This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 17th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When ranchers, loggers, and other extractive users of land want access to federal lands,

they typically don't pay a market price.

So why are conservationists left out of competing for these kinds of deals

and what does that mean for conservation?

I spoke with Sean Regan of the property and environment research center last week in Bozeman, Montana.

The history to the use of public resources on public lands in the American West,

you know, goes back a long ways to the on public lands in the American West.

You know, goes back a long ways to the 19th century when settlers moved west and began to settle

through the homestead, the various homestead acts

to settle the West.

And you had institutions emerge like what's called

the prior appropriations doctrine,

which is the institution governing the use of water in the west and the basis of that system was that in order to get a water right

you had to put water to a beneficial use.

And the notion of beneficial use was defined pretty narrowly at the time for good reason.

It meant you had to divert the water for irrigation, for example.

And if you weren't putting the water resource to good use

you were at risk of losing that right to the resource. So the the water right

system in the American West is very much a use it or lose that system.

And what we documented in our work here at Perk is how those institutions often create challenges

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