Who Owns That Bat?

“White-nose syndrome screening is mandatory.”

It was the summer of 2023, and our family of four was on the first of what would become an annual summer event: road tripping the American West in our camper.

Our first stop was Great Basin National Park in my home state of Nevada, and I had never heard of white-nose syndrome until I stood at the mouth of the amazing Lehman Caves. 

Before entering for our tour, we were instructed to leave behind anything that had touched another cave environment. No exceptions. The reason was spelled out plainly on the signage: to protect the indigenous bat population from white-nose syndrome. A fungal disease that travels on gear, clothing, and the soles of boots, white-nose syndrome has killed more than 90 percent of three North American bat species between 2006 and 2018.

When white-nose syndrome began collapsing bat populations across North America in 2006, most people didn’t notice. Bats are not charismatic. They don’t generate fundraising campaigns or cable news segments. But bats pull their weight, including by eating insects—enormous quantities of them, night after night, across every agricultural landscape in the country.

Across every county where white-nose syndrome arrived and bat populations collapsed, farmers turned to chemical pesticides to battle the insect populations bats had previously helped control. A 2024 study published in Science estimated the result: $26.9 billion in agricultural losses between 2006 and 2017, and more than a thousand additional infant deaths linked to pesticide exposure in affected counties. 

A thousand infant deaths linked to a bat disease most people have never heard of.

That is why the ecological world is not and cannot be a luxury concern. When it fails, the costs land on farmers, families, food systems, children, the poor, and the most vulnerable among us. 

And the failures are mounting rapidly. Across North America, migratory bird populations have dropped by nearly three billion since 1970 owing to habitat destruction, agricultural intensification, outdoor cats, and glass buildings. Agricultural runoff, overdrawing of aquifers, and land use change are causing freshwater systems to degrade faster than they recover. Pollinators are collapsing from pesticide use, habitat fragmentation, pathogens, invasive species, and monoculture farming, with no clear consensus on which matters most. Species are disappearing at a rate that many scientists describe as a sixth mass extinction event, this one unfolding right before our eyes.

One Size Does Not Fit All

These are complex problems that exist across diverse contexts, often with multiple, intersecting causes. They are deeply underserved by an environmental agenda that has been dominated by the monocausal climate change framework and its attendant solution of international carbon regulation. 

The climate is always changing, and there is no doubt we humans have a profound effect on it. But “reduce emissions, save the planet” is a better slogan than it is a strategy. We spend enormous political capital and resources to pursue a single solution, while problems that are local, regional, and tractable get less energy and fewer resources. 

Aside from the fact that simply reducing carbon won’t solve many of the serious ecological issues we are facing, there is a moral dimension to this. A framework built around global agreements and universal participation asks developing nations to forgo the industrialization that built the wealth of the countries now demanding restraint, in service of a problem they did relatively little to create. Serious ecological problems have been solved before, sometimes through global agreements or sweeping legislation, but most often through the patient work of people who understood a specific problem in a specific place and built something that worked. 

The bats in Lehman Caves are still there because someone identified what was causing the problem, deployed the tool that fit, and it is working. White-nose syndrome often travels on gear and clothing, so the National Park Service built a gear screening protocol at the point of entry, enforced it consistently, and is updating it as the science develops. They did not try to stop all fungal disease globally, or regulate all cave tourism, or wait for an international agreement. 

Many environmental problems more closely resemble the bats of Lehman Caves than they do climate change. For these local matters, we have a specialized toolkit that’s attentive to local knowledge and local means of land management.

That toolkit is at the heart of what follows. One of its virtues is that it helps us identify challenges where a more strategic, targeted approach is within reach. And in identifying the solutions that best address issues at the local level, we should look beyond the blunt tool of government regulation and instead to communities and individuals—the hunters, anglers, farmers, indigenous communities, local land trusts—who bring knowledge, accountability, and staying power that no federal agency can manufacture.

Layered Problems, Layered Solutions

In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin argued that, in the absence of state-run enforcement mechanisms, shared resources were doomed. Individuals acting in self-interest would inevitably overuse them until they collapsed. Government control or privatization, he argued, were the only options.

Elinor Ostrom spent her career proving him wrong.

An economist at Indiana University, Ostrom embedded in communities to see what happens when they manage shared resources. In fishing villages, alpine meadows, irrigation systems, and forests across multiple continents, she found community after community that proved Hardin’s theory wrong: they could manage shared resources—sustainably and for generations, without top-down government control and without full privatization, provided certain conditions were met. 

Communities tend to succeed, Ostrom found, when boundaries are clearly defined, when the people who depend on a resource have real decisionmaking power over it, when rules are monitored and enforced by those closest to the problem, and when governance is layered: local decisions nested within regional ones, regional within national, each level handling what it can handle best. She called this arrangement polycentric governance. 

The best-known example from her work can be found in the alpine meadows of Switzerland. For centuries, farming communities in the Swiss Alps managed shared grazing land that, by Hardin’s logic, should have been stripped bare by self-interested farmers racing to put as many animals on it as possible. Instead, these communities developed their own rules governing how many animals each family could graze, monitored compliance through social relationships, and enforced violations through graduated sanctions. Those communities thrived, and so did the land

The core insight here is straightforward: complex problems are best managed by people with direct knowledge of and stake in the outcome, at the scale closest to the problem itself. Rules matter. So does who makes them. For this work, in 2009 Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. 

Pollinators: A Case Study

Consider pollinators.

Monarch butterfly overwintering populations have declined by more than 80% over the past two decades, during which conservation efforts have already been underway. Roughly 40% of invertebrate pollinator species globally face extinction. Habitat loss continues to outpace restoration. 

The costs of this mounting crisis don’t just fall on the environment or farmers; they hit us all. While figures vary across studies, pollination services to U.S. agriculture are estimated at $15–34 billion annually. When pollinators decline, yields decline, and often requiring more human labor, all leading to higher food prices.

The decline of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators is one of the most consequential ecological problems in the United States, and one of the least understood. The IPBES Global Pollinator Assessment, the most comprehensive scientific review of the subject, documents multiple drivers acting in combination, including pesticide use, habitat loss and fragmentation, monoculture farming, pathogens, and invasive species. There is no scientific consensus on the relative importance of these stressors, and they interact synergistically, amplifying each other in ways that make simple solutions ineffective. 

Given the mobility and diffuseness of pollinators, an Ostromian approach to maintaining their populations requires coordinated action across defined corridors, by people with direct stakes in the outcome, governed through nested layers rather than a single centralized authority. A single farmer who reduces pesticide use on his land captures some benefit, but the real gains come from neighboring farms managing habitat in connected corridors and maintaining communication as they do.

The good news is that we aren’t starting from zero. 

Monarch Joint Venture coordinates efforts across federal agencies, state governments, nonprofits, and private landowners to restore habitat across the monarch butterfly’s entire migration corridor. It does so without a single centralized authority directing it. The Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farming certification gives farmers and retailers a market signal tied to pollinator-safe practices, creating an economic incentive without a mandate. Other farmer-led pollinator habitat initiatives, coordinated at the county and watershed level, have documented measurable gains in pollinator abundance where they have been implemented seriously.

The second bit of good news is that these ventures aren’t outlying examples. Ducks Unlimited has restored or enhanced more than 15 million acres of North American waterfowl habitat since 1937, funded almost entirely by hunters. Trout Unlimited’s members have spent decades on stream restoration and cold-water habitat protection. The hunting and fishing license systems fund state wildlife agencies to the tune of billions of dollars annually—a user-paid conservation model that has operated successfully for over a century, largely invisible to the elite policy conversation because it doesn’t look like environmentalism.

That is not to suggest these examples are perfect on their own, but they do illustrate Ostrom’s layered approach to governance. They also illustrate the strong foundation upon which we can build: The groups and civil society networks that Ostrom’s framework depends on already exist, organize, and fund conservation outcomes. They, and the approach more generally, are underleveraged.

Polycentric governance works where communities have the knowledge, the stake, and the decisionmaking power to act. In the pollinator case, much of that infrastructure already exists. What it lacks is the political priority to deploy it at the scale the problem demands. That is a solvable problem, though time is increasingly not on our side. 

But there is a harder class of problem—one where coordination alone cannot change behavior, because the people who bear the costs of ecological loss have no stake in the outcome. For that, a different lever is required.

When Nobody Owns It

Who benefits when wild, dangerous animals thrive in close proximity to humans?

In most of sub-Saharan Africa through the mid-twentieth century, the answer was nobody. Local communities living alongside elephants, lions, and leopards bore all the costs of that proximity—livestock killed, crops destroyed, and occasionally, people harmed. The rational response in such situations is to view wildlife as a liability, and that is exactly what happened. Poaching became rampant. Soon after, populations collapsed.

When the costs of conservation are concentrated in local communities that can least afford them, and when the benefits are widely dispersed, conservation fails. When the people closest to the resource own all of the outcomes, both good and bad, they have reason to invest in preserving the resource.

Take a program called CAMPFIRE: Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources. Launched in Zimbabwe in 1989, CAMPFIRE gave local communities legal authority over the wildlife in their areas. The community that previously had no reason to protect a lion now owned it. As owners, they not only incurred the costs but reaped the benefits of whatever they did to manage the resource. Under this new arrangement, communities set their own hunting quotas, leased rights to safari operators, and got to keep any revenue generated. Predictably, poaching dropped, and wildlife populations began to recover. That is not to suggest that CAMPFIRE has been an unqualified success, but the program has adapted amidst significant challenges, including political destabilization in Zimbabwe.

In the arid American West, water is the most contested resource. Farmers hold rights to it, cities need it, and fish die without it. Water rights law treats water as property, but for most of the twentieth century, the rivers themselves had no standing. Nobody owned the interest in keeping water instream. So it disappeared, diverted into irrigation ditches and municipal systems, leaving streams too shallow and too warm for many fish, most notably salmon, to survive.

Founded in 1993 with the help of Oregon Trout, the Oregon Water Trust (now the Freshwater Trust) became the nation’s first entity to apply a market-based approach to keeping water instream. On the Middle Fork of the John Day River, the Trust partnered with the Bureau of Reclamation to lease water rights from a private landowner, restoring flow during low-flow summer months when juvenile salmon most need it. No mandate, no litigation, and no regulatory battle needed. Only a willing buyer, a willing seller, and water staying in the river. The Trust also helped push through a new Oregon law recognizing instream water rights and allowing their transfer, a legal innovation that’s been adopted across fourteen western states.

The insight is the same as Ostrom’s: those closest to the problem are indispensable to solving it. But here, the levers are title and price rather than norms and coordination. Ownership made the transaction possible, and enforceability made the outcome stick.

The same logic can be adapted where formal ownership isn’t possible. The Defenders of Wildlife Wolf Compensation Trust, launched in 1987, faced a version of the CAMPFIRE problem on American rangelands. Ranchers living alongside recovering wolf populations bore all the costs—in livestock killed and operations disrupted—while the benefits of wolf recovery flowed to distant conservation advocates and the broader public.

Because granting the title wasn’t possible, Defenders’ solution was to use the price lever instead. The organization gave those who bore the costs of conservation enough compensation to economically benefit from coexistence. Defenders paid ranchers fair market value for any livestock killed by wolves, as well as a bonus for wolf pairs denning on their land. That second payment is the key move because it converts the presence of wolves from a cost into a source of revenue. 

In 2010, Defenders wound the program down after federal legislation created state-run compensation programs that could provide more funding than Defenders could supply on its own. That handoff is worth noting: a voluntary private solution proved the concept, and government helped scale it. 

The evidence since then is instructive. Paying for confirmed kills, which can be difficult to verify, addresses the financial loss but doesn’t reliably change behavior. Research increasingly suggests that it works better to tie payments to active coexistence practices—outcome-based incentives rather than entitlements. That is the test these state programs now face.

We don’t need perfection in order to make progress. In this case, we don’t need clean, transferrable titles to the resources we want to preserve. By adapting the price mechanism to what the law allows, the program pioneered a model that has since been adopted, extended, and improved through trial and error. This capacity is a hallmark of liberal, decentralized solutions.

Even so, there are limits to the property rights lever. In places where rights aren’t clearly defined or legally enforced, or where the rule of law is weak, additional approaches and tools are needed. 

Where the Going Gets Tough

Consider deforestation in the Amazon. Home to an estimated ten percent of all species and a hydrological system that generates rainfall across an entire continent, the Amazon is disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 2001 and 2020, the Amazon lost more than 54 million hectares of forest, an area roughly the size of France. 

The drivers included cattle ranching, soy expansion, illegal logging, mining, and road construction, most of it on land whose ownership is contested or whose legal protections are selectively enforced. Human-driven clearing has slowed meaningfully under Brazil’s current government, with fire taking its place as the central threat. In 2024, roughly 60 percent of primary forest loss came from fire, as drought and accumulated degradation turned the once-humid forest into tinder. 

The Amazon is not a simple story of destruction. It is a story of a system under mounting pressure from multiple directions at once, in a political environment where the rules change with elections. When the state itself is the problem—when governments incentivize environmental destruction or sell concessions into protected areas—both market and regulatory mechanisms fail.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is working to change that. Like the Defenders of Wildlife Wolf Compensation Trust, REDD+ aims to make conservation more profitable than destruction. In this case, wealthy countries pay developing countries, or communities within them, to protect standing forests.

The underlying logic shows promise. A global evaluation of 40 voluntary REDD+ projects found deforestation reduced by 47% within project areas in the first five years. The Norway–Guyana bilateral program reduced tree cover loss by 35% during its implementation period. The sole randomized controlled trial on a payment for ecosystem services program found an 88% reduction in forest loss among enrollees. 

In other places, though, implementation has been badly compromised. A peer-reviewed study examining 26 REDD+ projects found actual emissions reductions averaged 21% of what the recipients reported and got paid for. That fraud came from a structural problem: REDD+ credits take for a baseline the counterfactual of what is believed would have happened to the forest without the program. Since that can never be directly verified, baseline inflation is both easy and profitable.

The failure points toward what is actually missing: the ownership and accountability infrastructure that makes market mechanisms work. Three reforms address this directly. 

First, evidence consistently shows that forests managed by indigenous and local communities with legally recognized land rights have lower deforestation rates than either state-managed or private concession forests. We need to lean harder into the property rights framework and explore incentives for national governments to do so. Second, shifting jurisdictional accounting to the national or subnational level rather than the project level could eliminate much of the baseline fraud. Third, replacing developer-funded auditing with independent satellite monitoring—a technology already deployed in Brazil and easily scalable—makes real-time forest cover verification genuinely possible.

Each reform we’ve discussed is a different tool, but together they represent Ostrom’s framework in an international context: community governance and clearly defined rights, nesting autonomous, stakeholding localities within national and international frameworks. 

The through line, from Ostrom’s Swiss alpine meadows, to Lehman Caves, to the Monarch migration corridor, to the Amazon, is the same: conservation succeeds when the people bearing its costs also own its benefits, and incentives are aligned to outcomes. Conservation fails when those two things come apart. The mechanisms vary, but the logic holds across contexts and scale. And where it breaks down, the breakdown is diagnostic: it tells us what needs course correcting when something isn’t working. This liberal toolkit is within our reach if those of us who love the environment are willing to challenge the status quo and roll up our sleeves.

Image courtesy of the author.