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What is FME?

Free Market Environmentalism (FME) is an approach to environmental problems that focuses on improving environmental quality using property rights and markets. It emphasizes three important points: :

• Markets, property rights, and the rule of law are fundamental to economic growth, and economic growth is fundamental to improving environmental quality. There is a strong correlation between treatment of the environment and standards of living.

• Property rights make the environment an asset rather than a liability thus giving owners an incentive for stewardship.

• Markets and the process of exchange give people who have different ideas and values regarding natural resource use a way of cooperating rather than fighting. When cooperation supplants conflict, gains from trade supplant negative-sum games.

   

FME has allowed PERC to view problems through a different lens, and as a result, challenge conventional ways of thinking about the environment and spur common-sense solutions such as:

• Developing policies for trading water to protect stream flows (see Saving Our Streams);

• Analyzing climate change policies (see Trading Forest Carbon: A Panacea or a Pipe Dream to Address Climate Change?);

• Working to create individual fishing quotas to eliminate marine overfishing (see Helping Property Rights Evolve in Marine Fisheries);

• Finding ways to improve efficacy of conservation easements (see Conservation Easements: A Closer Look at Federal Tax Policy);

• Enticing entrepreneurs to invest the environment by demonstrating the benefits of aligning business with conservation at PERC's Enviropreneur Institute (visit www.enviropreneurs.org);

• Advocating new management strategies for public lands that link fiscal responsibility with environmental stewardship (see Branching Out: Case Studies in Canadian Forest Management).