At each summer's end, I leave our Montana ranch and return to Washington. I love to drive the West.

This is a good time to reconsider our culture, ecology, economy and politics. Increasingly, I'm having second thoughts about these subjects. Many friends, academics, business people and environmentalists, are also re-evaluating their approach to environmental goals.

Our culture, economy, and politics were based upon the exploitation of natural resources. This gave the West coherence. The default position was to dam rivers, graze grass, cut timber, butcher buffalo. Even our great National Parks were promoted by railroads for their potential tourist revenue.

Some people were rapacious and opportunistic; a blessed few were prudent stewards. But the dominant politics and economics were insensitive to noncommercial or spiritual aspects of our environment. In the past generation, a majority of people have became environmentalists. The West changed.

It's time for another. A new environmental paradigm is emerging and perhaps with it, a new coherence for the West.

This approach accepts the significance of noncommercial and spiritual values. It also recognizes the critical importance of information and incentives. Good intentions and education will not suffice. Big bureaucracies will stray from their mission. Political force will lead to plunder. And takings, even for good ecological cause, are perverse. It is irresponsible to pretend these problems away.

Economic logic has powerful analytic tools but they alone are not enough. Even though I came to economics from anthropology, and should have known better, I slighted community while focused on efficiency. (Sometimes it takes years to de-program the lessons of graduate school.)

Driving down the Blackfoot Drainage toward the Columbia, I realized that no one has ever gone to the wall for efficiency. And only the naive would even think of mobilizing citizens under its banner. The variables that economists can best measure are not those which matter most. But this is not to recommend some New Age eco-romanticism. We must consider ecological science, political economy and culture if we are to design successful reform. In isolation, none will do the job.

Modern societies can be destructive and corrupting but they provide the means for sensitive and constructive action. Our task is to foster their humane potential and make them ecologically sustainable. Science and prosperity are our best allies in this effort. A return to the folkways and mores of the Native Americans, even were it possible, gives no answer. Here's a second thought for romantics to consider.

Early man was not the far-sighted ecological steward of myth. The ideal of sustainable harvests were as foreign as IRAs.

Charles Kay is a wildlife research ecologist at Utah State University. For 20 years he has examined the archeological record of Greater Yellowstone. He and other researchers have noted that with the arrival of Homo sapiens on on the North American continent, many species of large herbivores went extinct.

There is an emerging theory of "aboriginal overkill." Humans were effective predators. Can any other animal run a mile, swim a river, climb a tree and organize a pack to hunt? Add fire as a tool and a real killer emerges. Kay writes:

[Aboriginal peoples] . . . acted in ways that maximized their individual fitness regardless of the impact on the environment. By limiting ungulate numbers and purposefully modifying the vegetation with fire, Native Americans structured entire plant and animal communities of western North America.

The Plains Indians were smart, tough and remarkably skillful. When they received the horse, steel knife and finally the gun, it became much easier and safer to kill bison. These new tools gave the Indians a huge discount on buffalo. At the lower price, they rationally bought more. This behavior is an efficient adjustment by individual tribes to changing "prices" of bison. The buffalo were fugitive resources, they really did roam. This movement, coupled with tribal competition for them, made it impossible for the Indians to manage the buffalo as a renewable resource. Slaughter by whites greatly compounded the problem.

Early white explorers noted that large ungulates were extremely rare when Whites came to the Rocky Mountain region. Kay writes, "Between 1835 and 1876, twenty different parties spent a total of 765 days traveling through the Yellowstone ecosystem . . .[T]heir first-person journals contain 45 references to a lack of game or a shortage of food." Lewis and Clark nearly starved and were reduced to eating dogs when traversing this region. Today, the area is over run, over grazed and over browsed - by game.

Several Native Americans tribes managed beaver streams and salmon fishing sites with clear and transferable property rights. However, the Plains Indians' could not control access. They had no property rights to constrain other hunters.

Today many environmentalists are reconsidering means to their ecological ends. Sustainability does not arrive through ideology. They can't count on government management for bureaucracies generate pathologies. And unless constrained, firms will neglect or abuse environmental values.

There is no single answer to our goals. It is time for second thoughts. I will share some in this series of columns.