Three decades ago I moved from teaching at Indiana University for a position at Montana State. At MSU, I helped create a small institute. While that program was a causality of university politics, its participants prospered. More importantly, its ideas triumphed.

Our goal was to fundamentally change the way opinion leaders thought about protecting and improving environmental quality. Our means was to apply economic principles to complex and contentious issues of natural resource management.

We challenged prevailing orthodoxy. We stressed the ecological importance of incentives, the positive power of environmental entrepreneurship, and the importance of weighing environmental costs ignored in balance sheets.

Much of our work focused on the economic and ecological mischief wrought by the iron triangle of federal agencies, extractive interests, and opportunistic politicians. We emphasized the environmental damage done through politics, e.g., subsidized road building on the national forests.

We found few friends and defenders in the academic, business, and environmental sectors. But that was a long time ago. Today, only Greens whose world view is frozen in the '60s, and their opponents, "lap dogs of industry," confuse this free-market, voluntary-driven, community-based position with pro-business policies.

These once radical ideas have become the norm among progressive, intellectually honest, and successful environmentalists. For example: Rocky Mountain Elk, Pheasant Forever, and Trout Unlimited enjoy accelerating success. These organizations model their efforts on those pioneered by a granddaddy of conservation, Ducks Unlimited (DU). DU's 60-year legacy of habitat protection extends from the arctic tundra of Alaska to the tropical wetlands of Mexico. Since 1937 DU has protected more than 9.4 million acres of waterfowl habitat (an area nearly five times the size of Yellowstone National Park) and has raised over $1.4 billion for conservation.

We still face many environmental challenges, but the environmental movement has been remarkably successful in changing the way Americans think and talk about the environment. In some cases, dramatic changes in behavior have followed. For example, in the 1960s the United States Navy occasionally used whales for target practice, actions untenable today.

We value natural resources far differently than a few decades ago. "Swamps" are now understood as "critical wetlands." Once demonized predators such as wolves adorn our nature books and calendars. Water conservation no longer means building dams.

Changes in the environmental policy landscape have accelerated dramatically in the recent years. For example, the federal buyout of the Crown Butte mine near Yellowstone, and parts of the Headwaters Forest in California, recognize the imperative of respecting property rights. A generation ago public opinion would have supported the "taking" of these lands by political proclamation. We now recognize such acts are infeasible - and in the long-term often grossly counterproductive to protecting ecological values.

When the Sagebrush Rebels advocated decentralization of federal land management in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the idea was repugnant to Greens. Today explorations in decentralization and community-based conservation motivate the movement.

Consider Dan Kemmis, former Mayor of Missoula, and now director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West. He is one of the leading advocates for moving environmental decision-making to regional constituencies. Many federal land management agencies are pursuing collaborative arrangements and experimenting with local stewardship.

These ideas rapidly moved from "radical" to "normal." What implications do these changes have for protecting the cultures and ecological landscapes of the American West?

Over the past decade Gallatin Writers and FREE have explored the root causes of these changes. Their work has stimulated lively strategy debates within the environmental community. This month Gallatin Writers will co-host a small seminar featuring papers exploring this fundamental transformation.

The results will be a resource for conservationists who understand that environmentally responsible policies must respect local interests. This is a logical consequence of understanding the political economy of conservation.

The institute created at MSU, and the organizations it inadvertently spawned, fostered determined and strategic environmental education. They have produced alternatives to dictates of remote federal bureaucrats. Gallatin's forthcoming seminar will meld ecological science, economic realities, and community involvement in exploring the emerging West. We hope this program will advance Stegner's goal of creating a society which matches its scenery.