It's time for some good news about America. By historical standards, the vast majority of Americans are exceedingly well off. This is important because richer is healthier, safer - and more environmentally sensitive.

We have greatly improved environmental quality since the first Earth Day. However, the easy problems have been solved. More complex issues of disappearing habitat, ineffective regulations, and sullied industrial sites called brown fields, require innovative policies.

This has created a new breed of environmental activist-environmental entrepreneurs. Environmental entrepreneurs specialize in identifying conservation opportunities, mobilizing resources, and building a constituency for conservation. They are leading this change by developing an experimental and non-doctrinaire field, conservation based development (CBD).

This new movement recognizes the importance of entrepreneurship. Members appreciate voluntary cooperation and understand how incentives can foster environmental quality in the same way they cause people to write new software.

Consider the three types of entrepreneurs. Frist are the well known for profit ventures that create "green" products, for example sweaters from the Growers' Wool Cooperative of Belgrade. Second are their counterparts in government who create new institution arrangements that foster environmental ends. Changing institutions to recognize secure, defensible rights to quality habitat illustrates this potential. Third are the creators of public, non-governmental organizations, for example the Gallatin Valley Land Trust. Such NGOs enable people to cooperatively achieve social goals

These developments are encouraging - and increasingly common. Examples include:

* Ecotrust is a Portland based nonprofit "bank". It engages the forces of social and economic development by building on the cultural and economic traditions of local communities. It works with locals who depend on nature for their livelihood.

* The Sonoran Institute (which has a Bozeman office) is another that believes that conservation works best when designed and supported by local people. In particular, it works with ranchers and small towns to help them preserve open space and a sense of community.

Today the intellectual and ethical high ground is held by those who appreciate the importance of incentives and prosperity to environmental quality. The entrepreneurs who created these organizations are innovators. They challenge conventions and create new arrangements of people and resources.

But change isn't easy. People are generally most comfortable when consorting, conversing, and cooperating with those who share and reinforce their personal perspectives, values, and approaches. Earth Firsters! usually hang out with their cultural brethren, Wise Use advocates with theirs.

Entrepreneurs test these conventions. Successful environmental entrepreneurs understand they must become part of local communities. They don't make the elitist conclusion that people merely want the wrong things. They don't insist that people exchange their old values.

Just as the ethical and economic problems inherent to socialism ultimately brought down the Iron Curtain, command-and-control environmentalism has lost legitimacy. Rethinking approaches to natural resource management challenges all. Creative, constructive ideas are scarce.

National politicians are no help. Prominent western Republican natural resource policy makers like Don Young of Alaska (Chairman of the House Resource Committee) and Helen Chenoweth of Idaho (Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health) parade under the banner of free enterprise while demanding subsidies for environmentally destructive resource exploitation on public lands. Democrats fail to offer new or constructive alternatives, defaulting to the failed orthodoxy of "improved" regulation and "integrated" agency oversight.

Elected policy makers and appointed bureaucrats want to maintain their control. They disparage green entrepreneurs. However, politicians' failures to deliver constructive, effective policy reform has left this niche open. Environmental entrepreneurs are filling it.

Even in the for profit world where bottom lines provide clear and compelling feedbacks, few entrepreneurs succeed. In conservation based development, entrepreneurs are subject not only to financial reality checks but also to the goals of equity and environmental quality.

I often advised my MBA students, "Everyone works for love and money and no one gets enough of either". This surely applies to green entrepreneurs. Their work is often tough slogging, especially in places where the tradition is to exploit natural resources with little sensitivity.

No one knows how to create entrepreneurs - and economists can't model their behavior. Motivations and talents are highly personal. However the "money and love" principle, no one gets enough of either, remains a key to success. When conservationists, people who desire a sustainable future, see environmental entrepreneurs chasing their vision, let's give them both.