The Weekly Standard
April 25, 2005
By Terry L. Anderson
In his new book Collapse, Jared Diamond begins with a chapter on my home state of Montana.
Although painting a romantic picture of “Big Sky Country,” he decries environmental tragedies including
toxic mining waste, forest fires, soil exhaustion, water shortages, and invasive species.
Diamond blames these environmental perils on miners, loggers, and farmers who “behaved as they did
because the government required almost nothing of them” and because they were business people maximizing profits.
Reading his gloom and doom chapter, one wonders why Ted Turner, Charles Schwab, and friends are buying land in Montana.
The reason is that Montana’s environment is not as trashed as alarmist Diamond would have us believe.
Here are the facts about Montana. You can drink from almost any stream without concern for toxic wastes,
though you might worry about giardia from burgeoning elk herds. You can view millions of acres of spectacular
forests—many on private lands. Farms remain productive, and lands mined at the turn of the century
are being reclaimed. In short, Montana’s environment is getting better not worse.
The same holds generally in the developed world. From 1970 to 2000, for example, concentrations of carbon
monoxide fell by 75 percent in the United States and by 95 percent in the United Kingdom. From 1975 to
2000, nitrogen oxides declined by 35 percent in the United States and by 40 percent in the United Kingdom.
Furthermore, we in the United States are actually sequestering as much carbon through improved agricultural
techniques, healthy forests and sealed landfills as we are adding to the atmosphere’s greenhouse gasses
Why is this so? First, as incomes rise, people demand and can afford a healthier environment. Study after
study confirms that “wealthier is healthier.”
Second, societies with a strong rule of law, private property rights, and market systems have better
environments that those that do not. As more countries have adopted these institutions following the
fall of the Iron Curtain, incomes and environmental quality have improved.
Diamond has it backward when he blames environmental problems on a lack of government regulation
and too much private enterprise. On Montana’s frontier, cattlemen formed voluntary associations
to prevent overgazing of the range. Farmers developed water rights to efficiently allocate water.
In addition, mining companies compensated landowners if the companies’ pollution spilled across
their boundaries.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof likens environmentalist false alarms to car
alarms that become “just an irritating background noise.” It is time to turn off the alarms and recognize
that our economic and environmental futures will be brighter if we rely more on private property
and markets than on governmental regulations.
Terry L. Anderson is the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and
the executive director of PERC—the Property and Environment Research Center
located in Bozeman, Montana.