The April 2000 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Terry Anderson, a policy adviser to George W. Bush and the director of the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. In a paper for the Cato Institute co-authored with Vernon Smith and Emily Simmons, Anderson urged that all federal lands be privatized. Confronted with the hard question of whether even the Grand Canyon and other "crown jewels" of the national parks, wilderness and forests systems should be privatized, Anderson and colleagues did not flinch: If they really value these properties, groups like the Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society and others should should simply outbid ExxonMobil, Louisana Pacific and other resource corporations, Anderson and his co-authors argued. Want a ban on logging, grazing or new oil exploration on federal land? No problem. Here's the Anderson solution: "Radical environmental groups desiring to 'lock up' petroleum or other mineral resources could bid directly for those subsurface rights against commercial enterprises for the purpose of preventing development of those resources."

Thanks to the Center for Biological Diversity and Mark Lipsman for digging up and forwarding this item. To see Anderson et. al.'s "How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands," go to <www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa.363es.html>.

*In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.