Interior Needs a Free Market Approach

Environmentalists are not happy with President Bush’s nominee for secretary of the Interior. This is not surprising. Gale A. Norton is not Bruce Babbitt--long the darling of environmentalists. Norton brings a fundamentally different philosophy to environmental protection and management of the public domain. But it would be surprising if it were otherwise. Bush did, after all, win the election.

The rap on Norton is this: She once was an associate of James Watt, President Reagan’s Interior secretary, whom environmentalists have vilified. She has been a longtime defender of property rights. She is an advocate of free market environmentalism. And the Alamosa River suffered devastating pollution while Norton, then Colorado attorney general, advocated for self-auditing by polluters.

Norton is no Watt. She is a smart, politically savvy lawyer who happened to work for Mountain States Legal Foundation early in her career. Guilt by association is unpersuasive, particularly when the accused has a long record of public and private lawyering on which we can pass judgment. Nothing of substance has been reported to suggest that Norton’s legal career is anything but distinguished.

Since Bush announced his nomination of Norton, it has been reported extensively that she is a defender of private property. Among many environmentalists, there is no greater condemnation. But those who oppose Norton because she defends private property will be hard pressed to explain how, without a commitment to private property, we would have achieved the prosperity upon which rests the world’s most significant investment in environmental protection. And they will be similarly hard pressed to explain why those nations with the worst environmental records are consistently those with little or no respect for private property.

Norton’s defense of private property is part of the philosophy underlying free market environmentalism. Many environmentalists continue to insist that free market environmentalism is the Trojan horse of industrialists and other capitalists bent on profiting from environmental destruction. But such antediluvian views have been abandoned by a diverse array of environmental advocates who have come to understand the importance of incentives and markets to the wise use and management of the planet. The Environmental Defense, formerly known as the Environmental Defense Fund, long has advocated for emissions trading and other market options, while groups like Trust for Public Lands, Nature Conservancy and Oregon Water Trust have participated in the market by acquiring property rights in the resources that they wish to protect.

It may be good politics for mainstream environmental groups to insist on command and control regulation and public ownership, but it leads to less than optimal environmental protection policies. Norton will not propose to sell the national parks, but she will seek to better manage those parks using whatever approach is most effective. If our parks and other public lands will benefit from greater reliance on market-based incentives, who but a central planning ideologue can object?

As an advocate of self-auditing, Norton is unfairly portrayed as indifferent to the enforcement of pollution laws. To the contrary, the self-audit approach is intended to encourage compliance, not just by the large companies responsible for the pollution of the Alamosa, but also by every pollution-producing entity in the country. Most polluters will never be in compliance with every pollution regulation. The vast majority of companies cannot begin to afford the costs of comprehensive monitoring, so they do the best they can. Under these circumstances, a policy that encourages compliance will yield far better results in aggregate than a policy that threatens an economic death sentence for noncompliance.

Norton’s views have been caricatured as anti-environmental. This is wrong. Norton is an experienced public official who understands that the formulation and implementation of environmental and resource policy is complicated. She understands that private property is critical to economic prosperity, which in turn is critical to environmental protection. She understands that incentives matter as much to environmental protection as to business success and that business success is essential to environmental protection. And she understands that sometimes the full force of the law is the only remedy. There is nothing extreme or radical about any of that.