Here's a benchmark to evaluate environmental policy: economic security and environmental protection go together. Conversely, when environmental policies thwart material wants, green goals languish. Only when environmental policies foster economic security and productivity can we reasonably expect long term protection. This understanding helps us protect environmental values.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Garrett Hardins' "Tragedy of the Commons" are bench marks of environmental history. Both works were in process for years, noted only by a few professionals and by a elite audience. In October of 1993 a new benchmark of environmental thinking was established at Airlie House, a conference center near Washington D.C. Under the auspices of the Claiborne-Ortenberg Foundation, a group of 60 people from 20 countries met to reconsider environmentalism. The group included anthropologists, field biologists, tribal leaders and donors.

Their thinking is summarized in a brief, attractive booklet, The View from Airlie House. They concluded that despite elaborate efforts, the conventional approach to conservation wasn't working. One critical reason is strategic:

"The chief strategy of conservationists for more than a century has been exclusionary and implicitly misanthropic....establish protected areas ...and then safeguarding these areas by carefully limiting human use....The methods of this strategy have been proscription and enforcement--laws and penalties, wardens and guns, in some cases fences and gates....Biological diversity can't be preserved...by setting it aside within protected areas. "

The participants identified five flaws in this approach. First is the problem inherent to "island ecology". Small protected areas lose diversity over time. Second, this protected area strategy is too costly and scattered to protect the world's biologically rich landscapes. Third, governments lack the means to protect borders of sanctuaries. Fourth, "The protected-area approach, dependent on centralized power and top-down planning, has often robbed rural communities of their traditional user-rights over forests, waters, fisheries, and wildlife, without offering appropriate remuneration." Hence, local people see conservation efforts as anti-development and anti-people.

Finally, this strategy amplifies conflict. "Blockading rural people against the use of their own landscape without offering them viable alternatives will always, to the blockaded, seem perverse and intolerable. And will always, consequently be futile." Although the focus at Airlie House was upon the Third World, this is also a good but incomplete explanation of the origins of the Wise Use Movement in the American West. The institutions that yield anti-protection sentiments throughout the Third World operate in the rural areas of the US and Canada.

The approach developed at Airlie is based on a series of case studies from around the world. It features positive local participation, not proscription and enforcement alone. It seeks ways to make local communities the beneficiaries and custodians of conservation efforts. The phrase "community-based conservation" captures the essence of their approach.

Earlier conservation efforts to protect public goods were based on exclusion and enforcement. This approach isn't viable over the long term. Communal use rights and systems of tenure are ignored. Resources go to the politically favored. This is the prevailing outcome when ever politicians can buy favor by granting access to natural resources.

What's true in America is even stronger in third world nations. Absence secure tenure, rural communities lack standing in decision making. As a result, they lack incentives to manage for sustainability. Their incentives are to consider short term interests and immediate gain. Over the long term, environmental protection is impossible with out recognition of property rights and markets.

It will be difficult for many greens, however sincere or intelligent, to accept the View from Airlie, i.e., the positive linkage between use by local people and the protection of biodiversity. In today's environmental culture economy and ecology don't often mix. The Foundation for Deep Ecology wants us to ignore the laws of economics. Unfortunately for them, economic behavior seems "hard wired" into our nature by the evolutionary process.

But fortunately, well off, well educated people normally consider environmental quality an essential goal for a responsible culture. According to Evert Ladd of the American Enterprise Institute, nearly three quarters of American voters consider themselves environmentalists.

Politicians who ignore this pervasive pro environmental feeling are in peril. Voters did not reject environmental goals in the 1994 election. Rather they found repugnant the statist, bureaucratic, command-and-control means to green ends exemplified by the EPA's approach to wetlands and its management of Super Fund sites.

Free market and free trade advocates are also challenged by the View from Airlie. Strong local communities are often eroded by international trade. Local markets involve personal relations and feelings. Can they be protected from the relentless workings of the market process at the international level? It's not clear that the answer is yes. The drive toward bottom line efficiency usually erodes traditions--including the sense of place so critical to preservation.

The View from Airlie offers an innovative perspective on effective and viable protection of ecological values. This is progress. We've tried command and control and found it wanting. It's time for community-based conservation and for rethinking environmentalism.