Free Market Environmentalism: A Syllabus

In 1991, Terry Anderson and Donald Leal released Free Market Environmentalism. The book’s notion that free markets could protect the environment as well as or better than government if property rights institutions were in place challenged conventional thinking. In the past, environmental policy had always been viewed as an example of market failure. Anderson and Leal claimed that this was not the case and offered examples of alternatives to prove it.

Since the book’s release, it has been used as a curriculum in universities from Stanford to Harvard to Purdue to Tulane. Many professors, however, were cautious in its use because they were not sure how to work free market environmentalism (FME) into the traditional curriculum. And so, with the release of a new edition of Free Market Environmentalism (Palgrave, 2001), PERC has created a syllabus to aid the inclusion of free market environmental ideas in to traditional environmental economics and policy curricula.

The syllabus can be used in two ways: it can be implemented as a course on free market environmentalism or incorporated into a standard environmental economics or environmental policy course to convey aspects of free market methods.