s proudest achievements. Lacking any sense of history and taking abundant food for granted however, some environmentalists want to transform the global food system into an organic model. They see modern agriculture as environmentally harmful and would like to see a transition to natural fertilisers that would be familiar to our distant ancestors, such as compost and manure.

However, conventional farming is not only necessary to produce a sufficient amount of food to feed humanity (a point that cannot be emphasized enough—as the writer Alfred Henry Lewis once observed, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy”) but in many ways it is also better for the environment. According to a massive meta-analysis by the ecologists Michael Clark and David Tilman, the natural fertilisers used in organic agriculture actually lead to more pollution than conventional synthetic products.This is partly because fertilisers and pesticides also allow farmers to farm their land more intensively, leading to ever-higher crop yields, which allows them to grow more food on less land. According to HumanProgress board member Matt Ridley, if we tried to feed the world with the organic yields of 1960, we would have to farm twice as much land as we do today. 

Despite successfully feeding more people than every before, the amount of land used globally for agricultural has peaked and is now in decline. So long as crop yields continue to increase, more and more land can be returned to natural ecosystems, which are far more biodiverse than any farm. Smart agriculture allows nature to rebound.

In wealthy countries, conventional farming is becoming ever-more efficient, using fewer inputs to grow more food. In the United States, despite a 44 percent increase in food production since 1981, fertiliser use barely increased at all, and pesticide use fell by 18 percent. As the esteemed Rockefeller University environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel noted, if farmers everywhere adopted the modern and efficient techniques of U.S. farmers, “an area the size of India or the USA east of the Mississippi could be released globally from agriculture.”

Most importantly, it must be re-stated, conventional agriculture feeds the world. Since the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, world agricultural production has exploded, causing the per-capita global food supply to rise from barely over over 2,000 kcal per day in 1961, to reach nearly 3,000 in 2017. And this even as the world population itself exploded. While hunger is now making a comeback, that is not any lack of the ability to produce enough food -- it is wholly due to war, export restrictions, and the misguided policies of leaders like Rajapaksa his environmental (and "ethical investment") mentors.

To be sure, the fertiliser ban itself was not the only factor behind Sri Lanka’s economic crash. Much of the damage was also caused by the hastiness of the ban, and the difficulty of obtaining enough organic alternatives. However, the idea that organic farming can produce enough food for the world is an unreachable fantasy based on the naturalistic fallacy — the baseless notion that anything modern, such as agriculture incorporating non-natural components produced by the ingenuity of man, must be inferior to the all-natural precursor.

As Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah from the Breakthrough Institute point out, “there is literally no example of a major agriculture-producing nation successfully transitioning to fully organic or agroecological production.” We must never take the relative rarity of starvation in modern times as a given, nor romanticise and seek to return to farming’s all-organic past. Unfortunately, the delusion seems to be spreading, helped along by the global shift toward ESG. Last Sunday, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, praised “natural farming” during a speech in Gujarat, calling it a way to “serve mother earth” and promising that India will “move forward on the path of natural farming.” 

Let’s hope not.

* * * * * 

Chelsea Follett
Chelsea Follet works at the Cato Institute as a Researcher and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org.

Malcolm Cochran
Malcolm Cochran is a research associate at HumanProgress.org.

Their Human Progress article also appeared at the Foundation of Economic Education.

We're back to farming subsidies again ...

"The Government never foresaw the land-use forces they were unleashing with the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)....

    "The bottom line is that [so-called] carbon forestry is now far more profitable than sheep and beef farming on nearly all classes of land. We are indeed on the cusp of the greatest rural land-use changes that New Zealand has seen in the last 100 years."

           ~ Keith Woodford, who says 'The ETS is both a gold mine and a minefield'

[Hat tip Ele Ludemann]

What would 'Party X 'do about the environment? Policy #2: Scrap the 'License to Pollute'

So there's a gap in the market for a political party representing what I'm calling "ethical environmentalism" -- and even Simon Bridges will want a part of it come coalition time (Whether it would want him is a whole other story). 
By ethical I mean policies that remove some existing political coercion without introducing any new coercion. By environmentalism I mean today's fashionable environmental tropes. And by some innate cunning involving preternatural judo I propose a Party X that uses those tropes to kickstart both some real environmentalism and a true movement towards liberty. Let me explain how with today's example of a policy that such a party could promote... 

Today, two proposals to propel property rights towards the heart of New Zealand life, while solving several major environmental problems:


A few years ago we woke to the news that  the world-famous famous penny-divers at Rotorua’s Whakarewarewa were being told by the authorities not to swim in the Puarenga River if they value their health. It seemed the stream was becoming seriously polluted.

    Tests over the years have shown poor results for water quality and [authorities] says companies like the Red Stag Timber Mill could be doing much better.
    But Tim Charleson, the mill's environmental manager, says the company carries out regular chemical tests on its effluent and it's meeting the conditions of its resource consents.

I have no doubt Red Stag et al were and are  “meeting the conditions of [their] resource consents,” as do farmers, mill owners and waste operators all around the country. But as this story and others clearly demonstrate, these consents merely formalise their pollution instead of protecting against it.

In short, resource consents are not a form of environmental protection. They are a license to pollute.

In cases like this one and all over the country, from the Tarawera River (into which the paper mill has a license to dump chlorine and worse) to Akaroa Harbour (where the council has given itself a license to dump nearly raw sewage), a resource consent full of mealy-mouthed conditions has granted to these producers full license to sully the places and rivers that people value, and that property owners would cherish -- if they were still allowed to.

The RMA, under which resource consents like this are issued, is hopeless at protecting the environment precisely because it’s hopeless at protecting property rights. Contrast this with common law, which has seven-hundred years of sophistication at protecting both, and you realise how far from ideal NZ’s so-called “environmental legislation” really is. 

With strong property rights under common law, for example, the tourism operators along the Puarenga River—and the former fishermen at the head of the Tarawera River; and the aquaculture operators in Akaroa Harbour—would all have had legal standing to take action against polluters damaging their property right. 

And taking and winning these actions against big polluters is the best signal to other would-be polluters not to start.

As Elizabeth Brubaker writes

The age-old common-law maxim 'use your own property so as not to harm another's' has provided the foundation for the resolution of disputes about farming practices [and pollution] .... Under this maxim, the rights of farmers [and other producers] -- like those who own or occupy land -- are tempered by their responsibilities. While they have a right to use and enjoy their property, they have a responsibility not to interfere with their neighbour's rights to use and enjoy their property.

Recognising and protecting that right  has been at the heart of common law "as early as the thirteenth century," explains Brubaker, "when one legal scholar wrote that 'no one may do in his own estate any thing whereby damage or nuisance may happen to his neighbour.'

In cases over the following centuries dealing with everything from pigsties to cattle to railway lines to sewage systems -- and from Britain to Canada to the US and New Zealand -- courts frequently cited and affirmed the principle in providing environmental protection through protection of neighbour's rights against a polluter.

Historically and in principle that’s the best protection the environment ever had – both for the natural environment and for the human environment. Property rights in streams and rivers for example coupled with common law systems of protection would at a stroke solve the ‘dirty dairying’ problem about which so much is said, but so little achieved. Property rights in flora and fauna and land is the best means of ensuring a genuinely sustainable nation. 

Yet the Resource Management Act instead protects polluters. 

Overshadowing all other legal defences [of a polluter] is ... that a statute has authorised a disputed activity. Government statutes take precedence over the common law [explains Brubaker]. If a government approves a nuisance therefore, a court loses its power to enjoin it.... At enormous cost to the environment, governments of all times and all political stripes have overridden the common law to protect favoured industries... Farmers now benefit especially from statutes affording some of the country's clearest and most sweeping protections.

While ignoring the property rights the law is supposed to protect. Fortunately, there are many solutions. I have two:

Method No. 1. Putting Property Rights in the Bill of Rights Act

We know that common law protection of property rights has been buried by statute and regulation and by the Foreshore and Seabed Act and its later replacement--but it’s not too late to resurrect it. Placing property rights in the Bill of Rights Act would be a start—a politically possible start—repairing an omission that Bill of Rights architect Geoffrey Palmer has publicly conceded was a mistake.

It should be simple enough to insert a new clause in the Bill of Rights adding property rights to the rights protected. (And a responsible ‘Party X’ would know they would need to add pressure to make the Bill of Rights  superior to all other law, as it always should have been.) 

After all, the principle of property rights simply promises the protection of the right to peacefully enjoy that in which one has property. What reasonable objection can be brought to a law that protects an individual’s right to peaceful enjoyment? (Let me stress the word "reasonable.") 

Let’s place on the back foot those who object to that right by challenging them to say for what reasons the right to peaceful enjoyment should not be made superior to all other law. 

Why should that right not  be put beyond the vote? That is, put well beyond the power of any politician to tamper with -- for that is surely a power beyond any right!

Our putative ‘Party X’  may not be immediately successful in this goal, of course, but it could at least flush out the bastards who oppose such peaceful rights, and expose the reasons they do. 

In the meantime, you might like to consider what would happen if property rights ever actually were placed at the heart of the likes of the Resource Management Act . . . would it be something like the meeting of matter and anti-matter ?

Method No. 2. Coming to the Nuisance

Planners like nothing more than than telling you where and how you may live.  The RMA gives them that power in spades, and the country is infested with the well-fed bastards writing and administering District Plans empowered by the RMA to boss you and your family around -- and with the utopias they have created and are all their own work ... like Albany and the Manukau City Centre. 

It wasn’t always that way. Back when common law was being invented, the English king was becoming increasingly frustrated at having to fix issues about the damage that someone’s chickens did to someone else’s crops.  Keen to stop his castles being overrun by defendants’ chickens, the king quickly realised the three important questions that could quickly solve these issues:

1. Whose chickens (and whose crops) are they?
2. What damage did they do? (And how to remedy it?)
3. Who was there first?

Such was the birth of common law—and right there in those three questions the English king had hit on the three ingredients that have been at the heart of common law ever since:

1. Property rights.
2. Damage.
3. Nuisance (and who came to it?).

Once these principles were established, the English king was able to solve these problems rapidly, to cleanse his castles of chickens, and to head north to invade Scotland—which is what the king known as “The Hammer of the Scots”  he’d been trying to do when he got bogged down in these disputes. 

What I’m going to propose here is another simple modification to law that would allow New Zealanders to once again repair to the common law protections that “The Hammer” had made possible. In particular, the codification of the common law principle of Coming to the Nuisance (seen in palimpsest in point three above), which on its own would a powerful antidote to the zoning that the RMA has entrenched -- perhaps the strongest possible antidote to zoning there is. Supplementary to putting property rights in the Bill of Rights, then, ‘Party X’ could promote the reintroduction of the Coming to the Nuisance doctrine for use as an absolute in neighbourhood disputes.

The Coming to the Nuisance Doctrine is an enormously powerful principle protecting pre-existing rights, and quickly establishing rights in situations of apparent neighbourhood conflict. Move next door to a clean and well-run chicken farm or pig or mushroom farm for example (even if the place has been re-zoned since the farm opened), and under this doctrine you have no right to have them thrown out. 

Move next door to a speedway track, for another well-known example, and you have no right to complain about excessive noise. 

I assume you see the difference with how things presently work. If the farm or the speedway or whatever it is was there before you chose to buy next door, then that’s probably why you got your land so cheap.

And if the track (or farm) is well and properly run, then those pre-existing rights should and can be protected in law; and if they were you then have a strong incentive to either make a more careful choice in future (whereas now the incentive is there to move in and force them out), or to buy out the speedway or the farm, or buy easements or covenants over the neighbouring land. 

Either way, when the coercion is removed from all parties and bargaining is all that’s allowed, the tendency is for property to end up in its highest value use. This is not something planners can ever claim to have achieved. 

Furthermore, what this principle will demonstrate over long use is that zoning is not only coercive, but unnecessary. It will on its own provide a daily demonstration that sound property rights work for everybody except the grey ones and the looters.

Not only that, at the same time as undercutting the zoning law established under the RMA, if  introduced it would have ensured that if neighbours of Western Springs speedway weren’t prepared to stump up enough for the bikes and midget cars to go elsewhere, then the noise of fast cars and motorbikes would have continue to annoy the luvvies for some years to come. You can’t do better than that.

Coming To The Nuisance then is THE pre-eminent antidote to zoning, the best way to pull the planners' teeth, and the single-best way to silence the NIMBYs who move in next to a circus and then complain to the grey ones about the noisy tent next door.

And what could be better than that?

Conclusion

So you can see the power that this measure would have, and I hope I've shown that it should be politically possible. 

I hope too that I've given you a few other ideas, like how to solve the problem of dirty dairying .... and we will, later in this series.

In the meantime, you can tune in again tomorrow to discover a very simple way to use pressure to solve the housing crisis to solve the problem of property rights in land ...

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THE SERIES SO FAR: 
INTRO: 'The Time is Ripe for a 'Party X' for the Environment' 
PART ONE: Eco un-taxes 
THE SERIES IS BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE DEVELOPED HERE: 'Transitions to Freedom: Shall We Kill Them in Their Beds?'
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The problem is not dirty dairying; it's still dirty government

Environment Minister David Parker is all set to tell dairy farmers how many cows he's going to be let them have on their own farms.  This is, he claims, to fix "dirty dairying."

But turns out you neither need nor want central planning to fix the alleged problem. What you do need is property rights -- and common law.

Here's a repost from 2008 that's sadly topical again, explaining what that means...

Enforced downsizing and limits on herd sizes! Talk about shooting your prosperity right in the foot.
Never underestimate the ability of politicians (and appeasement of them) to destroy your livelihood, while making a problem worse.
The problem they're mostly attempting to address is water -- how it's regulated, how dirty it is, and the role of agricultural intensification in the declining environmental standards. Said Parliamentary Commissioner Jan Wright at the report's release, the report finds water quality is "declining" in areas used for farming, and "the Resource Management Act is causing fundamental problems for water management." In response, Murray Rogers of Canterbury's Water Rights Trust campaign group says "agricultural development needs to slow down while research and regulatory structures are put in place to manage water."

Both Wright and Rogers are right, although not in the way they think they are.

Since it looks like farmers could have their future prosperity limited on the back of what this report says about water, let's see first what it actually says. (you can read the whole report here.) On inspection it turns out that the body of the report which contains the actual data is less frightening than what the headlines and the deleted 'summary' chapter say about it. (No surprise there -- it's on a par with the various summaries of the IPCC's global warming science.) About water the body of the report says:

• By international standards, freshwater in New Zealand is both abundant and clean.

• Because New Zealand has a low population and high average rainfall, it has more total freshwater per person than more than 90 per cent of almost 200 other countries around the world. However, not all of this water is in the right place at the right time...

• With land-use practices becoming more intensive, particularly in farming, there is greater demand for water now than ever before, and evidence is building that its quality is declining in many water bodies.

• As the dominant land use in New Zealand, agriculture has the most widespread impact on water quality.

• Rivers in catchments that have little or no farming or urban development make up about half of the total length of New Zealand’s rivers and have good water quality. Water quality is generally poorest in rivers and streams in urban and farmed catchments. This reflects the impact of non-point-sources of pollution in these catchments... The proportion of the total river length that is in farmed catchments is more than 40 times the proportion that is in urban catchments.

• In recent years, the impact of agricultural land use on water quality has grown as a result of increased stocking rates and use of nitrogen fertilisers. Within the agricultural sector, there has also been a move away from low-intensity to high-intensity land use (for example, converting from sheep farming to dairy or deer farming). The net effect of most intensified land use is to increase the amount of nutrients, sediment, and animal effluent dispersed into water bodies.

• The median levels of nitrogen and phosphorus have increased in rivers within the national monitoring network over the past two decades. More specifically, over 1989–2003, there was an average annual increase in levels of total nitrogen and dissolved reactive phosphorus of 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent. While this increase may seem small, and is difficult to detect from the slope of the median (dark blue) lines in Figure 10.3, it signals a long-term trend towards nutrient-enriched conditions that are likely to trigger undesirable changes to river ecosystems. Furthermore, New Zealand rivers with relatively high levels of nitrogen are deteriorating – becoming more enriched – more rapidly than rivers with low levels of nitrogen. This is illustrated most clearly in Figure 10.3.

• Seventy-five of the 134 lakes in New Zealand for which nutrient data are available have high to very high levels of nutrients (see Figure 10.5, right). Thirteen per cent of these lakes are known as ‘hypertrophic’, meaning they are ‘saturated’ with nutrients and their water quality is extremely degraded. In such lakes, algal blooms are common and the health of aquatic animals is often at risk.

• Levels of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and algae are between two and six times higher in lakes in pastoral catchments than in lakes that are in natural catchments (see Figure 10.6).

• A large majority of the 3,820 lakes greater than 1 hectare in area in New Zealand are not monitored. By extrapolating the results for monitored lakes, it is estimated that the majority (about two-thirds) of all lakes are likely to have relatively low concentrations of nutrients and good to excellent water quality because they lie in natural, or only partially developed, catchments (Ministry for the Environment). The remaining third of lakes are likely to have high levels of nutrients and poor water quality.

• Pollution from organic waste in rivers has reduced since the late 1980s. This indicates improved management of point-source discharges of organic waste, that is, pollution from a single facility at a known location, such as discharges from wastewater treatment plants, meatworks, and farm effluent ponds.

• Two-thirds of New Zealand’s lakes are in natural or partially developed catchments, such as native bush, and are likely to have good to excellent water quality. Small, shallow lakes surrounded by farmland have the poorest water quality of all our lakes.

• Sixty-one per cent of the groundwaters in New Zealand that are monitored have normal nitrate levels; the remainder have nitrate levels that are higher than the natural background levels, and 5 per cent have nitrate levels that make the water unsafe for infants to drink.

• Fertilisers and stock effluent are major sources of the nitrogen and phosphorus in water bodies in agricultural catchments. The erosion of soil also contributes significant amounts of soil-bound phosphorus to waterways.

Now I don't know about you, but overall that looks like a pretty credible pass mark to me [and since this 2008 report, things have been getting cleaner rather than the reverse]. Says the report: "By international standards, freshwater in New Zealand is both abundant and clean."
So much for the blowhards.
But there do appear to be two main issues:

1. increased draw-offs for irrigation and resulting 'competition' for water in Canterbury and Southland, and

1. the effect of farming on water quality in lakes and rivers.

You won't be surprised to hear I've got something to say about both, nor that both things that need to be said involve property rights.
Competition for water presently is complicated by bureaucratic systems of allocation. Protection of water quality is stymied by bureaucratic systems of protection: which means there are no effective legal remedies against pollution, and no effective agent to argue on behalf of that which is being polluted. Both problems are the direct result of what's known as the Tragedy of the Commons problem. As long as a resource is either unowned or held in common ownership (which is the case with water in NZ), then the incentive for each resource user is to take as much now as they can, and whenever they can, no matter the consequences for the quality of that resource, and no matter the long-term effect on the quantity of that resource. That's the tragedy: common ownership provides no incentive for genuine 'stewardship.'
The answer is clearer property rights, and greater common law protection of those rights.
As Jan Wright almost inadvertently pointed out in interviews yesterday, "the Resource Management Act is causing fundamental problems for water management." She's right, but not in the manner she thinks she is. The fundamental problem caused by the RMA is insufficiently secure property rights. The cure for both problems is more secure property rights. Let's me tell you how.

1. Competition for water
As water users realise every summer, competition exists for existing water resources. Bureaucratic distribution of access to water does nothing to secure the resource, and nothing to give water users long-term security of supply. By contrast, recognising secure property rights in water means that water users have a long-term interest in maintaining security of supply, and that rights to use water end up in the hands of those who are going to value it most.

Instead of a bureaucratic system of allocating water use, a system of secure tradeable water rights give users of water the benefit of long-term time horizons to plan their use (discouraging the short-termism that generally stymies 'sustainable' resource use), and establishes for all users the real value of those rights. With tradeable water rights, where and when water is in short supply price signals will communicate that information to users, indicating that more care should be taken with the valuable resource, and more attention paid to expanding the resource (by construction of greater collection capacity for example).

There's nothing complicated about any of that: that's how the markets for all other resources function, and the long-term effect of such markets is that for all sorts of reasons -- including greater incentives for increased efficiencies -- resources become less and and less scarce, and of better and better quality.

The key to swiftly effecting such a scheme is to immediately secure the rights of existing users, ensuring that such rights are tradeable so that they can be transferred to others who might value them more. A heavily politicised scheme for tradeable water rights was being discussed in 2006, but like all politicised schema the feet are still being dragged. What's needed quickly to avert moratoria and meddling is a system of clear property rights by which water can be traded.

As the Canadian Environment Probe organisation has said for a long time, a system of clear property rights and common law protections of property rights offers the best long-term security for water and those who rely on it. My colleague Craig Milmine has a dissertation from 2000 discussing the theory in detail, and showing how a water rights regime could function in the South Island's Kakanui district. 

2. Water Quality
We're told by all the usual suspects that dirty dairying is destroying our clean green reputation, and that agricultural intensification is destroying water quality. I suggest the answer to that is not more bureaucratic intensification, which is what has produced the problem, but less.
Property rights under a common law regime provides superior environmental protection -- that is, a system of clear property rights as a means by which water can be protected in common law. No question about that ( I invite you to follow those three preceding links to check that claim). When the costs of one's own actions are one's responsibility, a change of behaviour is greatly encouraged. When producers themselves have to pay for their own pollution, a change in methodology of production has to be considered. When water users themselves have clear rights in common law to protect the water in which they have property, then looking at it as a long-term resource that merits looking after is going to happen. And when neighbours' actions start to destroy that resource, then with their property rights secured rights' owners have the motivation to act in protection of that resource, and under common law they have simple and effective remedies with which to take action -- remedies that simply don't exist under the bureaucratically intense RMA.

Under common law for example, those with recreational or water rights along the Waikato or with rights to fish the lakes of Rotorua or the headwaters of the Tarawera River would have recourse against farmers or pulp and paper mills who polluted the fishery -- whereas with the RMA the polluters get a license to pollute and the affected parties find they have no particular legal standing, and no particular protection in law to protect their resource, common law grants them solutions, standing, and the means by which to protect their resource long-term.

What common law does in other words is give effective legal power to recognised resource users to protect their resource long-term. If we genuinely want to rehabilitate NZ's clean green credentials, then I maintain the solution is better protection of property rights and the rehabilitation of common law remedies for environmental protection. Simple.
But there’s a problem. In fact, there's two problems -- caused not by dirty dairying, but by dirty government:

1. The Resource Management Act (RMA) has successfully buried almost all avenues for common law environmental protection. Despite common law's proven effectiveness over eight-hundred years, common law measures to protect against pollution are buried under the statutory framework of bureaucratic control set up by the RMA. To bring back common law environmental protection requires the RMA to be scrapped, and replaced by a 'codification' of rational common law principles of environmental protection.

1. Even with the codification of common law, without clear ownership there is still no protection. To work effectively, property rights-based environmental protection needs an owner to stand up for his property, yet nearly half of this beautiful country and most of the seabed, foreshore and waterways still have no property rights attached. Most of it is essentially un-owned, leaving a government department as the conservator of record of much of the country's waterways. The Environment Report should be regarded as a report card of how well they've carried out the role.

Conclusion

Whatever the real news about the release, non-release or pseudo-release of the last chapter of the five-yearly Environment Report, the report suggests that water quality in some places is going to get worse, and that it will be "non-point sources" such as agricultural runoff (those that command-and-control resource management can't so easily control) that will play a large part in that diminution.

The answer is to give greater power to those who value the resources under threat, and there is no greater power in law than the protection of property rights and the legacy of common law -- if only these were allowed to function as they should.

RELATED POSTS:

• How the RMA continues to protect polluters
•  Amy Adams’s meddling dirtier than the dairying
• The Common Law: How it Protects the Environment – Roger Meiners & Bruce Yandle
• Cue Card Libertarianism -- Common law
• Water Markets: Priming the Invisible Pump – PERC
• Without Obstruction, Diversion or Corruption: The Power of Property Rights to Preserve Our Lakes and Rivers – Elizabeth Brubaker, ENVIRONMENT PROBE
• The role of property rights in protecting water quality - Environment Probe
• The state can't protect the environment – markets can – Fred Smith, NOT PC
• What would Party X do about the environment? Part 2: A Nuisance and a BOR – 2011
• Environmental Water Markets: Restoring Streams Through Trade – Brandon Scarborough, PERC

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