Nature Unbound: Bureaucracy vs. the Environment

What if what we think we know about ecology and environmental policy is just wrong? What if environmental laws often make things worse? What if the very idea of nature has been hijacked by politics? What if wilderness is something we create in our minds, as opposed to being an actual description of nature?

In 1934, former U.S. Forest Service offcial Aldo Leopold, a godfather to the modern environmental movement, wrote that “restrictive laws” had “largely failed” in their mission to conserve America’s forests, rivers, and other natural resources. Less than forty years later, however, as various events pushed environmental concerns into the public spotlight, lawmakers from both parties championed legislation far more sweeping and restrictive than any Leopold had witnessed.

How well did these “restrictive laws” work to right environmental wrongs? Why did so many miss the mark? And how should we go about improving our policies?

In Nature Unbound, authors Randy Simmons, Ryan M. Yonk, and Kenneth J. Sim offer a devastating critique of federal environmental policy by scrutinizing it through the lenses of biological ecology and political ecology. This powerful framework, they show, reveals that environmental policy has been guided since the late 1960s by demonstrably false assumptions responsible for a host of ineffective or wasteful, command-and-control policies—on air pollution, water pollution, endangered species, wilderness, renewable energy, and more. The mistakes have also empowered political entrepreneurship in ways that have encroached on property rights, burdened the general public, and degraded the civic landscape.

More than a critique of false assumptions and flawed policies, Nature Unbound offers bold principles to help us rethink environmental objectives, align incentives with goals, and af?rm the notion that human beings are an integral part of the natural order and merit no less consideration than Earth’s other treasures. Ultimately, nothing less can succeed in our efforts to restore natural resources and revitalize our social and political ecosystem.

Randy T. Simmons is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute; Professor of Economics and Director of the Center on Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business; Co-Founder, President and Director of Research of Strata; Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center; and former Mayor of Providence, Utah. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Oregon, and he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Utah League of Cities and Towns and a Member of the Utah Governor's Privatization Commission.

Ryan M. Yonk is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and Senior Research Faculty at the American Institute for Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Georgia State University, and he was formerly Program Director for the Center for the Study of Public Choice and Private Enterprise and Lecturer of Economics in the Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics at North Dakota State University, Assistant Research Professor of Economics and Finance at Utah State University and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southern Utah University.

Kenneth J. Sim is Director of the Reliable Energy Education Network and a former Analyst with STRATA Policy. He specializes in environmental policy and has particular experience working with the National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Water Act. He received both a master’s degree in geography and bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Utah State University, and he is the co-author of Nature Unbound: Bureaucracy vs. the Environment and of policy reports for the Mercatus Center, Southern Utah University, and STRATA Policy.