We Could Be Making Millions of Dollars By Saving Cougars
Save your nature and have it, too.
Los Angeles is one of only two megacities in the world with a population of big cats. Can you name the other? Too late: It’s Mumbai. An expanding metropolis has caused mountain lions living in Los Angeles to be boxed in, in so doing, they are inbreeding, which directly threatens their survival.
It’s been said the future existence of the Santa Monica Mountain Lion relies on the construction of a new overpass, which would allow wildlife to move across man-made structures, such as the 101 Freeway. According to UCLA Evolutionary Biologist Bob Wayne, at least 13 mountain lions have been struck and killed by cars while trying to cross LA freeways in recent years. Without a wildlife corridor of some kind, mountain lions will face imminent extinction within the next fifty years.
So this offers a brief picture as to what is the cost of not taking action, but what is the cost of building an overpass? Roughly $60 million. Therein lies the proverbial rub.
I’ve never even seen a mountain lion before — have you? Of course compassion is important but are the lives of animals we hardly ever see worth another toll or a new tax or rousing up private donations? Many of us would incontrovertibly say ‘yes it is worth it’ because we feel responsible for another life and we have compassion. But the point of this article is to not simply promote compassion. My primary objective is to re-wire our thinking. We’ve become accustomed to believing that spending money on the environment can’t have a positive return on our investment and/or that it is exclusively an exercise in compassion; we’ve been conditioned to assume that “helping the environment” and “generating revenue” have to be mutually exclusive.
I want to save the Santa Monica Mountain Lion, make revenue, and save us money in the process. Here’s a very simple plan I believe would do that.
The area where the aforementioned wildlife overpass would be located has been identified near Agoura Hills above US Route 101 (near the 405/101 interchange). The good news is that a portion of the $60 million needed to build the overpass has been raised through private donors; the bad news is sufficient private funding won’t be captured until likely 2022.
I have an idea. Don’t rely exclusively on private donors or a new toll (the latter is the customary solution to building overpasses). Raise money by putting up billboards. An estimated 300,000 people a day travel on this stretch of the freeway near the 101/405 interchange according to the most recent traffic count (which unfortunately was around 2012). So let’s say 350,000 people travel the 101 around Liberty Canyon (a.k.a. Agoura Hills) a day. That’s a lot of people to which a company or cause could advertise their product, message, or mission. Not to mention the uniqueness of the ad placement, which has tremendous added value (every person in the state of California would likely know about the “overpass ad”). With this, the wildlife overpass would not only allow animals to cross but provide placement for as many as four billboards displaying messages for hundreds of thousands of drivers to see.
How much revenue could these billboards generate?
This report says the typical billboard in Los Angeles sells for about $5.50 per thousand impressions, but that’s likely the going rate for a conventional billboard with no unique value — what I’m proposing is essentially a donation to a wildlife cause in a proprietary location. I’ll go out on the limb and say an advertisement with that kind of unique value could easily be priced at $20 per thousand impressions. Using this number: $20 x 350 (350,000 people / 1000) = $7,000 / day for one billboard. Multiply that by 4 (2 billboards on each direction of the freeway) and that’s about $28,000 / day or about $10 million / year.
Assuming it would cost about $1 million to construct and maintain the billboards, you could likely pay for the overpass using this ad revenue in about five years.
There is the issue of who would own the billboard and thus gets to keep the revenue after the overpass is paid for. This is a deep exercise in and of itself, considering that many naturalists have also fought for decades to completely remove the eyesores of outdoor advertising, initially through the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 (the same act which to this day makes putting billboards on Federal or State Highways legal). The difference with the billboards I’m proposing would be controlled by the wildlife groups as they own the land where the current overpass is planned. Environment groups would have carte blanche to control the ad experience, which should offer some comfort.
If this all seems a bit unconventional, that’s the point. Private foundations do a tremendous job of making us aware of environmental issues and generating the funding needed much of the time, but I don’t believe we should rely exclusively on donors or increased taxes as a panacea to the near and long term issues facing our wildlife and the health of our planet. I believe the global environmental issues are too grand to solve in a conventional manner.
Part of this exercise is to make sure we care for all forms of life, but even more so, it’s to realize we can advance ourselves forward without holding others back. That’s an important lesson not only in caring for nature but in becoming better humans. Being able to come up with sensible economic deals to improve the environment could make the world, and our pocketbooks, a lot more green.
Like the Santa Monica Mountain Lion, it’s likely our survival may depend on us finding outside the box solutions.
