One of the cardinal flaws of markets today is that they don’t limit or charge for use of co-inherited wealth. This leads to what economists call externalities — harms to nature and society whose costs are avoided by those who cause them. This enormous market failure must and can be fixed. One way to do that is to insert toll gates on boundaries between markets and critical ecosystems.

For example, a trust responsible for protecting an ecosystem such as a watershed, forest or the atmosphere could be granted property rights (think of conservation easements, as employed by the Nature Conservancy, MALT and many other land trusts) that allow it to limit and charge for use of the ecosystem. Peer-reviewed scientists would advise on sustainable usage thresholds and fiduciary trustees would decide how many permits to issue and how to price them — e.g., by competitive auctions or fixed prices. The toll gates would then be adjusted and the process would periodically repeat. The trustees’ duty to future generations would be to err on the side of asset preservation.