In the past year, with the help of remarkable new technology, beekeepers and many private citizens, Washington state eradicated the “murder hornet.” This one example is emblematic of innovative environmental stewardship that is moving us beyond the 1970s mindset of bureaucratic environmentalism that dominates our thinking about caring for the natural world.

It is a lesson for Earth Day that the most effective approach to tackling our most difficult environmental problems should be to innovate and act, rather than marching around with signs in the hope that politicians will do something.

From the beginning, the state’s effort to eradicate the murder hornet focused on building a network of beekeepers and the public to track potential nests. Rather than spend millions on studies and new bureaucracies – the approach common to many other environmental challenges – the state worked with the public to create hornet traps and share information.

It was one of those public traps that led to the capture of a hornet that was tagged with a small transmitter developed by a researcher at the University of Washington. By following the hornet back to its nest, state agencies were able to destroy the nest and prevent the the spread of the species.

When time was critical and the risk was high, the standard bureaucratic process was set aside. That is a telling admission. Even those at state agencies recognized the strategy with the highest chance of success focused on bottom-up public efforts, not top-down mandates.

It isn’t the only recent example.

A recent story from Spain notes that “According to the European Commission, the Spanish Marbled ducks' population has more than quadrupled since 2009, going from a mere 20 breeding pairs to 131.” This remarkable feat was achieved thanks primarily to private landowners who provided the habitat for the endangered duck.

Here is how the article describes the program:

“Land stewardship agreements are a vital part of Spanish conservation efforts. They involve collaboration between the government and landowners, who agree to help conserve endangered species. It is this strategy that has ‘proven to be very effective in species and habitat conservation projects,’ the Commission reported.”

This approach is in contrast to the mindset of the Endangered Species Act which treats private landowners as the enemy, threatening them with penalties for theoretical impacts to habitat.

For some on the right, Earth Day has become synonymous with the left, in large part because the approach to environmental stewardship has been dominated by a big-government mindset. That has to change.

Again and again, I remind people to look at a political map, noting that the parts of the country with the most wilderness are often the most conservative. To act as if conservatives don’t care about the environment is contradicted by daily experience.

And now, those who care about the environment are acknowledging that cooperation, bolstered by innovations — the hallmarks of free markets — is superior to coercion.

Perhaps the best thing to celebrate this Earth Day is the growing realization that democratizing environmentalism is not only more respectful of people and private property, it is also more effective.