WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Our redoubtable friend and colleague Fred Smith (president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute) returned recently from England with a zeitgeist gem that deserves a rebroadcast. Seems the BBC equivalent of "Saturday Night Live" contained a sketch of the second coming of Jesus, who naturally meets with reporters (the Pharisees of our day). "Well, I suppose you'll be back to your old tasks of curing the sick and feeding the hungry," a reporter asks. To which the Savior replies: "Yes, within, of course, the limits imposed by sustainable development."

It is moments like these that cause Fred to consider himself a "despairing optimist." "Despairing" because of the limitless reserves of ignorance and nonsense that pervade the world of politics and policy (as the German playwright Odön von Horwáth put it, "Nothing gives you such a sense of the infinite as stupidity"), yet "optimistic" because somehow common sense has a way of breaking through. If "sustainable development," the new Holy Grail of environmentalism, is the subject of popular satire, then we have a good chance of winning the issue.

These reflections come to mind this week because this is the week of Earth Day. Here in our precinct, we are releasing the second edition of our Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, which shows that environmental quality in the U.S. and Canada continues its steady improvement. We've even compiled a composite index of several environ-mental indicators (air, water, natural resources and solid waste) into a single number, like the Consumer Price Index. Using a conservative methodology that surely understates actual environmental improvement, we still find that overall environmental quality in the U.S. is 20% better than in 1980-and that's in absolute numbers, not per capita.

So if the basic definition of "sustainability" is to be used-making sure that we don't compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs-we wonder what the ruckus is about. It is increasingly apparent that "sustainable development" is one of those subjunctive moods that have proliferated like crabgrass in our political discourse. (When pressed for a more precise and operative definition of the term at a major conference in January, the best a prominent leader of the environmental movement could offer was that it is "a general sense of things," which strikes us as the environmental equivalent of "we know it when we see it.")

Way back in 1988, environmental scientist Timothy O'Riordan warned, "It may only be a matter of time before the metaphor of sustainability becomes so confused as to be meaningless, certainly as a device to straddle the ideological conflicts that pervade contemporary environmentalism." Looks like that time has arrived.

-By Steven Hayward