Economic analysis can promote environmental quality. By identifying subsidies, inefficiencies, and new opportunities, economists apply their powerful analytical tools to environmental ends.

Yet despite its great potential, economic analysis has failed to improve environmental policy in many areas. Environmental regulators often ignore the importance of secure property rights and advocate regulatory "takings" of property with predictable and oft perverse consequences. The Progressives of the early 20th Century, who established the federal land management bureaucracies, completely failed to understand why America's founders were so skeptical of activist, intrusive government. The persistent failures of bureaucracies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management illustrate the founders' wisdom. And too often American ideals of limited government are ignored by agencies and special interests, both of whom gain through wasteful central planning that corrupts good intentions.

Economists have failed to deliver their message because they are neither naturally inclined nor trained to communicate with intelligent non-specialists. The language of economists, calculus and econometrics, are alien to most people. Even when economists share environmental goals and interests with conventional greens, their message is unheard or misinterpretted.

This communication gap between economists, environmental activists, and decision-makers inspired a new organization, the Gallatin Institute. This non-profit, educational and research foundation links essayists, poets, and novelists with economists and policy analysts interested in environmental quality and sensitive to an emerging environmentalist culture. Gallatin works with these purveyors of culture to forge innovative cultural and intellectual foundations for an emerging West.

Shared goals of sustainable economies, ecologies, and cultures would be at the heart of such a New West. To get there, Gallatin first fosters exchange between writers and policy experts. Gallatin Fellows next take these messages to communities.

Environmental concerns increasingly affect the West. Technically complex and highly emotional, they often pit ecological against other human values. These ingredients for error and acrimony provide opportunities for demagogues to work their mischief. Lies go undetected, truths untold, opportuism fostered.

In pursuit of ecological integrity and viable economies, Gallatin Fellows respect the ideals of free and responsible individuals, the importance of community, and the value of voluntary cooperative actions. They agree productive and just economic and social coordination is rarely achieved through force, and never by fraud.

The Gallatin Institute develops thoughtful foundations for constructive policy reform. With support from the Ford Foundation and others, Gallatin hosts working conferences and seminars and provides modest support for writers to produce popular and scholarly articles and books. Its varied ideas and proposals respectfully recognize differing cultures and traditions of the old while articulating a vision for a new West.

When a group of writers met some years back, they envisioned a West moving away from federal dependency, factious division, and unsustainable land use. The Gallatin Institute emerged as one vehicle for ushering in a new West. Its aim is not to provide "the answer" for the New West. Rather, Gallatin promotes an ecumenical, constructive dialogue among leaders of rural communities, Western writers, and policy analysts. Gallatin recognizes that the West must determine its own identity, its own future.

The Institute's emphasis on fostering harmony and responsibility reflects its namesake, Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury under Thomas Jefferson. Albert Gallatin had coherent and yet diverse interests. A fiscal conservative, he stressed simple government and ending public debt. In spite of the Louisiana Purchase and preparations for the War of 1812, Gallatin cut the federal debt by 38% in eight years. He strongly opposed war and was instrumental in negotiating peace with Britain. Gallatin funded the Lewis and Clark expedition and founded New York University and the American Ethnological Society. Like its namesake, Gallatin Institute fosters constructive and peaceful exchange to find a new identity in the West, based on responsibility, cultural and ecological harmony, and self-governance.

The Gallatin Institute brings eclectic writings to the media and general public through several avenues. A new Gallatin Journal, based on writings brought to seminars and community gatherings, will be launched in mid-1996. Two forthcoming Gallatin books, The Next West and Writers on the Range, were generated by the seminars.

A series of op-ed pieces are published in local, regional, and national print and electronic media are produced by the Institute. Under the banners of "Range Writers" and "Writers on the Range", Gallatin's writers produce columns and articles to promote this dialogue in the West.

The Gallatin Institute is one of many examples of environmental entrepreneurship in action, this one in the intellectual arena. The Institute recognizes the important morality, ethics, and the analytic power of economics to explore an emerging West. When writers begin using the potent tools of economic analysis, and if even a few economists return to their ethical/moral roots in Moral Philosophy, then the 21st century will yield a West whose public policies equal the quality of its scenery. For once, I am not keeping my hopes and expectations in separate baskets.