The Yellowstone Primer

This introduction to the management of the Yellowstone area collects chapters by a range of authors, most of whom would identify themselves as free market environmentalists. Michael Copeland has provided a good introductory chapter introducing the term and reviewing what it means. Like most edited volumes, the quality of the chapters varies. Fortunately, the average quality here is pretty good. Free market environmentalism is a very useful corrective to conventional ways of thinking about national parks, national forests, and other public lands. It forces you to ask questions: what if the USFS simply sold off or leased its land? Would The Nature Conservancy buy some? Would timber companies buy some, and what would they do with it? Would we get better protection of wilderness if people had to pay more to use it? As you would expect, the book is full of criticisms of government and the people who work for it - - who are always "bureaucrats," never "officials" or even "government employees." The authors recognize in theory that the market doesn't always work, and their arguments are appropriately hedged by recognition of market failures. However, they never recognize any examples in practice where governments outperform markets. This failure to acknowledge any examples of good government or poor markets leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and makes the book feel more like ideology than economic analysis. More surprisingly, the book is full of praise for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the way that they manage, or would manage, lands. The authors all assume that NGOs are well behaved and public-spirited, and are not staffed by "bureaucrats." This is clearly unreasonable. For example, NGOs, like governments, are subject to principal-agent problems. Because of a lack of electoral accountability, it is not obvious to me that NGOs are necessarily more accountable than public officials. They are accountable to their donors, of course, unless they are sitting on large endowments that allow them the freedom to pursue their own interests. The contributors to this volume also like to overuse particular anecdotes. Because the Audubon Society used to develop oil and gas reserves in its Paul J. Rainey Sanctuary Preserve (Louisiana), the authors suggest granting NGOs oil and gas leases in wildernesses around the country. But Audubon has been widely criticized for this policy, and it ceased production in 1999 (after this book was written). A second overused-example is International Paper Corporation, one of the nation's largest landowners. Because IPC sells hunting rights on some of its lands, and manages those lands for hunting and not for timber production, the authors suggest that private management of forests serves wildlife and recreational values. That certainly sounds nice, but IPC makes most of its money from timber, and mostly plants monocrop softwoods in the South, which it harvests by clearcutting-neither of which are ec