Chapter 60: Economics of Wildlife Protection

Rebecca P. Judge

Economics of wildlife protection Economics arrived late to wildlife protection. Although optimal timber harvest rates were first described by Martin Faustmann in 1849, and although Harold Hotelling had defined the parameters for profit-maximizing extraction of exhaustible resources like coal and petroleum by 1931, the problem of wildlife protection was ignored by the discipline until 1951. That year, Charles Stoddard (1951), a consulting forester working out of Minong, Wisconsin, urged fellow attendees at the North American Wildlife Conference to address the nation's “steady deterioration of wildlife habitat ” with “an intensive development of a branch of knowledge devoted to the economics of wildlife management” (p. 248). The problem, according to Stoddard, was that wildlife production on private lands competed with more remunerative sources of income to landowners. For wildlife to recover, private landowners needed to be “provided with incentives, economic and otherwise, for producing wildlife crops” (p. 248). But the discipline ...

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