Entrepreneurs are visionaries who see innovative ways to move resources to higher value. These resources include knowledge, ideals, and good intentions. Entrepreneurs make immense contributions to our wealth, health, and well-being.

Noted entrepreneurs, Henry Ford and Bill Gates for example, created businesses that changed the world. The great majority of research on entrepreneurship focuses on creating new business successes. Montana State University’s TechRanch is devoted to this goal.

But some of the most important and beneficial results of entrepreneurship do not arise from profit-oriented business. Consider Florence Nightingale’s work, begun in the Crimean War in the 1850s. She created the field of nursing and the entire world benefits from this remarkable achievement. Remembered as a pioneer of the Red Cross movement, Nightingale also exemplifies social entrepreneurship.

Here is a local example with national implications. Greta and Bob Mathis created Eagle Mount in 1983. Its web site explains: “[P]ersons with special needs are challenged to achieve the previously unthinkable in skiing, ice skating, swimming, horseback riding, golfing, and more. Children with cancer are given the freedom of normalcy participating in one of three summer oncology camps.”

This success is the product of talent and dedication applied to the goal of helping others. The genius of success lies in finding a means of mobilizing talent and good intentions. The mission was clear and unambiguous: help folks with disabilities enjoy outdoor experiences we take for granted. Only a misanthrope could argue with the goal. The means were relatively clear: provide safe mobility to those with disabilities so they could recreate outdoors. Working with Eagle Mount is its own reward. With Eagle Mount the goal was clear and success easily measured; 980 skier days at Bridger Bowl, for example.

Sixty years ago Ducks Unlimited was an entrepreneurial effort with a clear mission, to save rapidly vanishing habitat. “Providing places for waterfowl to live and thrive is our No. 1 goal....” Last year they raised nearly $200 million, 87 percent of which went to conservation, and DU conserved 220,000 acres of habitat, mainly through contracts. These too are clear metrics.

Few environmental problems are this straightforward. When confronting such massive and diffuse environmental challenges as climate change, it is extremely difficult to find appropriate means of achieving laudable ends. Environmental issues consistently share these two characteristics: high scientific complexity and heavy emotional baggage. These are ingredients for error, acrimony, and poor policy. It is all too easy to specify lofty goals and assume positive outcomes. But, when love and professed good intentions fail, folks face strong temptations to use coercive power. This is seductive and dangerous. Without an understanding of basic economic principles, commonly accepted command-and-control “solutions” to environmental problems portend great mischief and worse, especially for the poor. Today’s movement to merge religion and ecology runs precisely this risk.

Religious leaders are lending their moral authority to struggles over environmental policy. For example, the Evangelical Environmental Network launched its “What Would Jesus Drive” campaign, associating poor gas mileage with immorality and advocating stricter government fuel economy regulations. Even in Bozeman, on Mother’s Day one earnest protester carried a sign reading “Buying Gas Is A Sin.” Really?

Many religious leaders see an inherent conflict between a market economy and environmental stewardship. This is indeed unfortunate; the only effective approach to environmental reform harmonizes environmental quality with responsible liberty and economic progress.

Here’s an important task for environmental entrepreneurs: create an environmentalism complementing America’s founding ideals and religious traditions and present it to the emerging Green religious movement. Its leaders should understand poverty, not affluence, is the stronger enemy of the environment.

Only when people can provide the basics for their families will they focus on environmental quality. “These wild things,” Aldo Leopold reminds us in A Sand County Almanac, “had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast.”

Here is FREE’s new project. We believe religious leaders’ environmental advocacy would benefit from knowledge of basic economic principles. Modeled on our seminar series for federal judges, now in its fifteenth year, we will develop a program to reach them with a positive, pro-environment message. This is our latest effort in social entrepreneurship.