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?

Developing answers to these questions and developing implications of those answers are our purposes in this book. Two themes guide us—political ecology and political entrepreneurship.

Combining these two concepts, which we develop in some detail, leads us to recognize that sometimes in their original design and certainly in their implementation, major U.S. environmental laws are more about opportunism and ideology than good management and environmental improvement.

Will America enact environmental policies based on sound principles? The authors of Nature Unbound are cautiously optimistic.

Kenneth J. Sim is currently employed as an analyst with STRATA, an energy and environment think-tank. Randy T Simmons is Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State University’s Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, and former Mayor of Providence, Utah. Professor Simmons’s books include the award-winning Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Failure, Aquanomics: Water Markets and the Environment and The Political Economy of Culture and Norms: Informal Solutions to the Commons Problem. Ryan M. Yonk is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Research Director for the Center for Public Lands and Rural Economics in the Department of Economics at Utah State University, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southern Utah University. 

Contents 1 Politics, Ecology, and Entrepreneurship 2 Political Ecology 3 Environmental Political Entrepreneurship 4 The Politics of Nature 5 The Clean Air Act 6 The National Environmental Policy Act 7 The Clean Water Act 8 The Endangered Species Act 9 The Wilderness Act 10 Renewable Energy Legislation 11 Conclusions Appendix: Federal Land Policy Acknowledgments References Notes Index About the Authors