A FREE Policy Salon*

Jim Posewitz is a conservation hero and not just in Montana.  He received the National Wildlife Federation "Conservationist of the Year" award in 2015.  Jim came to MSU to play football and graduated with a degree in wildlife management.

FREE's latest Yellowstone Park project is a course, “Yellowstone and the Second Century of Our National Parks”.  It is offered in MSU's Wonderlust program, a part of its Extended University.

Bozeman’s Montana State University created the Wonderlust program for adults interested in exploring intriguing topics. While open to all, the majority of “students” are accomplished retirees with intellectual and historical interests. Retired professor John Baden is offering a Wonderlust course, “Yellowstone and the Second Century of Our National Parks,” beginning September 12^th.

FREE's work on Yellowstone, the world's first national park, links ecology, liberty and prosperity.  This summer we are engaged with MSU professor Jerry Johnson on a new project, Ecology and Prosperity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.  We are exploring how sustainable, largely natural ecosystems, have become engines of prosperity. 

The natural resource reforms surrounding the Progressive Era, 1890 through WWI, were surely positive experiments in resource management.  They did a great deal to preserve today's lands of romance.  The creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 is the best example.  Their greatest reform contributions were protecting common pools and constraining the unlawful exploitation of resources. 

Veronica Harrison of the Heartland Institute asked me to describe seasons living on our Montana ranch. It's a great blessing to live with Ramona on productive land lying between Bozeman and Big Sky, Montana and an hour north of Yellowstone Park. Together, and we've been together over 40 years, we represent nine generations in American agriculture.

It's snowing hard at our Gallatin Valley ranch at noon on May 17, 2017. I'm writing to correct today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article listing FREE as skeptical about climate change.