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Lawyers and political scientists focus upon explicitly religious components of American political polarization. A robust scholarship illuminates the nation's religious history. Nevertheless, we fail to appreciate the extent to which conflicting policy preferences are rooted in religiously shaped normative frameworks, or the extent to which scholarship in religious history, sociology, social psychology and culture might be synthesized to inform our understanding of contemporary policy disputes. Like the blind men and the elephant, we encounter different parts of the animal. We see a tree, a wall, a snake – but we fail to apprehend the size, shape and power of the whole elephant.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three intertwined ambitions drove federal legislation over wildlife and biodiversity: establishment of multiple-use federal lands, the economic development of natural resources, and the maintenance of option values. We examine this federal intervention in natural resource use by analyzing roll call votes over the past century with a Random Utility Model (Manski, 1977) and conclude that economics mattered. So did ideology, but not uniformly. After World War II, the pro-environment vote which had been conservative shifted to being liberal. All these votes involved decisions regarding public land that reallocated the returns to users by changing the asset’s physical character or its usage rights. We suggest that long-term consequences affecting current resource allocations arose from disparities between broadly dispersed benefits and locally concentrated socioeconomic and geophysical (spatial) costs. We show that a primary intent of public land management has become to preserve multiple-use option values and identify important factors in computing those option values. We do this by demonstrating how the willingness to forego current benefits for future ones depends on the community’s resource endowments. These endowments are defined not only in terms of users’ current wealth accumulation but also from their expected ability to extract utility from natural resources over time.

Since the publication of the first volume in this series in 2000, there have been advances as well as retreats in the areas of both environmental performance and environmental disclosures. The Kyoto Protocol will become reality if 55 nations and the industrialized nations that produce at least 55% of the world’s output of carbon dioxide ratify the treaty. With the European Union’s ratification in 2002 and with Russia and Canada poised to ratify the treaty, the Kyoto Protocol is expected to become effective shortly. Even without the treaty being in effect, the EU countries have instituted a carbon dioxide trading scheme to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. These endeavors constitute progress toward making the contents of the Kyoto Protocol effective. In the U.S., the Bush administration’s choice of ignoring Kyoto and relaxing the requirements of certain environmental laws, however, constitute steps backwards in the battle to keep the planet clean and safe for future generations.