The beginning of a new year is an excellent time to make a personally important announcement. It’s time for FREE to find a new president, and our board has begun the search. Fortunately, my good friend and colleague Pete Geddes will continue his excellent work as Executive Vice President.

I’ll remain at FREE as Founding Scholar, help organize conferences, sustain contact with our traditional funders, and increase my writing on economic adaptation to changing circumstances. Ramona and I are especially interested in developing FREE’s program in environmental stewardship for religious leaders. We are planning to produce a book and develop a curriculum concerned with public policy and environmental ethics for religious leaders and seminary professors.

It’s hard to imagine a better position than heading a Bozeman-based foundation devoted to harmonizing liberty, ecology, and prosperity. Yet it’s time for me to shift to a more reflective, less active role.

I first came to Bozeman forty years ago and, after a systematic search throughout the Northwest (and with great luck), made it my home. I bought our modest ranch back when agriculture could pay it off. Ramona and I have dialed it in to meet our lifestyle, and now it’s time to share and enjoy it.

We’ve built a comfortable home, and restored a small spring creek with a self-sustaining fishery and a series of ponds. They are filled with viable populations of brown, brook, cutthroat, and rainbow trout. We delight in sharing our good fortune with occasional guests with guides, as well as Eagle Mount’s Camp Brave Heart kids undergoing cancer treatment. Most recently, we have improved pond access and ranch facilities to better accommodate the wounded warriors brought to Bozeman by the Warriors and Quiet Waters Foundation. (This is an all volunteer organization that FREE helped create and we urge you to support it.)

We have placed all but about 40 acres of our ranch in an agriculture and wildlife conservation easement with GVLT. In addition to producing grain and hay under center pivots and wheel lines, it provides winter range for a few dozen horses and habitat for birds, mule deer, and occasionally the Cottonwood elk herd. The ranch includes a mile and a half of ditch-rider road on the Kleinschmidt Canal, as well as several miles of trails for our hiking—and for volunteer fire departments to practice off-road driving with their 52,000-pound rigs. (It’s a great treat to drive powerful, beautiful, all-wheel drive fire trucks on our own land!)

In sum, having grown up on farms and loving agriculture, we have our ideal place in which to ease into retirement while still having the health and physical capacities to enjoy and share it.

We look forward to hosting FREE’s conferences and entertaining friends. We’re very lucky indeed to live here, especially now. While Montana will always be the most remote of the contiguous 48 states, the costs of distance have declined dramatically, while the diseconomies and discomforts of large urban areas seem to have increased (at least to us).

Ideally, FREE’s next president will live here fulltime. However, FREE’s conference schedule and today’s technology may well permit its leader to be at a major university or think tank, with frequent visits and summers spent in Bozeman.

FREE needs a leader with substantial scholarly credentials and accomplishments—and the proven ability or promise to secure independent funding. FREE has always been, and will remain, a solidly independent organization. As a matter of principle, we accept neither corporate contracts nor federal grants. Both may taint independent inquiry.

These are trying times, financially and politically. It’s easy to do well when conditions are good. When the rain falls and livestock and grain prices are high, it’s hard to have a bad year ranching. Likewise, when the endowments of grant making foundations are growing and they need to make ever-larger dispersions, think tank management is easy.

Now it’s less so. However, FREE’s work in policy analysis is ever more important. The costs of error and the benefits of good policy are greater. The challenges of FREE’s next president are to understand why this is important and then communicate this wisdom to important opinion leaders and decision makers.