Evolution, Adaptation, and Invention: Property Rights in Natural Resources in a Changing World

Abstract

This chapter explores the extent to which property rights in natural resources have adapted and evolved in the courts and through legislative intervention to address environmental problems and resource scarcity. It examines new forms of property and trading systems that have been invented to manage natural resources and to achieve sustainable objectives, and the difficulties of protecting ecological "values" that are not recognized or easily accommodated in conventional economic theory. It concludes that the law is a dynamic and versatile instrument that can, and should, accommodate principles of sustainability, not just as an external limitation on the exercise of property rights, but as an inherent internalized obligation of property ownership.