Let's celebrate our most creative laborers -- the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have been neglected by economists and ignored or derided by environmentalists. Environmentalist Al Gore sees entrepreneurial innovation as "alchemy of a very dangerous form". Economist Mark Casson notes that economic modelling "leaves no role for the entrepreneur." The economics discipline has become ever more abstract and mathematical. Economists are selected for their sophistication in math and statistics, not their understanding of how the world works. They have no way of modelling the creative uncertainty of entrepreneurs. Hence, economics neglects them.

This is too bad, because everyone works for love and money and no one gets enough of either. It is indeed unfortunate that entrepreneurs aren't at least appreciated if not loved for they are the catalysts of progress and change. They seek opportunities to create value--but the values sought need not be measured in dollars.

We find successful entrepreneurs in the environmental and human service contexts but more would be welcome. They created Habitat for Humanity, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Eagle Mount (a Bozeman organization providing skiing, horseback riding and other outdoor activities to disabled children).

Here's one way entrepreneurs affected the wood products industry. Just twenty years ago approximately 40% of the logs brought to mills ended as waste. Processing and disposing of the unusable wood cost labor and money and resulted in pollution. Teepee burners converted nearly half of each log into disposable wastes, toxic by-products, and sulphurous air pollution.

Radical environmentalists used such examples to advocate a "return to nature". They rejected capitalism, science, technology, and economic progress. Mankind should break the shackles of urban decay and industrial blights like the paper mills, and become hunter-gatherers and organic farmers, living in peace with the land. Their romantic solution ignores the power of the entrepreneur to bring economic progress and environmental improvement. The next chapter in the timber mill story illustrates this.

Since the 1970s, entrepreneurial innovation has transformed forest products into a leaner, cleaner industry. Entrepreneurs found value where waste and pollution once dominated. They effectively processed the once unusable fiber into valuable goods like particle board. Entrepreneurial energies created value while by reducing industrial impact on the environment. The teepee burners were closed and industrial waste became useful products. Today, less than 5% of wood rolling into timber mills is wasted and pollution has been cut 80 to 90 percent.

This entrepreneurial success story reveals a solution antithetical to radical environmentalism. Bringing the masses closer to nature will make them more reliant on natural resources, like trees, soil, and rivers. This primitive, decentralized dependency will lead to increasing, not decreasing, environmental pressures. Professor Martin Lewis writes in his book, Green Delusions, "If we were all to split wood, the United States would be a deforested, soot-choked wasteland within a few decades."

Alternatives to improving environmental quality require tapping entrepreneurial ingenuity and harmonizing our economies with our ecologies. For example, copper mining once faced dual problems: massive pit mines scarred the countryside and a global copper shortage seemed imminent. Now, pit mining is in decline and copper is abundant, because entrepreneurs found a better way. They found sand.

To meet the demands of the the Information Age, entrepreneurs discovered and implemented a substitute for copper in the form of sand-based fiber optics. A fiber optic cable made of 25 kilograms of sand can transmit the same information as a cable made from 1,000 tons of copper.

Such progress pinpoints the key entrepreneurial role. Today, soft drink cans require only a fifth of the metal that they needed in 1975. We adopt stronger metals, better energy efficiency, and smarter designs as entrepreneurs move up learning curves.

Entrepreneurs are also important in the policy arena. Groundwater in the Los Angeles basin is valuable. After World War II, the race to pump water from the West and Central Basins jeopardized the water supply. In her study of groundwater management, Dr. Elinor Ostrom emphasizes "how public entrepreneurship can be used as a strategy to transform the structure of incentives facing those jointly using a [natural resource]" into effective, sustainable solutions. Public entrepreneurs devised arrangements where water pumpers manage themselves to conserve the resource.

The growth of service industries in America, the Information Age, miniturization and the search for "green technologies" all point to a future where economic progress includes environmental protection. Many perceptions of the old "growth versus nature" trade-off are false. With institutions that provide regulatory stability and secure property rights, ecology, liberty, and prosperity become complements, not competitors. We can hope that some year a political entrepreneur will understand these possibilities and mobilize reform.