As far as my research agenda goes, I am working on a project about water rights and water markets. I am also planning a book for the Hoover Institution on the politics of environmentalism, and the strange bedfellows it can create. This is an example of the twisted incentive system set up by environmental legislation. It will look at how government got to be such a large land holder, and how things might have tuned out differently if we had let western history evolve without such extensive government influence. Although many people mistakenly think that markets can only generate consumerism and other gunk, in reality it is markets that produce wealth, and thus help the environment.
Positive incentives can turn the environment from a liability to an asset for a resource owner.
If we own our own water and land, we have the incentive to manage and conserve it properly. Basically, the New Resource Economics paradigm that I worked on then is just a more academic view of free market environmentalism. The evolution from talking about New Resource Economics and Free Market Environmentalism has been to increase the subject's layman appeal. One example of how the rhetoric in resource management has shifted because of the influence of FME is that years ago I was invited to speak in front of the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior. He was afraid to even discuss the possibility of markets working.