On February 18 the Montana Policy Institute and the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) co-sponsored an environmental policy conference in Bozeman. The title, “Your Land is My Land: Property Rights in Montana,” suggests this was not a typical Green gathering. And it surely wasn’t.

The introduction to the program agenda provided the orientation, noting that the Montana Constitution guarantees “a clean and healthful environment” as a right. Many citizens infer that governmental regulations are the key to this guarantee. However, this discounts the importance of private property rights to habitat, open space, wetlands, and clean water “husbanded by landowner and enjoyed by the public at large.”

Although neither Ramona nor I had attended a PERC event for some twenty-five years, we found this meeting attractive for several reasons.

First, it was a public offering on a topic of great interest to us. We are intellectually interested in discovering and fostering complementarities among environmental quality, secure property, responsible liberty, and stewardship.

Second is a practical concern. We have placed the great majority of our modest ranch in a conservation easement with the Gallatin Valley Land Trust and have improved and protected excellent fish and wildlife habitat. We regularly share access to wildlife, especially trout fishing, with Warriors and Quiet Waters, Eagle Mount, and neighbors. Occasionally, we also rent a ranch apartment to fly-fishers who fish here and use our place as a base when fishing and exploring the Greater Yellowstone region.

Third, given current and growing disenchantment, and indeed fear, of intrusive government and ballooning budgets, we were curious about attendance at the event. We, and the sponsors, were more than a little amazed. Carl Graham, Executive Director of the Montana Policy Institute, told me he would have been extremely pleased if 100 people came. Actually, over 200 paid the fee to attend—and nearly all stayed the entire day. Amazing! I find a ton of information in that number.

Fourth, the two featured speakers, Randy O’Toole of the Cato Institute of DC and Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute have been good friends for several decades. They have participated in FREE’s conferences for federal judges and other programs. Both have earned excellent, and controversial, national reputations. It’s always a treat to hear them and talk with them. I was not disappointed.

Hayward and O’Toole have each done a great deal of environmental writing. They’re both remarkably productive scholars who critique bureaucratic pathologies, sloppy and dishonest science, and sorry implications of Green religious expressions. In addition to his books, Hayward is co-author of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators.

Hayward’s luncheon talk focused on the follies of climate change politics, a topic he has addressed for a decade. He is perceptive, quite funny, and honest. Al Gore would not be pleased. Whatever the reality, speed, or severity of climate change, Hayward’s work merits serious attention.

O’Toole was trained as a forest economist. When I met him in Oregon 30 years ago, Randy represented a remnant of the sylvan socialism of Gifford Pinchot’s Progressive Era forestry of the early 1900s.

Randy is a life long committed environmentalist. He began his work contracting with various conventional environmental groups to analyze the forest plans of dozens of the nation’s forests. His task was to explain why good people with good intentions did unambiguously bad things.

Why, Randy asked, did the U.S. Forest Service so consistently offer timber sales that lost huge sums of money (on an inventory given to them for free) while generating massive environmental damage? In addition to producing a monthly magazine Forest Watch, in 1988 Island Press published his book Reforming the Forest Service.

This book, and several that followed, explained bad behavior. They do so not by reference to evil people, while surely there are some, but rather by examining the incentives and information produced by inappropriate institutions.

It’s extremely difficult to adjust behavior by fixing people’s morals. However, if we understand the institutions and analyze the incentives, we can design reform.

I believe the underlying topic of this conference, the relationship between property rights and the environment, is important to all of us who care about the West’s environment, liberty, and the economy. It challenged those who default to governmental solutions when a problem arises. And as O’Toole has written, people “almost invariably have been disappointed (by) the result.”

For the past 100 years, environmentalists have relied primarily on government to achieve their goals via a mechanical, bureaucratic, engineering approach. Alas, in addition to not working well (while often enriching special interests like the ethanol lobby), this fosters a neglect of an ecological alternative.

Simply stated, social as well as natural systems are infinitely complex and always adjusting. I predict that the positive potential of property rights and voluntary coordination will become recognized as a valuable complement to the regulation required to protect us from noxious spillovers and the opportunists who produce them.

Further, as governmental budgets at all levels are stressed, and they surely will be, environmentalists will seek private sector alternatives to achieve their goals. And, at least among the smart and honest, this should enhance appreciation of property rights.