Part 2: Economics, Property Rights, and How to ACTUALLY do Conservation WorkPart 2: Economics, Property Rights, and How to ACTUALLY do Conservation Work

If you missed the first part, it's available here: #1525478

I've followed Paul Rosolie's journey for years — from afar and via a screen, not yet in person. I find his storytelling captivating, his masculinity and adventurism infectious, and his spiritual passion for nature echoing in my own soul (#1507948, #1508570)

Across three appearances on Joe Rogan, another few on Lex Fridman (including one recorded directly in the Amazon), and another on Modern Wisdom, I clocked about 25 hours with him... another few hours with this 300-page book.

The book itself, Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World, out this year by Penguin, is well put together, incredibly vivid and personal. An on-the-ground account of a real-world conservationist's life: the successes and setbacks, the wonder and the despair.

In this second part I turn to the more economic-y conversations around property rights and economics and the ecological/eschatological obsession that unfortunately fuels a lot of green people. There is a way (intellectually consistent and practically meaningful) to do proper conservation work and use the tools of markets and prices and property to uphold (push through?!) strongly held green beliefs. #862610, #1427651.

For catch-up, I'd start here: Is the Amazon Really a Market Failure?

the benefits to the rest of the world of an intact Amazon forest is much, much larger than the benefits that local ranchers and loggers gain from chopping down its trees.

If that's true, it should be fairly simple (not easy...) to protect it: lots more people, with lots more money, are invested in keeping most/every tree standing than those needing or wanting to extract logs and minerals, meaning there's definitely a Coasian bargain to be had.
(Now arranging it and policing the bargain once it's struck, those are a different story in the world's second/third/fourth least accessible place.)

Rosolie rarely talks policy, or climate change, or economics, but he does venture into these themes accidentally. He definitely carries within him this anti-human presumption that all we do as a species is destroy and ravage the Earth...

What I most appreciate about his life's work is that he ends up using the mechanisms of markets – incomes, salary, property rights, ecological tourism services – to save forests. Which is completely and radically different from the humans-are-sinful-and-must-repent or anti-market legalistic, bureaucratic summit lobbying that fuels most of the green movement.

The first, early, observation he has is one of direct ownership and control: the Schtackers and Bitcoiners generally have a pretty good idea of this (#1496074)... in a vast, expansive, impossible-to-monitor place, what difference does a legal ruling make? You control only what you possess and can protect directly, not what some piece of paper in a dusty capital city archive states.

In the early days, when first presented with the unfathomable and unfair burning and logging of the forest, Rosolie asks his mentor, JJ, who owned the land. JJ shrugged. "Someone."

Well, who? And where are they and why don't they fight back against the loggers? The answer was always a shrug. It was maddening. (p. 52)

You own what you can control. Police state (or, you know, private security company…) can uphold ownership of physical stuff (#1506425) but the further out you go from the center, the less powerful (=potent) that rights-upholding mechanism becomes. Three days upriver from what’s already an isolated, far-off village… there’s nada.

For two decades, then, Rosolie asked "Who was gonna do it?" "Who owns the forest?" and gradually realized that nobody was coming... that he and his team of lost souls were the only ones available.

Making a Living Living Your DreamMaking a Living Living Your Dream

This is very relatable #1513929

"trying to make a living while living your dream is hard." (p. 92)"trying to make a living while living your dream is hard." (p. 92)

At some level, it's supposed to be. Not only for pop psych reasons like "everything worth doing is hard" but rather: lots of people have eccentric dreams similar to yours, and plenty of people like you give it a shot. Meaning, economically speaking, you compete away whatever economic rent may be hidden in your dream life. On the margin, lots of people like you are gonna drop out and work at Starbucks, the DMV, or a local grocery store. It's less hard, less risky; the dental plans are better.

Analogy to home mining is obvious: if it were profitable to run machinery modified for silence, at home, and at residential rates, it'd be multiple times more profitable running the same machinery unhinged at industrial rates. duh. By definition, then, home mining will always be unprofitable, its hidden economic rents competed away and swamped by industrial mining.

Back to the jungle: everybody wants a meaningful life, working hard for what they believe in, "living the dream" and making a living off it. Rents competed away, and so by selection and competition living your dream life almost definitionally means you must accept living a life (mostly) in relative poverty.

At one point, Rosolie makes this bullshit vegetarian point about energy entropy for every level upward in the ecosystem. Blackboard true; real-world life false. Quality matters, energy isn't the same across the board:
Yes, also nutrient concentration. Most apex predators can’t live (or like us, live extremely poorly) on plants alone; it’s backup for periods of extreme food dearth.

Then he totally botches the analogy to economics: “Ecosystems are energy economies.” Correct, and ecology has the same etymological root as economy (https://mises.org/mises-wire/difference-between-ecology-and-economics). But the primary insight isn’t that, like in the jungle, one change impacts many more species downstream, but that competition and evolutionary drive select for efficiency. Household-ing, nothing going to waste.

Rosolie recounts a story about fishing in the amazing without bait... ah, just grab something from the ground, no? No. This is an extremely competitive ecological environment, there just won't be anything worth eating that would tempt a fish just lying around. So JJ cuts off a piece of skin from his heel's callus, and almost immediately catches a small fish. Using that small fish they go further out on the river and catch another fish, and then use that one as bait for the final, large dinner they were after.
The economy and ecology is ruthless, there's no just finding free shit lying around... You must sacrifice: The forest wants your carbon (You are the carbon they want to reduce?).

In one interview, he leans into the destruction-cataclysm-Sixth-Extinction nonsense I just can't stand:

“We’re in a period of extinction… they’re calling it the Sixth Extinction… this is an anthropogenic extinction; we’re taking up too much land.”“We’re in a period of extinction… they’re calling it the Sixth Extinction… this is an anthropogenic extinction; we’re taking up too much land.”

This is false, and a silly, religious, anti-human, anti-scientific statement. Mass Extinctions have clear, geological definitions: they operate over geological time frames (not human ones), what little tiny things our unique mastery of the planet has accomplished in the last two to five centuries are merely blips. Plus, we're not using much land, definitely not "too much."

What underlines this statement is the wholly unscientific “background rate of extinction” where you take some average or “regular” rate of extinction over long time frames (a rate you can’t even see, because how do we practically know of species that disappeared from the archaeological record?) and you compare it to a yearly or decadal observation recently.

If the number today is higher, scream BLOODY MURDER from the top of whatever ivory tower your privileged arse is situated.If the number today is higher, scream BLOODY MURDER from the top of whatever ivory tower your privileged arse is situated.

The irony is that the man who saves him, deus ex machina style, and makes Junglekeepers happen (financially speaking) is a billionaire… someone who provided immense economic value to countless people globally in this destructive and horrid civilization, and then looked around for something powerful and meaningful to change.

Yes, Dasilva was sufficiently impressed by Rosolie and his twenty-odd proof-of-work, on-the-ground decades of experience and what he wanted to build… and it was somehow luck that they crossed paths. Still, nothing could be more illustrative of the power of markets and capitalism and the praxeological truth that to consume and invest, first you have to create.

But then Rosolie can be perfectly reasonable, too. In the Modern Wisdom interview, he immediately follows his unimpressive “extinction” commentary with

“How do we get them out of poverty so that they can start becoming stewards of […] the natural environment?”“How do we get them out of poverty so that they can start becoming stewards of […] the natural environment?”

Gotta align the economic incentives. Need to make the forest and its trees worth more alive than dead, the labor service of guarding or guiding be more pleasant or worth more than logging and extracting. Here’s from the book:

Many of the people we hired used to be loggers or gold miners. Instead of cutting trees and working for terrible wages, suddenly they had respectable pay, uniforms, health insurance, a steady job, and a community. (p. 256)

On the next page: they're not evil, just trying to make a living. Real-world economic constraints, not purity or virtue or green wishy-washy beliefs.

He voices that powerfully toward the end of the book, too: give people jobs (p. 301).

They build a high-end, comfortable tree house with WiFi and running water, realizing that a few people visiting means the exclusivity and uniqueness can generate a lot of money for very little ecosystem disruption. He did so explicitly to help people see the divinity of the insane forest they're in, Rosolie being the foremost apostle of the "mythical church of the Amazon" (p. 61). He ends up efficiently raising money for his organization, finding a way to sell ecosystem services to wealthy patrons who made their living in the filthy, destructive global economy.

After the money started coming in and they had some early successes, he remarks that

“This is how real conservation gets done, lawyers and land acquisition, papers and meetings over coffee.” (p. 269)“This is how real conservation gets done, lawyers and land acquisition, papers and meetings over coffee.” (p. 269)

Because property rights, ownership, contrary to the Marxian delusion, is a peaceful resolution over use of a nonrivalrous good.

This all strikes me as an elaborate version of a benevolent UBI — we, out of our boundless global economic wealth, pay you not to extract from the forest logs, food, game, or minerals.

Your best economic act is so destructive to us and our sensibilities that we'll pay you not to do it.

It's a short-term bribe (because whatever you pay for you'll get more of) that might just work. If, out of the world's bounties, we carry marginal workers on our economic shoulders so that they don't cause harm, we might just keep this Junglekeeper jungle intact. And more of it in time.

I'll take idealistic can-do types like Rosolie over any political summit or Greenpeace/Extinction Rebellion stunt or despicable Greta Thunberg characters any day. Rosolie may not precisely understand the economics of what he's doing, but he's pragmatic enough and grasps enough of the direct, on-the-ground constraints that the incentives push him that way regardless.

I shall make my way to Peru one day and go visit that tree house.

Junglekeepers is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, with tax-deductible donations, operating in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. Grab some merch from their online store, or donate—which I will with whatever scrappy lil sats this post may raise.