Earth Day: Chicken Little Gloom Obscures Environmental Improvement

Recent invectives directed at the Bush Administration obscure a significant but ignored story: the steady and continuing improvement in U.S. environmental quality. That trend is certain to continue during the Bush years, despite demonizing by groups that view the president as the equivalent of an Exxon-Valdez oil spill every day. The Sierra Club claims that Bush’s environmental policy is “returning us to the 19th century.” Not to be outdone, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility claims that Bush will return us to “a new environmental Dark Age.”

With few exceptions, the media echoes this line uncritically. We can expect that Earth Day, April 22, will be full of Chicken Little pronouncements about the end of the world. But contrary to this apocalyptic gloom, the improvement in the environment is perhaps the single greatest public policy success story of the last generation. The decline in air pollution in American cities, for example, dwarfs the decline in the crime rate or the decline in the welfare rolls over the past decade. We are justly proud of the decline in crime and welfare, but we seem not to notice or express pride in our environmental progress. Environmentalists are afraid they will lose political clout if they acknowledge this progress (even though their movement helped make it happen), and the EPA is also afraid to trumpet these results because it fears having its budget cut. While air pollution is the most significant success story, major progress has been made in other areas as well.

Back in 1969 the nation was shocked when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, and the degradation of the Great Lakes was a scandal. Today, rivers no longer catch fire, and in most locations the water of the Great Lakes is safe for fishing, swimming, and drinking. Long-term data also show a major decline in chemical residues in wildlife in the Great Lakes region, and several bird species that were once in decline are now flourishing.

Meanwhile, the decline in wetlands has been halted, and the national goal of restoring 100,000 acres of wetlands a year seems within reach. Figures show that wetlands are already increasing in the western states.

What has been responsible for this happy story? Regulation has certainly played a role, but regulators, like King Canute, can only command what is technically and economically feasible. Economic growth and technology are the key ingredients. As people get wealthier, they want more environmental improvement. What the uproar over the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969 proved, since the river had caught fire in the 1930s and 1950s without much comment, is that the affluent society does not want to be the effluent society.

None of this is to imply that our work is done, or that we don’t have to worry about the environment, any more than the sharp decline in the crime rate means that we can lay off police officers and stop fighting crime. There remain a number of environmental problems where we are just beginning to devote significant attention, such as curbing "non-point" sources of water pollution.

There are two difficulties in solving these kinds of problems. The first is the scarcity of good information. Unlike air quality, which has been consistently monitored and measured for more than two decades, we have very poor statistical data on water quality and several other areas of concern. Even though the EPA spends more than $400 million a year on research, it does not have even basic trend information on water quality. Without better information, policymakers are working in the dark.

The second difficulty is where these problems are best addressed. Up to now, we have emphasized national, Washington-based regulation. The time for this is over. The next generation of environmental policy will have to be based in states and localities.

The EPA recently had this to say: “We believe that people know what’s best for their own communities and, given the facts, they themselves will determine what is best to protect public health and the environment.”

That sounds exactly like what President Bush says, so it is surprising that the author of this statement is not Bush’s EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, but her predecessor Carol Browner. Perhaps Bush is not so far off track after all.

This article was nationally distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.

Steven Hayward is senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, and the author of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. He can be reached via email at hayward487@aol.com.