Ever since its creation in 1985 FREE has worked to advance responsible liberty, sustainable ecology, and modest prosperity. Achieving this trinity of values requires certain institutional arrangements. The primary ones are: the rule of law, secure property rights, and the allocation of resources through the market process.  These must operate in a legal context of environmental protection.

Government is better as a monitor than a manager.  Why? With active management comes rent-seeking. Governments should protect common pool resources, constrain negative externalities, and foster positive spillovers.  I've learned to expect mischief and environmental plunder to follow when politics determine resource management.

Public Choice economics explains why.  My institute at Montana State University, then PERC and FREE, initiated and led the application of Public Choice economics to the sensitive management of America's "romance lands". This is the natural outcome when we are surrounded by parks, wilderness, wildlands, and undammed trout waters.

FREE has never lobbied or engaged in the political process.  Rather, we have always selectively focused on important intellectual leaders, decision makers, and influential writers. To use an analogy, if FREE were a jewelry store it would be Tiffany's not a Zales.

For more than two decades, FREE organized programs with Article III federal judges and distinguished law professors. FREE enjoyed well over 500 visits to Montana from these judges--and half a dozen Nobel Prize winners.  When judges requested other topics, for example drugs and terrorism, we responded with additional programs. However, our basic mission was to promote environmental conservation of America’s “romance lands”, often through public and private sector entrepreneurial efforts.   

Complementing FREE’s judges and law professors’ programs, we created a seminar series for seminary professors and other religious leaders. The constructive role of classical liberal and conservative thought in the environmental arena was alien to religious leaders.  The great majority was innocent of training in either ecology or economics. (None understood that microeconomics is the human oriented subset of evolutionary biology.)

The vast majority of religious spokesmen and women viewed capitalism and the market process as inimical to environmental quality. Few had any notion of how markets foster the efficient use of precious natural resources. Even fewer had considered constructive entrepreneurial responses to problems, scarcities, and ethical violations in the environmental arena.

One good product of FREE’s religious program is the current issue of Religion & Liberty: Acton Institute’s International Journal of Religion, Economics and Culture. The title of this issue is “Growing pains in the romance lands”. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty promotes a free society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.

Acton’s executive editor, John Couretas, attended two of FREE’s seminars. He and the managing editor, Sarah Stanley, spent a week at our ranch last November. We hosted a policy salon to introduce John and Sarah to nationally prominent environmental leaders who reside and work in Bozeman. They included heads of the American Prairie Reserve, Yellowstone Forever, and Gallatin Valley Land Trust. John and Sarah toured Yellowstone Park, spoke with community and agency leaders. They clearly obtained a good sense of FREE’s work in the heart of romance lands. For instance, in John’s Article, “Growing pains in the romance land” he quotes Aldo Leopold in “The River of the Mother of God”: “Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.” I hope you will read our featured article and others in Religion & Liberty Magazine on Acton Institute’s website, https://acton.org/pub/religion-liberty.