Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 21, 2007

Maybe "dying" is a too dramatic when talking about the Kinnickinnic River.

Cheryl Nenn, a Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers activist and no Pollyanna, says the stream's ranking last week by another group as one of America's 10 most endangered isn't exactly scientific. It's a means of getting attention.

It's in a good cause. What ails the Kinnickinnic are toxins in river-bottom muck. This means, says Nenn, that marinas can't dredge because it would stir up PCBs. This keeps people off the river.

The attention from the river being called endangered may help secure an $11 million grant to remove the contaminated muck, she says. It may bolster the case later to remove a concrete lining that uglifies the river upstream. That's good.

Yet the Kinnickinnic is not being poisoned now. It's ripe for cleanup, but its woes do not result from a presently growing threat. They are the legacy of dirty days gone by.

Buy a link hereDirty days have, in many ways, gone by. That's the overwhelming news from another report last week, the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. In the most important ways, the world is getting cleaner, says Steven Hayward, who assembled the latest in a series of annual reports for a couple of free-market think tanks.

Major air pollutants have been falling for years, says Hayward, and are still falling. Toxic releases are down - by 45% in seven years. Depending on the pollutant, some of these trends stretch back decades, says Hayward, some even before the command-and-control rules imposed in the 1970s.

Some of this may have been helped along by those diktats, he notes. There's less lead because of unleaded gas, a great benefit for the cost. But when Washington mandated things like catalytic converters, "we cleaned up the air in the most expensive way possible," he says.

More and more cities are now meeting ozone rules because car- makers have improved engines. The aim was better horsepower for the dollar, he says. The result was better air.

That was the 20th century's story in developed countries: Better technology usually pollutes less. "Some of the very worst air pollution in this country was 50 or 60 years ago," he says. In coming years, he expects, we'll see the same improvements in countries that today suffer rising pollution as they develop. Mexico's air is already starting to improve, he notes, just as Japan's and South Korea's did. China and India will follow.

China is already gaining trees. The most striking trend to Hayward is that while the world on net is deforesting, particularly in Brazil and Africa, Asia is now gaining forest. That's happening everywhere that gross domestic product exceeds about $4,600 a year. Prosperity breeds leaves.

There's a tendency to discount this. A majority of Americans say the environment's worsening. That sentiment is increasing. Some of that may be gloom about global warming, which has eclipsed people's worries about actual pollution.

Even there, there's progress: Methane in the air has stabilized worldwide, and it's a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The growth in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions is slower than in the '90s, and its output per dollar of wealth we create is falling faster than in most developed nations.

Still, there's pessimism. Hayward blames a puritanical streak in some activists, an eagerness to believe the worst. There's the desire to seem ever more needed, but some of it is the natural human yen for apocalyptic tales. Enviropessimists are gloomy, he says, "because it makes them happy."

Not that everyone looking to clean up is that way. Fewer should be: Aside from the risk of despair, to presume our surroundings are getting worse when they're really getting better leads us to misunderstand how to improve them more.

It was a poorer Milwaukee that pumped soot into the air and PCBs into the Kinnickinnic. It's a sign of how far our free-market prosperity has brought us that we now can contemplate cleaning up antique toxins left by our grandparents.

Patrick McIlheran is a Journal Sentinel editorial columnist. His e-mail address is pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com