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Protecting landscapes, flood plains, wetlands, and forests is actually a cost-effective approach, say, to flood control and water supply protection, given substantial reductions in storage or treatment costs in favor of the natural filtration processes of these ecosystems.

A study of 27 water suppliers conducted by the Trust for Public Lands and the American Water Works Association in 2002 found that more forest cover means lower treatment costs. For every 10 percent increase in forest cover in the source water area, treatment and chemical costs decreased approximately 20 percent. Moreover, approximately 50 to 55 percent of the variation of treatment costs can be explained by the percentage of forest cover in the source area.

These community-based initiatives often address practical, economic concerns in the course of pursuing conservation goals. In August almost 70 percent of Missouri voters approved a renewal of one-tenth-of-one percent sales tax to support state parks and soil and water conservation with a provision that the tax be placed on the ballot for renewal every 10 years thereafter. According to the Missouri Parks Association, the electorate has supported this same proposal in 1984, 1988, and 1996 by margins of 2 to 1.

This ballot initiative generates annual income in the neighborhood of $82 million, split evenly between the state parks system and soil and water conservation.

Missouri's parks-and-soils tax may be one of the few projects that earned the backing of both the Sierra Club and the Farm Bureau! It also drew the support of multiple constituencies -- campers, hikers, birders, hunters, but also local chambers of commerce, farmers, and agri-business. Parks are economic engines for recreation and tourism in many rural communities, and Missouri was one of the worst states in the Union in terms of soil erosion, a clear threat to agricultural yield and water quality.

TO RECOGNIZE THIS OVERWHELMING, grassroots trend is not to endorse every expenditure of public money or assumption of debt. But it is a valid indicator that Americans, whatever ambivalence they show towards federal environmental laws and programs, are decidedly pro-conservation.

Grassroots conservation affirms the nation's articulated, federal system, the principle of subsidiarity, and the voters' appreciation of the role of state and local governments in dealing with matters close to home. It treats the protection of local landscapes and watersheds as the responsibility of multiple levels of government and not the exclusive preoccupation of Washington.

Free-market environmentalists would prefer that land conservation be undertaken by non-governmental actors such as land trusts or conservancies. The growth in private land trusts has been impressive. According to the Land Trust Alliance, there are over 1,600 land trusts in the United States which have protected approximately 11.9 million acres. (These are the latest figures, not yet posted on the Alliance's website). While such private initiative is always to be preferred and encouraged, state and local action in protecting land through acquisition or conservation easements has certain attractions.

First, it is preferable to regulation or overly prescriptive land-use controls. Land purchases, especially those exercised without recourse to eminent domain, embody the freedom and flexibility of a market transaction and the protection of property rights. The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation organization, used to have an old marketing slogan: "We protect the environment the old-fashioned way. We buy it." State and local ballot initiatives partake of that spirit.

State and local initiatives, nurtured and sustained by smaller political jurisdictions close to home, are more likely to express organic community values than the gargantuan federal government ever could.

Federalism and the principle of subsidiarity, assign responsibility to the appropriate level of government. Interstate air pollution is rightfully a federal concern. Groundwater protection is probably not. And state and local governments should not be overshadowed by an over-extended, dysfunctional federal government.

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