This article is adapted from a talk presented at the Entrepreneurship Beyond Politics Mises Circle on February 21, 2026, in Oklahoma City.
Conflict over the natural world often originates in people’s different conceptions of how the natural world can and should be used. I like the many useful things people can make with the resources extracted from the land. Many people, like me, also enjoy wild land and views of wildlife. I like forests and rivers, and I like knowing that some species of antelope or whale is still with us, even if I never see one of them myself
Entrepreneurship in a free market helps settle those conflicts peacefully, without one group using the power of the state to force their preferences on others. For many people, entrepreneurship conjures up images of factories and boardrooms, which seems incompatible with solving problems related to the environment. But not only is entrepreneurship compatible with the environment—it is essential that we rely on entrepreneurs when it comes to environmental issues.
What Entrepreneurship Does
Human action starts with individuals wanting various things based on their preferences. The problem, then, is how to produce those things and get them into the hands of the people who demonstrate the greatest desire for them. Entrepreneurs stand between the demanders (their bosses), on the one hand, and the owners of resources on the other. The entrepreneur must (1) correctly anticipate what consumers will want in the future, (2) design a production process that will produce that product without wasting resources, and (3) gain control over (e.g., buy or rent) the resources necessary to carry out that production process.
Environmental resources have value that is determined by the goals of the customers the entrepreneur must satisfy in order to earn a profit. So we say that environmental value is imputed: The value of a resource in the environment is derived from the value of the final product made from the resource.
An environmentalist of the anticapitalistic type— which is a common type—might protest: Would we not say that elements of the environment, such as land, bodies of water, clean air, wildlife, or integrated ecosystems, have value apart from whether they can be turned into a toaster oven or a fur coat? Must everything be reduced to raw materials for a factory?
We would say: Certainly not. We must think more broadly about what customers want. Entrepreneurs do not only respond to people who want goods manufactured out of the environment. They also respond to people who value the natural world as more than a source of calories, minerals, or fiber. Most people want not only goods and services that are the products of factories, but also goods and services that are best provided by an environment in its natural state. People want the kind of thing I want when I head for the wilderness. Maybe some want just the knowledge that there is a place where land and its wild inhabitants exist without human contact—even if that means the land will not be directly enjoyed by a visit.
Providing these things is not outside the realm of entrepreneurship. But we have to clear something up first. Some environmentalists would like to separate the value of something from a valuer. They argue for an inherent value in nature, something that cannot be discerned through a market process that conveys the valuations of individuals to entrepreneurs.
How would we determine this inherent value in order to compare it to the value of other things? The short answer is: We can’t.
An individual—let’s say John—who demands that other people recognize a certain value as “inherent” is often simply demanding that others accept John’s claim of authority as valuer in chief. John can authoritatively say that to him, a tree is worth more than a chair, or even that all the manufactured goods in the world are worth less to him than a single tree. But each person will value trees and chairs differently. John cannot, for everyone for all time, say that a tree is worth more—or less—than a chair. At least, he cannot do so without making what is essentially a religious argument. Questions of whether one should value a chair more than a tree or should value a tree more than a chair introduce morality into the discussion. That is an important conversation to have. However, we should recognize a conversation about morality and religion for what it is and deal with normative questions on that level.
No moral claim of value is necessary when individuals indicate their valuations by choosing among alternatives. If a person chooses a chair over a tree, it is incontrovertible evidence that the person values the chair more than the tree.
An entrepreneur may discern these preferences, forecast that some people may prefer chairs to trees in the future, and arrange a production process to convert trees into chairs. The entrepreneur must then go into the market for factors of production—ingredients of production—and persuade their owners to turn over to him their labor, their capital (tools), and their raw materials instead of continuing with their present uses. Normally, entrepreneurs will persuade by offering to pay, but getting a donation is not out of the question. If the entrepreneur’s forecast is correct, a profit will result. An error will result in a loss. This motivates entrepreneurs to get their forecasts right and to use resources efficiently to satisfy others.
Nature Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is versatile. Protestors who prefer that trees remain trees instead of new chairs have a clear pathway to get what they want without coercion. They may engage in nature entrepreneurship (or enviropreneurship, as some at the Property and Environment Research Center have called it) to produce a good or service requiring that trees be left in their natural state.
This good or service might be, for example, visits to a nature preserve (ecotourism) or goods that provide customers (or members) with ways to signal their affinity for nature, like branded merchandise with the name of the nature preserve or its parent organization on it.
They could also harvest resources from the preserve in ways that do not significantly alter its natural condition, as with limited hunting permits. To create these goods and services, entrepreneurs would have to gain control over trees by paying for forests or by getting people to donate forests to them, just as the chair-making entrepreneur would have to do. Whether it’s a for-profit or not-for-profit entity, the nature enterprise imputes value to trees in their natural state.
In this way the tree lovers are pushing back against the use of trees for chairs. The tree lovers and the chair lovers are engaging in a peaceful market process that works out how many trees are allocated to each group.
But to some, it seems that government coercion is the only answer. In reply, we do not have to offer simple hypotheticals about what private nature entrepreneurs could do. We can observe real-world examples of nature entrepreneurship.
There is the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership, which uses donations to create or enhance wildlife habitat. Their BirdReturns program pays California farmers to flood rice fields after the harvest to provide migratory birds with attractive stopovers along the Pacific Flyway. Sena Christian, writing in Comstock’s Magazine in 2017, explained the process: Farmers participate in a reverse auction, in which they place “a bid for what they want to be paid per acre to keep their fields flooded. Sellers with the most reasonable bid and conducive fields are enrolled. The program relies on data from the eBird app, where birders record their sightings for researchers to use in mapping where habitat is most needed.”
In Montana, the American Prairie Foundation has assembled a patchwork of private land to preserve prairie in its natural state. The organization uses donated funds to buy private land with the goal of connecting 3.2 million acres of prairie. They have provided campsites with low-impact facilities that can be rented for a fee, built an educational center for visitors to learn more about the prairie ecosystem, and initiated a bison conservation program in which the animals are carefully managed with the goal of achieving a herd of 5,000 or more bison.
Around Yellowstone National Park and in central Idaho, wolf lovers created a trust to compensate ranchers for livestock lost to wolves. The trust reduced opposition to wolf reintroduction. A few years later, a similar program was created for grizzly bears.
In Vermont, the Audubon Society has created a Produced in Bird-Friendly Habitats label for maple syrup producers to use in exchange for enhancing bird habitat in their forests. In New Mexico, Audubon succeeded in gaining property rights over in-stream water, which is beneficial for birds. Also in New Mexico, Trout Unlimited obtained water rights for trout preservation purposes.
In a recent article on wildfires, I mentioned the Nature Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh Preserve in Oregon, which was managed so well that a raging fire on neighboring government land was reduced to a low-intensity ground fire as it moved onto the private forest land. Unlike bureaucratically administered government land, which is plagued by mismanagement, private land tends to be managed much more efficiently.
Private ranches in Texas began importing and breeding oryx, addax, and gazelles before the Endangered Species Act was passed. They obtained revenue from hunting, which of course meant they wanted to keep the herds healthy for future hunters. As of 2024, there were about 12,000 scimitar-horned oryx, 5,000 addax, and between 1,000 and 1,500 dama gazelles on these ranches. After the oryx were extirpated from the wild in Africa, Texas oryx provided the seed population for reintroduction of the species in the Republic of Chad. Since only 250 to 300 dama gazelles are left in the wild in North Africa, these private ranches might help that species as well.
There are many more examples of environmental entrepreneurship. Among these are countless conservation and habitat preservation efforts by small private landowners that never receive the attention or funding of a large organization. There is also a kind of unintentional “green entrepreneurship” that results from entrepreneurs trying to reduce their use of scarce resources or come up with an alternative to a scarce resource in order to cut costs. For example, discovering how to turn petroleum into kerosene in the mid-1800s helped reduce the demand for whale oil. Innovations in fish farming have lowered the cost of raising fish while reducing pressure on fish populations in the open ocean. And producing crop breeds with more output per acre means more land can be turned from plowed fields into forests.
Entrepreneurship, as it turns out, is a nature lover’s ally. While government uses coercion to impose one group’s preferences on another— often fouling the natural world in the process— entrepreneurs look for creative ways to peacefully connect those preferences to new products. They, far more faithfully than government, serve the interests of their customers. This includes customers who want chairs and toaster ovens and houses, and customers who want forests and bison and gazelles.
