Environmental think tanks exist to foster constructive reforms. That's why FREE and Gallatin Writers launched a $35,000 contest. The goal is to generate innovative ways to help preserve the Upper Missouri River, its culture, and its economy.

The bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (2003-2005) will focus world attention upon the Upper Missouri, especially the 139-mile Wild and Scenic portion in Montana. This stretch is a mosaic of private, state, and federal land. It is extremely attractive, with magnificent white limestone cliffs and spectacular topographic relief.

Currently, the area receives modest commercial and private recreational use. However, with the impending bicentennial, the success of Stephen Ambrose's recent book, "Undaunted Courage," and Ken Burns' PBS special on Lewis and Clark, interest in and recreational use of this section is increasing dramatically. As a result, a national treasure is at risk.

In its concluding act, the Clinton administration has proposed upgrading the federal status of the river from Wild and Scenic, a relatively weak federal protection, to the fuller protection claimed by national monument or national park designation. The designation would only apply to the federal lands. Yet the majority of acres along the upper stretch of the corridor (from Coal Banks Landing to the Judith River) are private. Consolidating ownership to compose a fully federal land corridor along the river would be costly, time-consuming, and controversial. Ultimately, it would eliminate many family farms and ranches.

The Missouri River corridor from Fort Benton to the Montana-North Dakota border is home to some of the world's largest wheat farms. Ranchers and farmers historically have used the river bottom lands for grazing and for pumping stations for irrigating the bench lands above. It would take tens of millions of dollars for the federal government to buy out existing landowners to consolidate ownership. Given the anti-federal political climate of Montana and the West, the likelihood that Congress could amass such funds (probably over the objections of Montana's congressional representatives) is slim.

Conservation strategies usually fail without the cooperation of private landowners. "The View from Airlie," a book supporting community-based conservation, explains why the exclusion of locals from local environmental decisions precipitates failure. Here's its critique: "The chief strategy of conservationists for more than a century has been exclusionary and implicitly misanthropic ... establish protected areas .... and then safeguard these areas by carefully limiting human use.... Blockading rural people against the use of their own landscape without offering them viable alternatives will always, to the blockaded, seem perverse and intolerable. And will always, consequently be futile."

How then can we protect the Upper Missouri?

First, we know that valuable but unmanaged resources are systematically overused. Concurrently, many noncommercial values are ignored and despoiled. It follows that without cooperative management, the commons of the Upper Missouri would suffer serious degradation.

Second, we know that the qualities of ecosystems are time and place specific. Centralized, bureaucratic mandates from Washington are often inappropriate to these local circumstances. Uniform environmental policies that ignore differing local conditions produce unintended effects. For example, efforts to eliminate fire from the national forests ultimately leads to holocaust. Third, Westerners traditionally move stuff, not symbols. However, environmentalists have long advocated policies that undermined the work culture of the West's loggers, miners, and ranchers. The administration's proposal exemplifies this conflict. Resentment and anti-environmentalist fallout follow. Last guys don't finish nice.

Creative, flexible and adaptive ideas are increasingly welcome among progressive, incentive based, environmental groups. Such ideas are essential when coordinating environmental protection across multiple ownerships such as along the Upper Missouri. Given the constraints inherent to large governmental bureaucracies, this flexibility and adaptability are elusive under politically centralized management.

Smart, sincere greens recognize the positive links among well defined property rights, prosperity, and ecological sustainability. They've seen well-intended political programs lead to corruption and environmental harm. Trout Unlimited, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife understand ecology is too important to trust to politics and remote bureaucracies.

Thus, in cooperation with Gallatin Writers, FREE has established a $35,000 contest to solicit and rank proposals exploring alternative institutional arrangements to protect the Wild and Scenic portion of the Upper Missouri River.

Our nationally respected, five-member jury includes author Stephen Ambrose and Pat Shea, former director of BLM, the managing agency of this section of the River. This competition was opened to all individuals and teams of individuals, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions worldwide. Check our web site http://free-eco.org/rfp/index.html for more information and innovative proposals.