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Re:IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from bei... by thaumasiotes on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @07:47PM (#25936543)
> If you're buying a million acres for over a hundred million dollars, then that's about 150 miles of border to patrol.

> If that's too expensive then go up to 10 million acres, which triples the land area per mile of border. Or 100 million acres.

I don't really follow. The use case is that you want to prevent small farmers from encroaching on the jungle. This will only ever happen at the border between where the small farmers end and the jungle begins. If you buy land behind the border, that's nothing but a waste of your money (until the border is so thoroughly dejungled that your old hinterlands is the new border).

In turn, this means that all of the land you're interested in is border. You can't rely on the fact that a circle has a high ratio of area to perimeter to claim cost-efficiency, because you're structurally constrained to owning maximally cost-inefficient strip shapes.

Re:IKEA buys 11,000 acres of U.S. forest to keep it from bei... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday January 27, 2021 @09:36PM (#25937413)
Doesn't that risk someone buying the land behind your strip and developing it?

But assuming your scenario is the right one:

Buying only the border land is a strict improvement in efficiency over my plan. Instead of paying X million for land and Y million for security to protect a huge swath of rainforest, you only have to pay X/50 for land and Y million for security. Who cares about what percent goes to what, you're saving tons of rainforest for even less money.

In the extreme you might realize you don't even need to buy any land, you're just paying for security to protect the rainforest. Instead of paying 100 billion to own and never visit, you pay 1 billion a year to protect land you don't own. Which... sounds fine to me!