Today's wilderness preservation movement exemplifies a remarkable convergence of radically different ideas. Here¹s an example, one of many. It features the ideas of libertarian economists and green activists.

Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman is the champion of those who envision a minimalist government. Among his radical proposals is to sell the National Forests. His 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, was written for the general reader and was ignored or scorned by intellectuals. However, it has been extraordinarily influential, even prescient. The ripples of his ideas have become tides.

Professor Friedman argued that political agencies are captured by special interests. As a result, both economic efficiency and environmental quality are trumped by bureaucratic and political forces. Both of these values, he argues, would be better served if the National Forests were insulated from political management.

Nearly 30 years ago at the University of Montana I debated Milton on the wisdom - and feasibility - of his radical proposal for transferring ownership of the National Forests. I argued a better strategy would be to reform the Forest Service. I underestimated the power of his ideas, the pathology of governmental bureaucracies, and the adaptability of the environmental movement.

I should have known better, but I truly believed the Forest Service was a splendid agency, managing for the greater good and the long run. I saw problems as only occasional aberrations.

While a graduate student studying political economy I worked to help preserve the Lincoln-Scapegoat Backcountry of the Helena National Forest. We feared the ravages of bureaucratic ambition in the Forest Service and the avarice of timber companies seduced by heavily subsidized logs. To justify the timber sales and the expensive, extensive road system they would require, the Forest Service wildly exaggerated the volume, quality, and even the species of trees on this forest.

The local community knew the forest far better than the transient, upwardly mobile Forest Service bureaucrats. They saw the lies and intuited their implications, a transformed but transitory economy. They anticipated the closure of the few small, family run local mills and the export of logs from "their" forest to the huge corporate mills in Missoula. Since the timber volume was far less than the agency claimed, cut-and-run logging would soon exhaust supplies.

The Forest Service made serious efforts to stifle local input. Only heroic efforts by a few articulate, impassioned residents saved the Lincoln Backcountry.

This was my great awakening. Behavior I thought deviant was actually the bureaucratic norm. Truth is a stubborn thing and again and again people witnessed similar behavior in forests across the nation. Conclusions were drawn and strategies evolved.

Milton wrote Capitalism and Freedom to keep the ideal of limited government alive until circumstances changed. They surely have-and people are responding. Leaders in today's wilderness preservation movement mold once disparate ideas into real reforms.

Former Earth First activist, Mitch Friedman, is head of the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance. He and his colleagues just raised $13.4 million dollars to buy 25,000 acres of old growth timber in the Loomis Forest from Washington State. His goal is to protect this land as wilderness, not to log it.

Friedman raised an impressive amount of money because he felt the protections that come from secure and defensible property rights (i.e., contract and deed restrictions) were preferable to campaigning for transient governmental protection. This is a notable change in strategy. Why is the environmental movement undergoing important changes? I offer two explanations.

First, people's demand for wilderness and other ecological values is much like their demand for BMW's, foreign travel, and gourmet food. It increases disproportionately with wealth and education. Mitch tapped Microsoft millionaires, and people like me and my enviro friends, to buy timber rights on the Loomis Forest. I signed a check for one acre. A VP at Microsoft could "buy" 100 acres with appreciated stock and take a huge tax deduction. Second, Americans are politically more sophisticated. Few believe huge bureaucracies will do the right thing. After months of trying to work with the Washington State legislature, one supporter said, "We can raise the money. Let's just buy the timber to save it."

Milton's strategy of keeping ideas alive until conditions change is paying off and not only with Mitch. The Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and hundreds of small land trusts are gaining ever more support. The 95,000 acre Baca Ranch in New Mexico may finally be sold to the Forest Service. But as part of the deal, trustees, not the Forest Service, would operate it as a working ranch.

Social movements, like ecosystems, evolve. The Northwest Ecosystem Alliances' purchase of timber on the Loomis Forest illustrates how strange bed fellows make interesting children.

This column was nationally syndicated by Bridge News and Knight Ridder.