THIS is my last column until I return from Montana next autumn.

While there, I'll continue working on the three E's of environmental policy: ecology, economics and ethics. Only systems that link freedom to act with responsibility for the results of the action work well in dealing with them. Others fail. Linking action with accountability for outcomes is a classic problem of political economy. It plagues efforts to harmonize our environmental and economic interests.

All my columns deal with these themes. Next fall, when I return to FREE's Seattle office and the University of Washington, I will again apply economic thinking to pressing environmental and ethical issues. I often think of my columns while bicycling.

Seattle and a ranch near Bozeman, Mont., are great places to live. For years, I have wanted to make the spring pilgrimage from Seattle to Bozeman by bicycle. This year my wife Ramona and I joined 110 participants for the first week of Cycle America's annual trip across America.

Some bicycle tourists go self-contained. We see these hardy individuals on the road each summer. Their bikes resemble over-loaded pack animals with lumps of clothing, cooking gear, sleeping bags, and tents. Imagine a Porche 911 Carrera towing a U-Haul. These riders proudly identify as self-supported cyclists - others might call them masochists.

In contrast, Cycle America provides fully supported tent touring. Trucks transport the extra clothing, sleeping bags and tents, and vans pick up the stragglers. Meals are prepared by people in local communities. The support staff is excellent, cheerful and highly competent. These cycle tourists are neo-Spartan hedonists.

In the most luxurious kind of bicycle touring, cyclists carry only sun screen, water and a credit card. They sleep at inns and eat fine food. This Stoic Epicurean cycling is my favorite kind of tour. Each year FREE offers such a "Seminar on Wheels" for special friends. These Bozeman-based tours are "rolling salons" with readings for each day and seminar discussions over dinner. Last year we biked from Yellowstone to Glacier National Park. This year we'll tour the Big Hole Country of Southwest Montana.

Linkages between economic and environmental systems are especially clear when cycling. For example, our Cycle America Tour left Bellingham and headed over Rainey and Washington Pass and into Grand Coulee. This area was logged early in the century. We saw large stumps from four to eight feet off the ground. Cyclists asked, "Was logging only in the winter and was stump height determined by snow depth?" No, I explained, the relative value of wood and labor, not snow depth, explains the high stumps of years ago.

America had a huge timber inventory. Trees were so plentiful that their value was often negative. Fertile cleared ground was often worth more than land with standing timber.

Because trees swell at their base, timber cutters created temporary platforms from which they sawed the trees above the butt swell. This left much high quality wood in the forest, but it saved labor. Our ancestors "wasted" wood to economize on labor.

Today the relative values are reversed.

We biked past several dozen sawmills filled with second-growth and third-growth logs. Today, some mills utilize tops down to 2 inches in diameter. Twenty-five years ago, some mills would take no top less than 7 inches. But as relative values shift, the market naturally adjusts, responding quickly to changing scarcities.

Another adjustment is coming. On the third day of the trip, we arrived at Grand Coulee and Lake Roosevelt. I spoke with Gary Kuiper, recently retired superintendent of Lake Roosevelt National Recreational Area. He had served on parks throughout the United States and loves the Park Service.

Throughout his career, he saw politics interfering with sound and sensitive management. He saw no way out of the dilemma between long-term protection and constant short-term political pressures. This political problem is increasingly obvious. It's the natural result of the "scientific management" model of the Progressive Era, a century ago.

This approach assumes federal control by experts uncontaminated by self interest or political pressures. However, bureaucratic and political entrepreneurship normally trump scientific understanding, concern for local communities, and property rights. Ecological damage, economic waste, and ethical violations result.

As problems grow, concerned citizens seek new answers. People who are intellectually and ethically responsible don't expect different results from the same institutions. They want institutional change. To be successful, new approaches must replace political management. I suggest that we adopt a variety of alternative institutional arrangements. These should be modest and careful experiments that rely on various mixes of nonprofit and for-profit organizations, not federal bureaucracies. The feds will monitor, not manage.

We've had a hundred years experience with sylvan socialism and we know a lot about what doesn't work. This summer I'll explore new approaches to these problems with academic and business leaders, federal judges, journalists and environmental writers, and some Montana fun-hog cyclists. I look forward to sharing the results with you during the next academic year.