Barton Thompson

Barton “Buzz” Thompson is the Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law at Stanford Law School, a Professor of Environmental Social Sciences, and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He is a global expert on water and natural resources focused on legal, institutional, and technological innovation in resource management.

Wildlife Mandates Built for Scarcity Now Struggle With Abundance

At a Hoover Institution session on markets and mandates in conservation, Dominic Parker and James Workman argued that wildlife policy is now confronting problems created partly by its own successes. Parker said land-based mandates that helped restore game species such as deer are poorly suited to managing overabundance, shrinking hunter participation, and conflicts over predators such as wolves. Workman made the parallel case at sea: commercial catch shares rebuilt some fisheries, but recreational anglers increasingly sit outside the monitoring and incentives that made those systems work.

Hoover InstitutionJun 8, 202619 min read