Jonathan Wood ’12 tackles conservation from the ground up in Montana
Applying market solutions to conservation challenges is a longstanding passion for Jonathan Wood ’12, who’s now vice president of law and policy at the nonpartisan Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana. Currently, Wood is seeking to build consensus among stakeholders and policy makers on proposed initiatives that include revitalizing national parks through a selective fee increase, providing incentives to landowners to aid in the recovery of endangered species, and rehabilitating forests to prevent wildfires.
In this Q&A, Wood discusses what NYU Law taught him about understanding different viewpoints, how joining a nonprofit fast-tracked his courtroom skills, and what it’s like to see ideas he published in a law review article a decade ago gain traction among regulators and conservationists.
Tell us about your work.
PERC was founded by economists, and we approach conservation issues differently than most groups. We ask, first and foremost, what are the incentives here? And what do they need to be to produce better environmental results? For most of PERC’s history, it would produce academic research, put it out there, and hope someone grabbed it. What we’ve learned over time is that we needed to do some of that internally. So for the last five years, we have been taking that research and putting it into practice in policy and in law. Partnering with another conservation group, we’ve overturned a regulation that creates perverse incentives discouraging habitat restoration and species recovery efforts. We have filed amicus briefs to present our research to courts and to reframe some really big conservation challenges [including arguing in the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that a district court ruling on the Endangered Species Act (ESA) violated the US Constitution’s anti-commandeering doctrine and discouraged states from contributing to species recovery]. And we’ve engaged in a lot of policy reform, around the idea of how do we change the way that policies work so that the landowners who do the right thing are made better off?
Can you elaborate on some of your recent agenda items?
There are several big topic areas where we’ve seen major momentum in the last year. For one, our national parks have been overcrowded and are struggling to maintain infrastructure. But the amount that people pay in fees is not enough to cover what it takes to maintain parks. We had some researchers develop the idea of increasing fees on international visitors to match what other countries do. The National Park Service has been implementing the increase [since] January. We’re still waiting on official numbers. But from what we’ve heard, it’s likely to be a pretty significant boost to funding.
We’re also focused on our national forests, which have an 80-million-acre backlog in needed restoration that is fueling the wildfire crisis. We have been working to address persistent barriers that the Forest Service identified. Many of our ideas to accelerate forest maintenance projects through mechanical thinning and prescribed burns have been incorporated into a bill called the Fix Our Forests Act, which the House passed last January. We’re hopeful that it will go before the Senate sometime this summer.
Another issue we’ve been pursuing is conservation leasing on federal land. Typically, conflicts over federal lands—such as whether a particular parcel should be used for oil and gas development, grazed, or conserved—are resolved politically. But one of the ideas we’ve championed is that, if conservation groups are able to compete in the leasing process on an equal footing with other interests, markets can do a better job of resolving some of these conflicts.
What led you to study law?
When I was around 9 or 10 years old, my parents moved from the Dallas suburbs to a ranch in northeast Texas. I spent most of my childhood outdoors—camping, hunting, and fishing. My parents were the type to throw me outside in the morning and say, “Come back by when the lights go down.” My educational background was largely economics, which I studied at the University of Texas. But it was at the London School of Economics where my interest in the environment and economics linked up. My thesis was on efforts in Namibia to leverage markets and property rights to conserve endangered species. Originally, I wanted to become an economics professor. But studying this issue changed my mind. What I discovered was that economics was behind the model [for protecting rare species], but the problem was the law. It made me realize that if you want to have an impact, you have to get the laws right. I figured that I might have more impact if I went to law school and learned how environmental laws worked.
Why did you choose NYU Law?
You apply everywhere, keep your fingers crossed, and hope for the best. Still, NYU was a prominent target for me, given its standing on environmental law and its general prestige. Coming to New York also appealed to me. I lived in Texas my entire life until age 21. And I wanted to use my education to see the world a little bit—first in London, and then in New York. Being in New York was my intro to seeing a different world and different communities.
What comes to mind as you recall your experiences at NYU Law?
The intellectual and academic experience. But it was also a lot. Richard Epstein [Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law] was one of my attractions for coming to NYU. He’s a giant in the law, especially for someone like me who thinks about things from a relatively libertarian perspective. But I also benefited tremendously from Roderick Hills [William T. Comfort III Professor of Law] and Katrina Wyman [Wilf Family Professor of Property Law].
[AnBryce Professor of Law] Richard Revesz’s Environmental Law course was also instructive. What I especially appreciated about him was that he was incredibly good at playing devil’s advocate. He sort of knew the perspective that 90 percent of the students had. And he went out of his way to argue the other side, even though it was not necessarily his own. At the time, I admired what is known as the Turing test. And I admire it even more since I’m engaged in policy. If you can’t articulate other perspectives, then you can’t convince others to think about things differently.
What happened after you graduated?
I spent three months preparing for the California bar, which is an especially difficult exam. Then I went to work [as a fellow] for the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which is a nonprofit firm in Sacramento. I spent almost 10 years there as an attorney. At PLF, I carved out a niche in handling cases in which private landowners were being regulated in ways that were unfair or unconstitutional. As I grew in my career, I started to focus on cases where landowners were being penalized despite voluntarily carrying out conservation efforts.
When I joined PLF, it was the peak of a major recession. It was not a time to be selective about opportunities, yet I was incredibly lucky to go to an NGO that did the kind of work I was interested in and gave me opportunities to develop that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. There were a lot of folks I knew from NYU who went the Big Law route, and they spent about the first five years doing document reviews—but I was arguing in court the day after I took the oath to become an attorney.
The Endangered Species Act has also been a priority for you. What changes are you seeking in the law?
One of the ideas that we’ve been leading on is to change the way we regulate species, so that as species progress to recovery, landowners and states are rewarded with incremental regulatory relief. Right now, the main motivation for recovery efforts is that if the species fully recovers, federal regulation will subside—but that’s only happened a few dozen times, and it takes decades. When ESA was first enacted, Congress created different categories for species to reflect that some are closer to extinction. There are some species at greater risk and others that are less so. Congress directed that species be regulated differently. But for most of the ESA’s history, we haven’t done that. And by treating all species as endangered, thereby denying states and landowners any reward for incremental recovery progress, we’re actually creating bad incentives.
The federal government has made drastic cutbacks to environmental regulations. How has this impacted your work in conservation?
With the areas that PERC works in, every administration is a mixed bag. Ultimately, that’s probably where you want to be. If your vision of what environmentalism or conservation only allows you to see positive things whenever one party is in control, and only negative things in the other, then that is just inherently going to limit what you can possibly do. Everything is a mix of challenges and opportunities. And you need to be open to both sides.
Of course, environmental and conservation challenges differ. Pollution, for example, requires public or private legal restraints to control, and deregulation can produce setbacks. But conservation challenges are often situations where a private landowner has previously provided a public benefit, like open space, wetlands, or wildlife habitat, for free, but the cost has risen too much for them. For them, regulations can effectively punish their past conservation efforts and lead to perverse incentives.
Think about this in the context of Paradise Valley, Montana. It is one of the main entrances to Yellowstone National Park, and it’s open year-round. It is a beautiful valley to drive through with open landscapes that have giant elk herds, pronghorn herds, and other wildlife. For over 100 years, everyone who has driven to the park has benefited from ranchers freely providing this open space. They didn’t need any motivation or payment. That’s starting to change due to the show Yellowstone. More and more people have been coming to experience the land for themselves. There are many pressures on that area now, and the ranchers need help, not regulatory impositions, if they’re going to continue to provide these benefits to the public.
What piece of advice do you have for current students?
Find a harebrained idea that you believe in, and stick to it for the long term. A big part of my work in ESA arose out of the first case I did at PLF, where a species’ recovery progress was met with more burdensome regulation, not less. I wrote a Pace Environmental Law Review article about it three years after I graduated, arguing that the ESA requires regulations to be sensitive to whether species are endangered or threatened, improving or declining. I have now spent a lot of the last decade pursuing this idea, with some great progress. In 2019, the Fish and Wildlife Service rescinded the regulation that automatically treated two categories—endangered and threatened species—as the same, and started to experiment with different ways of thinking about regulating threatened species creatively to improve incentives [for property owners].
I could have just written the Law Review article and moved on. Or I could have gotten frustrated in feeling like I was a lone voice. That would have been a shame, because now there’s an idea that is affecting how the Fish and Wildlife Service is implementing [the ESA]. And it is increasingly embraced by people and groups across the political spectrum. It was once an idea, and now there’s a way to capitalize on it in a way that I didn’t foresee 10 years ago.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
