Deep questions. I don't have many answers, but I have also thought about this topic.
With regards to owning the ocean, I think that ownership will happen as seasteading enters the main stream. Bill Gates will not own the entire ocean, but small operators will own bits and pieces of it. No one will own an entire species, but they'll be able to protect all species through the portion of the ocean that they seastead.
Walter Block also covered many of your points in this video:
He addresses the subject of water at around 30:22, but he sort of glosses over the question of overfishing. His answer to that was sort-of a hand-wave.
Also, somewhat related, I wrote Making Wildlife Conservation Fun and Profitable here on steemit a while ago. May as well link to it as it drifts into oblivion. ; -)
Lastly,
I remain thoroughly unconvinced property rights will be sufficient to address and redress every environmental slight, especially when it comes to international areas like the ocean and the ocean’s resources.
I'm not sure that's the right standard. It's important to avoid the trap of comparing free market environmentalism against our desired ideal. Replace the words "property rights" with "government action" and I think your statement is still true. No solution is perfect.
For any particular environmental problem, the question has to be, is the government solution better than the market solution? I am suspicious of absolutes, so I strongly suspect that government would win on some issues and markets would win on others, but if we're going to use force against people in certain cases, we'd better be pretty darned sure that we've ruled out all voluntary solutions and that our ideas aren't going to make things worse. All too often with government action, the cure is worse than the disease.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'm going to watch the YouTube video and then come back and comment, and do the same for your post. But I wanted to address your last two paragraphs now.
Yes, absolutely. I've often lamented that the government isn't better at protecting the environment. However, I feel right now, in the real world, as (crony) capitalist markets are, that they are better than a "free" market solution (since I don't believe one can actually exist in 2017). Simply because private property and tort laws are not set up correctly to address this issue, and common resources are not clearly defined under the law (as Murray and Smith point out in this article). Therefore, massive, spiraling, lobbyist "cures" are the best we have. And honestly, I don't see this issue being resolved any time soon. Libertarians can't seem to get elected to any powerful office, and the duopoly isn't interested in anything but big government. I point again to my sea turtle example, and, because you're also right, I immediately contradict myself with an example of bald eagles: they're federally protected, but dying by the masses because their prey is being shot with lead bullets and they're poisoned. The federal government isn't doing anything about that, and I'm sure if they did, some other unintended consequence would rear its ugly head.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes! :) I completely agree, except to the extent that using force against people in this case is the role of the government. My very narrow definition of the government's role is "To protect me from you and you from me" from personal and property harm. Polluting and harming the ecosystem falls under that umbrella in my worldview. Again, I know this is a slippery slope because as these authors pointed out, the "environment" is synonymous with "everything." So I really don't have an answer except to go with what we've been going with because we're not all dead yet, which I know is a completely terrible, moot argument.
I'd like to address one more excellent point you made:
Yes. This. I actually had another looong paragraph written in response to this statement but I decided to make a post about it instead! Thanks for the idea, the dialogue, and the excellent references. I feel like steemit is leaps and bounds ahead of every other social media platform in this regard, and I've only been here about 2 weeks! (Also, there seems to be a lot less trolling, although perhaps that's because I'm staying in my sheltered corner of steemit.)