Recently, I came across one of those fascinating side-by-side photographic comparisons, one showing a scene as it appeared in the 19th century and the other, taken from the exact same spot, showing how it looks today. The two photographs were of Yosemite Valley, the early one taken in 1866 and the other in 2009. The striking difference between them was that trees were much more abundant in the later shot. Most Americans would probably assume the reverse to be the case.

Why is it that one of America’s most iconic places is now more wilderness-like than it was before our great westward migration and the beginning of the industrial era? You will find the answer to that question within the pages of Nature Unbound. Authors Randy Simmons (professor of economics at Utah State University), Ryan Wonk (director of the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State), and Kenneth Sim (director of the Reliable Energy Education Network) give readers a synoptic view of America’s sprawling environmental protection bureaucracy: its assumptions, its numerous players, its frequently perverse incentives and often bizarre results. The book, in short, is a valuable corrective to the notion that the federal government has done a splendid job of protecting us from environmental disaster.

Before going any further, what about Yosemite?

Back in 1866, Yosemite Valley was inhabited by people who made use of the land. The Miwok Indian tribe had long lived there, growing their crops. Since the 1840s, some whites had moved in, keeping sheep and prospecting for minerals. When John Muir saw the magnificent valley, he decided that it would be still more magnificent if those people were removed so the land could once again be pure. As the authors write,

For Muir, it was more important to maintain the balance of nature than to allow the Miwok Indians to live off the land. Muir’s ideology about the balance of nature within national parks was so influential that (citing another source) “the Yosemite model spread to other parks, including Yellowstone, where forced evictions killed 300 Shoshone in one day.”

That’s why once-open meadows are forested today: the idea that man must be kept out to save nature.

If the book can be said to have a villain, it is that “balance of nature” ideology, which holds that any sort of human intervention is harmful and dangerous, and thus must be minimized if not stopped altogether. The truth, argue the authors, is that nature is not so fragile as this ideology posits and human activity is not like introducing a cancer into it. Disturbance and change are constants in nature; ecosystems are resilient. Humans certainly can cause environmental damage, but “balance of nature” thinking is an immense overreaction that brings about results that most of us would find undesirable.

Laws and the environment / Just as nature has its ways of responding to environmental change, so do we humans. We dislike pollution and developed legal responses to it centuries before the current environmental laws were written. English and American common law sided with those who suffered the effects of pollution. The authors provide illustrative cases going back to the 19th century where judges ordered polluters to cease and pay damages under common law rules of property. No doubt, much pollution was deterred by those precedents and the authors suggest that we might be better off today if we had not veered away from common law and instead started placing our trust in federal statutes and bureaucrats.

The words legislators put on paper are often interpreted by the courts or the bureaucrats to mean something that was not originally intended.

The great bulk of the book is about those statutes and the officials who enforce them: the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Wilderness Act. The authors also devote a chapter to the closely related subject of “renewable energy” laws, which gave us Solyndra and other boondoggles. The authors do not maintain that all of those laws are failures, but argue that the environmental benefits they have brought us have come at a greatly inflated cost.

Consider first the Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1970. America certainly had suffered from befouled air, such as the hideous smog that killed 14 people in Donora, Pa. in 1948. What is little known, however, is that state, local, and private efforts (such as innovations by the Big Three U.S. automakers that prevented crankcase hydrocarbons from being vented into the atmosphere, in use by 1961) had been steadily reducing air pollution. But because of media sensationalism, most Americans were convinced by the late 1960s that the nation faced an air pollution crisis. That led Sen. Edmund Muskie (the top Democratic contender for president in 1972) and President Richard Nixon to start competing to see who could be more “green” in voters’ eyes.

Nixon made use of his incumbency to push through the CAA and sign it into law in 1970. Henceforth, the country would take a top-down, bureaucratic approach to air quality, run from Washington, D.C. What was the result? “Overall,” write the authors, “the Clean Air Act and its amendments have been less successful in cleaning the air than in allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to extend its reach.”

Apropos of that point, the authors detail the protracted litigation over the question of the EPA’s authority (even duty) to regulate carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant as defined by the law. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the agency did have both the power and the obligation to regulate carbon dioxide discharges to help prevent “catastrophic harm” to Massachusetts residents. The authors sum up the case, writing that it showed two fundamental problems with the law:

The first is the inability of the EPA to possess the knowledge or ability to tackle all of the problems now deemed to require regulation…. The second is that the expansion also increases the complexity of the CAA, which augments the ability of interest groups to engage in rent-seeking behaviors.

The case demonstrates a point that recurs throughout the book, namely that the words legislators put on paper are often interpreted by the courts or the bureaucrats to mean something that was not originally intended. The level of authority the legislators thought proper for regulators often grows exponentially under the processes of administrative law.

Bureaucracy and red tape / Such a concentration of power in bureaucratic hands is highly problematic, the authors argue. Assuming that agency personnel want to make the best decisions in the public interest, they confront Hayekian knowledge problems in that the information necessary to make ideal decisions about environmental conditions and responses is widely dispersed throughout society. Worse, many of those officials are ideologues who are determined to impose their will no matter the costs to the rest of us. The EPA, for instance, “consistently overlooks important variables and twists the science to match its political agenda,” the authors write.

Another serious problem the book highlights is the waste of time and money in getting projects done, given the maze of environmental laws and the possibilities they offer for obstructionism. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), for example, applications to undertake construction projects must show that all other possibilities have been considered and that the current proposal is the one with the least environmental impact.

In one particularly risible case, the Army Corps of Engineers refused to approve a plan to improve a rural road on the grounds that the state had not explored all alternatives to the plan. The alternative that had not been considered was the possibility of building an elevated road over the existing one. More time and money had to be spent in analyzing that “alternative.” The authors comment, “The ridiculousness of this alternative is obvious, but it should be noted that reasonableness under NEPA is subjective, and political entrepreneurs will use whatever tools are at their disposal.”

Readers also learn that the Endangered Species Act creates some horribly perverse incentives that often lead to the needless destruction of wildlife. If an endangered species is detected on private land, the owner may not use or develop the property in a way that could harm the creatures or their habitat. That amounts to a taking of the property, but one that the courts don’t view as compensable under eminent domain. Therefore, owners who suspect that a protected bird species like the red cockaded woodpecker might take up residence have an incentive to develop or otherwise exploit the land immediately, and if the bird should appear, the most rational response is to “shoot, shovel, and shut up.”

Some of the most distressing cases of the harm done by the balance of nature ideology occur when the Wilderness Act is invoked to prevent sensible land management. This ideology insists that humans must let nature run her course. So what if thinning underbrush would reduce the likelihood of devastating forest fire, or adding lime to a stream could offset acidification, or removing landslide debris would allow fish to swim upstream to spawn, or killing destructive beetles might save healthy forests from being ravaged? The wilderness must remain “pristine.” Zealots have used the Wilderness Act to stop such human incursions, a triumph of ideology over what almost all of us would think of as common sense.

Students of regulation and public choice will find this book to be a feast. More encouragingly, environmentalists may find themselves rethinking their views on environmental policy after reading Nature Unbound. Someone might even send a copy to the descendants of the Miwoks, who still live in California, but where they can’t “ruin” nature for the environmental purists.