February 22, 1997 marks the centennial of the creation of the national forest system. We can learn a lot from America’s century-long romance with sylvan socialism. This Progressive Era experiment featured centralized planning by green Platonic despots; it has inspired America’s environmental legislation ever since. The Progressive Era reformers, in contrast to America’s Founding Fathers, […]

The cowboy symbolizes the American West and universal manly virtues. For a few decades these rugged individualists ran roughshod over the wild expanse of the West, herding cattle, taming broncs, and working dawn to dusk. In myth, the cowboy still is the West at its best. But times they are a changing. The West isn’t […]

The timber wolf is an icon of the changing West. It also offers a litmus test of the ability to think clearly. Emotional baggage is chained to the species like a # 4 Victor, the trapper’s tool of choice. Ranchers I’ve known for 30 years have come untrained, loudly sputtering at me for defending the […]

Whether we’re trying to save species or specie, decisions are based on information and incentives. Regulations that generate poor incentives simply won’t work. Good intentions are not enough. Congress tried to protect endangered species via the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. Prior to 1973, landowners could freely use their land, even if endangered species […]

Here is my gift to you for this Christmas season and the ones to follow. If you have friends and relatives for whom it’s hard to buy holiday gifts, you’ll find economic thinking helpful indeed. But you may wonder how economists, followers of the “dismal science,” can contribute to the holiday season? Surely not by […]

“By establishing a nonprofit trust to manage the Presidio’s property, it gives us a blueprint for national parks that one day will be able to sustain themselves without government funds,” President Bill Clinton announced last month. He was in part referring to legislation he signed which turned over management of the Presidio National Park in […]

In Idaho, state wildlife biologists are doing something they never learned in college—teaching trout how to eat native foods. It seems that the hatchery-raised fish, fed a diet of protein pellets instead of stoneflies, have developed rather discriminating palates. They react to worms and other traditional fare the way most five-year-olds do to broccoli. This […]

The first lesson of international relations is that democracies don’t go to war with on another. In his 1994 State of the Union addresss, President Clinton said that no two democracies have ever warred with each other. The conventional wisdom is that world peace can be achieved through universal democracy. Unfortunately, this is not quite […]

Some day, a politician will offer reforms harmonizing environmental quality with responsible liberty and modest prosperity. This niche in our political ecology is vacant. Incentives to fill it have been weak. This, however, is rapidly changing. Republican representative Sherwood Boehlert of NY said, “There were some valuable lessons learned by some who ignored environmental policy […]

The First Amendment of the Constitution safeguards that most essential feature of democracy: the liberty to communicate ideas and advocate alternatives to the status quo. It protects freedom of the press, speech, assembly, and religion. It guarantees our right to complain to and about the government. Environmental advocates use these freedoms to champion reform. Greenpeace […]