One of the things I appreciate most about our friend John Baden is his relentless optimism and that optimism shines through his column today celebrating FREE’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Baden founded FREE (Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment) in 1985. “The initial focus of our work,” he writes, “was on the economics and policy analysis of contentious natural resource issues.”

At the time, “environmental problems were addressed almost exclusively through command and control regulation.” Through years of patiently engaging federal judges “on tensions among ecology, liberty, and responsibility,” Baden and his team have seen changes in law school education and in judicial decisions. “We’ve won the intellectual battle recognizing economics as central to better environmental policy.”

The battle, but, alas, not the war.

Baden writes: “Now, however, Americans face new threats to our traditions of social coordination through voluntary, cooperative means. Much silliness in Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance seems central to the core belief system infecting America’s governmental czars and the major media. An underlying drive toward ever increasing governmental direction and coordination of society permeates current federal policies and proposals. This poses huge ethical and economic threats.”

Religious leaders, says Baden, are particularly vulnerable to the new environmental fear mongering. Many of those leaders “default to collectivist ‘solutions,’ many of which have terrible perverse consequences” and they “become unwitting accomplices to political favor seeking by special interests looking for subsidies or protection from competition.”

In the battle to protect and educate religious leaders, the Cornwall Alliance is proud to stand with John Baden, Pete Geddes, and the rest of the team at FREE, wishing them great success and blessing in the next twenty-five years and beyond.