First published on the Steem blockchain by @remlaps on October 02, 2022. View the original post.
Building America's Serengeti for less than the price of a football stadium
Introduction
Pixabay license from Stefan Weissenberger at source |
Back in 2016, I wrote the Steemit article, Making Wildlife Conservation Fun and Profitable, which explored the idea of using market mechanisms to protect wildlife. In the article, I proposed the idea of a game that was inspired by things like Airbnb, Project Noah, and Pokémon Go where property owners, tourists, and app developers could all collaborate in a game where they get blockchain rewards for matching photographs of endangered wildlife.
In this concept, property owners of hotels and similar properties would post a photo of an animal that was seen on their property, and a tourist would be rewarded for taking a matching photograph of the same animal.
I was reminded of this post today, when I read the article ‘Free-Market Environmentalism’ Is Working in Montana. This article discusses the American Prairie Reserve, which is in the process of creating a so-called American Serengetti - the largest nature reserve in the contiguous United States.
In particular, the reason I was reminded of my 2016 post was the "Cameras for Conservation" concept from this excerpt:
Some of these benefits are felt most directly by American Prairie’s [Wild Sky](https://www.americanprairie.org/wild-sky) program participants, which financially incentivizes wildlife-friendly management practices on neighboring ranches. Interested neighbors can sign up for “Cameras for Conservation,” where American Prairie will pay to install game cameras on the rancher’s property and then pay them for each picture of an animal that that camera generates. If your game camera gets a picture of an elk or deer, that’s $50 in your pocket. A mountain lion? That’s $250. And if you document the presence of a grizzly bear or wolf, that will be $500 per animal, all while you are still running cattle on the property.
So I was curious to learn more about this project. I found some more about this project in the YouTube video, Imagine America's Serengeti: Building the Largest Wildlife Reserve in the Continental United States from the Aspen Institute. Here is the video:
