August 19, 2005, 8:21 a.m.
Green in America
A constructive, conservative approach.

By G. Tracy Mehan III

America has seen the rise of the conservation movement, environmentalism, sustainable development, and, more recently, a host of alternatives to conventional environmental thinking, emerging from right-of-center thinkers: Free-Market Environmentalism, Hard Green, Civic Environmentalism, Blue Environmentalism, and Cooperative Conservation.

That last concept was articulated by secretary of the Interior Gayle Norton and is the subject of an upcoming White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation, which will be held August 29-31 in St. Louis, pursuant to an executive order issued by President Bush. It will feature a host of presentations by grassroots individuals and organizations, often working in partnership with government, to pursue on-the-ground projects embodying citizen stewardship of the environment.

So it is fitting that The Philanthropy Roundtable has just published a new guidebook highlighting fresh approaches to environmental philanthropy that embody entrepreneurial thinking on private-sector conservation and environmental matters generally.

Soaring High: New Strategies for Environmental Giving is a slim, handy volume, less than 90 pages, authored by Thomas J. Bray. Bray is a national columnist with the Detroit News where he formerly served as editorial-page editor. He also writes for the Wall Street Journal's Opinion.Journal.com. Of great relevance to this enterprise, Bray is president of the board of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a Montana think tank which has had a leading role in the development of "free-market environmentalism" ().

Soaring High seeks to assist potential philanthropists in honing their thinking about alternative, fresh approaches to conservation. It assumes that "if environmental action is to be sustainable, it needs to be widely dispersed, carefully targeted, and consistent with the enlightened self-interest of communities and individuals." Private property and market incentives are the mainstays of this new thinking, but the book recognizes that government has a role to play in safeguarding the environment. "Nobody has yet devised a way to assign a property right to the air we breathe . . . "

The heart of Soaring High is a series of profiles of individuals and organizations, along with their financial supporters, who truly think globally and act locally. These are the "Do-ers" and the "Funders" respectively. For instance, there is the Peregrine Fund, supported by Henry "Hank" Paulson, chairman and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, which pioneered new breeding and reintroduction methods that allowed the peregrine falcon to recover after the banning of DDT. After 20 years of hard work, and 4,000 birds having been released to the wild or to pigeon-rich urban environments, this bird was removed from the Endangered Species List, one of the few species ever to have been de-listed. "And I like the Peregrine Fund because it's pragmatic rather than political," says Hank Paulson.

Some of the case studies involve harder-edged advocacy groups, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which have become major players in the environmental-policy debate over the last two decades, often supported by independent-minded donors with a strong independent streak. In the case of CEI, its patron, to the tune of five figures annually over the last decade, is William A. Dunn, a physicist and founder of Dunn Capital Management. "I almost always give unrestricted money," he explains. "And rather than sprinkle the money around too widely, I prefer to fund groups that I feel have special talents. You get more bang for the buck that way."

"Oh yes," Dunn adds, "I like to have fun; so I give money to organizations that like to stir things up."

But in the main, this guidebook focuses on non-adversarial groups such as the Sand County Foundation in Wisconsin that seeks to implement Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" on a larger, landscape scale: removing dams on the Baraboo River; working with landowners to reduce nutrients running off their lands into waterways; helping communities in Tanzania to manage wildlife for ecotourism, and protecting swift-fox habitat. This foundation was the inspiration of Reed Coleman, a prominent businessman in Wisconsin, whose parents were close friends of Aldo Leopold. Coleman is also on the board of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, which, in turn, established the Bradley Fund for the Environment, administered by the Sand County Foundation.

After reviewing these various case studies, Soaring High identifies four major strategic ideas that should guide potential environmental donors:

Stressing grants to local or regional causes that can be more easily monitored for effectiveness;

Supporting environmental education efforts for schools and the press that avoid crude ideological views and instead focus on scientific skills like measuring environmental quality or on analytical skills that can be used to compare alternative actions;

Underwriting scientific watchdog efforts that will bring the best information to public attention and hold environmental managers and groups accountable for exaggerated claims and hidden agendas; and

Funding think tanks and other projects whose environmental goals reflect a sober understanding of human incentives and political freedom.

Of course, what is objective science and what is political propaganda is often in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately, there are no examples in Soaring High of funders supporting something like disinterested scientific research, except in the realm of wildlife biology. A "scientific watchdog" usually has its mind made up.

Nevertheless, this publication is a call for engaged, private stewardship of our natural resources and environment. Tocqueville would be proud.

— G. Tracy Mehan III, was assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He is a principal with The Cadmus Group, Inc., an environmental consulting firm in Arlington, Va.

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!