 Government regulation of land in the western United States on balance doesn't protect the environment from industry. It protects industry from having to compete in the free market. Why can't environmentalists acquire the land that they want to preserve? Often because it's illegal. Sean Reagan is the vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center, which is a leading advocacy group in the free market environmentalist movement. He says preservation groups are often willing to compete with industry on a level playing field. They are looking to use markets to use property rights to use voluntary exchange to essentially get what they want, which is preserving natural amenities, conserving wildlife, and open space. So in the case of public lands, we see groups trying to acquire ranchers grazing permits. We see groups trying to buy federal energy leases to keep the resources in the ground. We even see groups trying to bid for timber leases, but to keep the trees standing rather than harvesting them. In many cases, though, they've been thwarted by rules that basically make that illegal. Most people think of public lands in the west as being national parks or wilderness areas, but really most of the lands in the west are managed by other federal agencies, and they're fundamentally political lands. Reagan says that these lands are often leased through public auctions, but environmental groups that want to pay for the right to preserve them are frequently excluded from participating. Too often natural resource management is biased towards resource extraction because rules that were created in the 19th century essentially require rights holders to harvest, extract, or graze the resource rather than to conserve it. Because federal agencies don't consider conservation to be a beneficial public use, environmental groups are locked out. Reagan says that in a free market, the highest bidders should win, even if their intention is to leave the land untouched. Our idea of a beneficial use is much broader. A lot of times the highest valued use would be a community coming together to decide that a forest should be left standing rather than harvested or conserved for some recreational opportunity. Reagan points to one case in which environmentalists successfully preserved land in Bozeman, Montana, by outbidding the competition. The state offered up a timber sale on some state-owned land south of town, and a community group formed to oppose this project. But rather than trying to litigate or regulate, they attempted to outbid the timber company instead of harvesting the trees. And the local group raised enough money to purchase this lease. They outbid the timber company, and for 25 years they have the right to keep these trees standing. And yet the Montana legislature's response was to change the law to prevent environmentalist groups from competing against timber companies in the future. In the case of the Bozeman timber sale, the community group paid more than the logging company. So taxpayers in Montana earned more from this non-use right than they would have from a timber sale. And I think that's an important distinction here, is that just because we're leaving trees standing doesn't mean that we're not going to generate as much revenue. It's, in fact, the only way that this lease would have moved forward is if the group outbid the logging company. The lease that the group purchased is good for 25 years, and so after the 25-year period, they'd have to acquire another similar lease, and the state would stand to earn even more revenue from another conservation license. Whereas if the lease had gone to the logging company, it would take 100 years before that forest would regrow to the point where it could potentially be harvested again. By excluding environmental groups, Reagan says, we get a distorted picture about the value of our natural resources. The point is not that resource development is bad. It's not that extracting energy is fundamentally wrong or harvesting timber is fundamentally wrong. We all live in a house likely that's made of wood, but rather it's that environmental values are real and they're legitimate, and we need to find ways to allow for those values to be expressed through markets and through voluntary exchange. I think a system of non-use rights where markets can help resolve these competing demands is a system that can help us allocate resource extraction into places where it makes the most sense and do conservation where it makes the most sense as well.