Property and Environment Research Center

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Group.png Property and Environment Research Center   WebsiteRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
MottoImproving Environmental Quality Through Property Rights and Markets
HeadquartersBozeman, Montana
Sponsored byScaife Foundations

Political Economy Research Center (PERC) or sometimes "Property and Environment Research Center") sees it self a pioneer in free market environmentalism. It covers endangered species, forestry, fisheries, mines, parks, public lands, property rights, Superfund, water, wildlife, and environmental education. It is part of the anti-environmental Wise Use movement.

Links to Republicans

Department of Interior

Secretary of Interior Former Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton is a protege of Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt (see MSLF). She was hired by the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1979 and worked there as a Senior Attorney until 1983, when she moved to the Hoover Institute. She also served on the advisory boards of two other right wing groups, Defenders of Property Rights and the Washington Legal Foundation. In 1998, she founded a group called the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA). The sponsors for CREA’s kick-off gala included the Chlorine Chemical Council, National Coal Council, Chemical Manufacturers Association, and the National Mining Association[1]. She was a fellow at PERC when it was announced that she was to become Secretary of Interior. Norton was also on the Advisory board of the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, run by Steve Milloy.[2]

Norton’s appointment was met with dismay by environmental groups. The nomination of Gale Norton amounts to a declaration of war on the environment," said Dr. Brent Blackwelder, President of Friends of the Earth[3]. The NRDC said “No amount of rhetoric can conceal who she is: an ideological extremist who has worked for more than two decades to systematically dismantle our nation's environmental protections. The direct beneficiaries of her views on enforcement are mining, grazing, timber, oil and other multinational corporations — at the expense of the environment and public health”[4]

Robert F Kennedy JR from the NRDC wrote in the Independent that: “In autumn 2001, the Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, provided the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources with her agency's scientific assessment that Arctic oil-drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterwards, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which defends scientists and other professionals working in state and federal environmental agencies. ‘The scientists provided us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that she had given to Congress a week later’, said the group's executive director, Jeff Ruch. There were 17 major substantive changes, all of them minimising the reported impacts. When Norton was asked about the alterations in October 2001, she dismissed them as typographical errors”[5].

Funding

According to PERC “Currently, 92 percent of our funding comes from foundations, 7 percent from individuals and miscellaneous sources and 1 percent from corporations”[6]

It has received money from Amoco, ARCO, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Conoco, Eli Lilly and Co., Pfizer, and Coors[7]. The Institute received some $4,125,875 in 88 grants from 1985 to 2002, from the following 10 foundations[8]:

Personnel

  • Terry L. Anderson – Executive Director - author of “Enviro-Capitalists: Doing Good While Doing Well”, which argues that entrepreneurs in the private sector rather than the federal government “guarantee protection and improvement of environmental quality”[9]. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute and Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.

Board

Some Senior Associates

Issues

  • Education – to provide all students with access to a quality education
  • Entrepreneurship – to strike down barriers to economic growth and innovation
  • Health Care – to provide better quality and access to health-care while lowering costs
  • Technology – to identify and limit harmful government regulation in the technology sector
  • Environment – to sustain the trend toward a cleaner environment

 

EventDescription
Scaife FoundationsGrant-making foundation overseen by the late right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.
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References

  1. [1]
  2. [2]
  3. [3]
  4. [4]
  5. R. F Kennedy, “America's War on Nature; for Decades, US Corporate Interests Have Systematically Sabotaged Efforts to Protect the Environment”, The Independent, 4 December 2003.
  6. [5]
  7. [6]
  8. [7]
  9. [8]
  10. http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2000Q2/fearnotfacts.html; http://www.prwatch.org/improp/cei.html