The biggest threat to beaver reintroduction to the UK is powerful landowners and thier campaigning bodies such as the NFU, CLA & CONFOR. The owners of riverbanks see beavers as a
threat. In my view the solution to the beaver issue is Land Value Tax...
In the fight to reintroduce the beavers the battle lines
have been drawn, and will always exist between private landowners wanting to
derive as much profit from their land as possible, i.e. intensive farming on
riverbanks and the public need for 'ecosystem services' such as water quality
and flood plain buffering of peak flow. The natural tendency towards people
trying to create monopolies means landowning groups want to co-opt the taxpayer
into paying for services they receive such as river management and drainage,
while at the same time receiving private profits and government hand-outs with
little taxation. Much of the research into 'ecosystem services' is being
sponsored so as to allow a valuation for 'landowners' to then charge the rest
of society a rent for these services. My economic research in this process,
which I am in touch with some 'green' economists, highlight the lobbying
efforts of the 'monopoly forces' to 'own' ecological services and try to charge
the rest of society a 'rent' to access them.
Beavers are a wonderful animal
that can help return riverbanks to the 'commons' whereby landowners have
stewardship responsibilities and that landownership confers responsibilities as
well as benefits. Modern law sees freehold tenure as an absolute right, but it
should be as much about imposing duties to protect the land as well as the
right to exploit it for private gain. This I see as the most important battle
of the 21st Century as global corporations try to 'commoditise' and privatise
natural assets such as water, land and pollution then convert it to a tradable
asset that can allow private ownership, speculation and 'rent seeking'. If we
as a society allow this, the future of humanity will be very bleak indeed with
a new feudal system between the 'freeholders' of natural assets and the rest of
humanity who must live in relative poverty as a large proportion of their
income will be captured by these natural asset 'rentseekers'.
I feel this is the key economic issue to the return of beaver and
other wildlife to our country and is often not well understood by naturalists
and wildlife conservationists. There is a simple solution to this conundrum and
that is the direct taxation of land, water and pollution so the 'rent' is captured
by the Government and used to offset other taxes, while at the same time making
natural assets expensive to 'own' or abuse and thus helping to conserve them.
Direct taxation of land would mean those landowners who are fortunate enough to
have beavers on their land and create, in perpetuity, a wet riparian woodland
would receive a tax break as the land would have no economic value to them, but
would have huge economic value to society. The thorny question is should we
compensate private landowners for this process? Once we received these services
for free and so the moral question is did our state have the right to privatise the gifts of nature and
should present day landowners have the right to expect payment when we ask for
those service back? I think not but many would disagree...
