Economics and the environment essays

Economics and the environment essays Before if someone would have used the words economics and the environment in the same sentence I would have looked at them with a dumbfounded expression on my face, however the basic principles of economics can be applied with great benefits of the environment. An example the speaker made was with African Elephant populations in two separate countries, one country outlawed the hunting of the elephant while the other country gave private ownership to the elephants and legalized trade on the elephants and the products that could be made from them. Since I had no knowledge of economic principles, I expected the country that outlawed the hunting to have the greater population, but in reality the country that gave personal ownership had nearly double the population of elephants after ten years. This was explained to us by the concepts of benefits, if you can make money off something, you are more likely to do it. The towns raised the elephants similar to how we raise cows. The next example that was given was the incorrect (for the environment) usage of this concept. There is a species of woodpecker that will only nest in a single type of maple tree, so the government passed a law that anyone with one of these trees with a nest in it could not build on the land in a hundred foot radius of the tree and would be fined greatly for doing so. This lead to the mass destruction of the poor birds habitat, as most of the nation cut down these trees to avoid these birds, which would lead to their extinction. The speaker (Russel Sobil) was very talented and appeared to be extremely competent on this subject matter, which I found out I knew nothing about. I found this lecture interesting, and it also raised my interest in this subject matter. ...