Montana Ethic Project: Toward free market environmentalism

Joey and Libby Early

Terry Anderson, director of the Property & Environment Research Center, talks about free market environmentalism.

This is the 30th chapter of the 32-part video series “The Montana Ethic Project.” This chapter features Terry Anderson, former executive director of the Property & Environment Research Center, talking about free market environmentalism. You can watch the whole video below. Here is an edited transcript of how it begins:

“I grew up in Bridger, Montana, a little town south of Billings, where my passion was hunting, fishing, hiking, and skiing up at Red Lodge Mountain at the time. I used to spend a good deal around Cooke City when it wasn’t wilderness area with my dad in an old Willy’s jeep, driving in to the lakes to fish when the snow would melt off in the early summer.

“I think it was those experiences that gave me my love of the environment, and love of what all of wholive in Montana care so much about: Big Sky Country.”

Here is another, edited excerpt from Anderson’s presentation:

“Today people from all kinds of environmental groups are using markets. Everyone knows about The Nature Conservancy, a great organization. Here in Montana we have the Montana Land Trust, just a perfect example of people using private property rights and markets to preserve agriculture and our agricultural heritage.

“That concept though, to a lot of Montanans, doesn’t sit very well. The notion that we should have to pay for the environment is almost antithetical to the way people in Montana think. And I think, therein, is an important part of what I think has to change in the psyche of Montanans. I grew up, as I said, in a little town where I could take my shotgun when I was 12 years old and walk out the front door and in a few hundred yards be hunting. I knew everybody. My dad knew the landowners. I knew them. I knew you didn’t go hunt on old lady Jones’s place or she’d kick you off. I knew that if I hunted the land I had to take care of it.

“But we’ve seen big changes since the days when I was 12. And those changes brought a lot of pressures on our resources. Not just pressures to mine, not just pressures to cut trees or to grow crops. But pressures from those of us who compete to get to the Yellowstone Park campground first in July, those of us who compete to get to the best fishing streams or best hunting grounds, those of us who compete for the best camping sites in the wilderness. All these are examples of changes that put pressure on our Big Sky, on our resources that create the amenities that we all know and love.”

PERC—the Property & Environment Research Center—is a proud sponsor of the Montana Ethic Project. To learn how PERC’s ideas can help us honor one another’s rights to land, water, and wildlife,visit perc.org.