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Life in Jeopardy on Private Property 53 depends on who has recently shifted perceptions of values. The goods carried by rare species are novel, nontraditional, public goods; the Endangered Species Act asserts new benefits hitherto unrecognized and unclaimed. But changing perceptions of value may be realizing values that were long in place and accepted as natural givens. Environmental values are not simply in the eye of the beholder. When we lose air, water, soil quality, natural resources,. when we lose ecosystem stability, we lose whether we are aware of these losses or not. We lose even if we think we do not. There was loss when the passenger pigeon went extinct, even though this loss at first- was perceived by few people. Un- tempered economic development seriously harms the public because it irreversibly harms life processes. These biological processes are not newly adopted values; they are the oldest values of all. It is no part of a landowner's rights to "take" this life; nor is the state "taking" something from the landowner when it insists that a species be preserved. Property rights were instituted to protect individuals from harm; now we must institute a law to protect individuals from harming species and in so doing harming other persons. John Locke asserts that the landowner's property rights give him no right to spoil or destroy-"the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but in the perishing of anything uselessly in it." We can make use of the commons, but we can take only "where there is enough and as good left in common for others" (Locke, 1690 [1947], chap. 5, secs. 46 and 27). In the case of nonrenewable resources, use may leave less for others, but land use ought to be renewable. Land can be left to others. Locke did not have species in mind, but the principle applies here. Species ought to be renewable resources; they are wealth on the land. When species perish, uselessly or not, this creates scarcity. Alternately put, property rights to land ought to help us divide up the pie of natural resources, but extinction of species shrinks that pie forever. In the case of long-continuing, nonreplaceable goods, prop- erty rights are rights to use, not to destroy. I cannot, on my private forested land, cut timber in such a way that, with the soil eroded and seeding stock gone, the forest cannot be regener- ated.16 Ican buy real estate and build a home there. Perhaps I must destroy the native vegetation to build my home, but that