This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act. But has it been effective? Laura Huggins, of the Property and Environment Research Center, says no and has this to say: “The Endangered Species Act is expensive and ineffective. Its reactive approach to conservation penalizes property owners once a species is already in a tailspin, and it often spends millions of taxpayer dollars with no effect. An alternative approach is candidate conservation banking, which rewards landowners who find and protect soon to be rare species on their land with credits they can sell in the marketplace. Using market incentives to protect species is a promising alternative to the ineffective Endangered Species Act.”