News that a Connecticut businesswoman has expressed interest in “buying out” the Canadian Maritime seal hunt is a reminder that some resources can be saved from depletion through a combination of ingenuity, determination and cold cash. What fur coat boycotts, publicity campaigns and lobbying haven’t accomplished, in other words, might be achieved through the actions of a single person with enough money.
There are other examples, some of them quite venerable: Baxter State Park in Maine, created through Percival Baxter’s own philanthropy when he couldn’t persuade the legislature to spend public money for the purpose; Acadia National Park, also in Maine, created through the philanthropy of the Rockefeller family and others many years ago; the work of The Nature Conservancy and others along the Saint John River in northern Maine.
The Nature Conservancy, in fact, has pioneered the private conservation approach exemplified in the proposed seal hunt buyout: with others, it has taken steps to protect fish stocks on the West Coast by purchasing rights to them. There has been talk of employing a similar strategy in the Gulf of Maine.
Private — “personal” might be a better word — preservation can carry a price, however. The actions of Roxanne Quimby, a businesswoman who has purchased large tracts of forest land in Maine for the purpose of preserving them, have been controversial for years. One person’s desire to set aside resources to protect them can be a threat to another’s lifestyle, recreation or job, not to mention a community’s tax base. The acts of individuals, particularly people with the cash to buy something really big — a few thousand acres of forest, the rights to a fishery — are never exercised in a vacuum.
So it’s useful to look again at the seal hunt: it does provide jobs and money in a region hard-hit by fisheries stock collapses, and in the opinion of some people there’s value in “controlling” the seal population lest hungry seals devour the fish stocks before they can recover. On the other side it’s undeniable that the market for seal pelts is a matter of fashion and discretionary income. If slaughtering seals for fur coats can be compared to hunting whales for pet food — or drilling for oil so we can burn more fuel in wasteful cars, for that matter — might it be time to apply some real imagination and ingenuity to protecting these valuable resources? We humans won’t run out of ideas, but if we don’t apply them to the problems we face, we could run out of a lot of other things.