Does Voluntary Environmentalism Work?

A new study shows that "voluntarily going green continues to have limited corporate appeal -- even among the snowy slopes of the ski industry... The report found that among ski areas in the western U.S., where the industry is a major environmental player, many of the guidelines in the National Ski Areas Association's "sustainable slopes" program are not being followed by the ski areas that have endorsed them.

The most consistently successful examples of voluntary environmentalism, however, involve [both] regulation and external oversight.