Despite April snows, I find spring a fine time to be here. I know it’s spring for the Sand Hill cranes have returned to our place. One pair has long claimed an island on one of our ponds. The hen began nesting on Easter—after driving off trespassing geese. The male has less luck when fighting his reflection in the south windows of our pond cabin. He never learns, but ultimately tolerates his likeness. Surely there’s a lesson in this.

We’ve had just enough warmth to begin biking. Good snow pack in the mountains promises ample irrigation and healthy trout. This is an encouraging background as we prepare for summer’s fun and work. It’s hard to separate fun, work, and worthwhile activities. They normally co-mingle, especially during summer.

Working with FREE’s summer interns is fun. This year’s include students in MSU’s Honors Program. Interns join our Summer Scholar in Residence, law professor and economist Professor Steve Eagle. They study with us, write, and help prepare for our conferences for federal judges and religious leaders.

We’ve held conferences for federal judges for 20 years, over 50 in total, and have hosted over 600 judge visits. More recently, in 2007, FREE created a program for an ecumenical group of religious leaders. These conferences target seminary professors and key denominational and pulpit leaders interested in environmental stewardship, “social justice,” and other contentious policy and ethical issues.

We are hosting two conferences for religious leaders this summer: “Human and Environmental Health: Social Justice Implications,” and “Environmental Economics of Creation Stewardship.” Both explicitly introduce entrepreneurship as a means of advancing social and natural wellbeing. Next year we hope to offer a religious leaders’ program focused entirely on entrepreneurship and another “Stewardship Lessons from Yellowstone.” Both will involve professors from MSU, the “University of the Yellowstone.”

We believe it worthwhile to design a conference series to impress religious leaders with the value of entrepreneurship. Many people called to religion have a creative bent, but implicitly see it limited to theology and ethics. Some believe that solutions to practical social and environmental problems are found in bureaucratic expertise and management by fiat.

To these well intended but naïve souls, politically driven command-and-control regulations beat voluntary organizations and the market process. “Green” groups, and many advocating political management of health care often exemplify this approach.

Such individuals rarely ask about the unintended consequences of the “solutions” they advocate. When decisions are made in the political arena, they are necessarily driven by political calculations. The results are normally distorted by considering special interest voters and campaign contributions. Think corn ethanol. In the name of Green energy, politics diverts 40 percent of America’s corn into automotive fuel. Terrible ethical and ecological consequences follow.

While for-profit entrepreneurship is well known, consider entrepreneurial contributions of non-profit groups. An excellent example is Warriors and Quiet Waters. We created it 5 years ago to help heal military personnel injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WQW has brought 141 wounded warriors to Bozeman. One wrote us, “Our lives were forever and irreversibly changed by our experiences in combat. I truly believe that our lives are now forever and irreversibly changed by our experiences in Bozeman Montana. For the first time in 4 years I truly believe that ‘I am going to be okay.’ I did more than learn how to fly fish. I learned to let go. And that it was okay to let go and to live. My failures in the future are on me, but any successes or happiness I owe to a great bunch in people tucked away in a special place on Earth. Bozeman Montana.”

Not all worthwhile summer activities are pure enjoyment. Some make our eyes sweat. Yet, last week 77 WQW volunteers gathered for our 2011 training and orientation program. The above testimony illustrates why this is one of the best and most worthwhile parts of Bozeman’s summer.