The World & I: America's Environmental Rebirth

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Steven Hayward

*Wetland friendly*; Over the past three decades, the loss of U.S. wetlands such as this one in Florida's Big Cypress Swamp has been halted and probably reversed.

sk a cross section of informed citizens to identify the single largest public-policy success story in America in recent decades, and most will probably answer crime and welfare.
        The national crime rate has fallen more than 30 percent over the last decade. In some high-crime cities, such as New York, rates have fallen even more dramatically--up to 80 percent for several categories of violent crime.
        Welfare is regarded as an even more stunning success story: The nation's welfare caseload has fallen 57 percent in the last five years. A few states, such as Wisconsin, boast a welfare-caseload decline of better than 80 percent.
        These are undeniably significant achievements, made all the more impressive by the pervasive sense for several decades that nothing much could be done to bring down crime or welfare dependency. Yet measured by the magnitude of change, the positive trends in both crime and welfare are dwarfed by the improvement in America's environmental trends.
        This surprises most people, because they are used to a drumbeat of apocalyptic news that the environment is getting progressively worse. Polls show that a majority of Americans--often as high as 70 percent, according to the annual Wirthlin Poll on the environment--believe that environmental quality is deteriorating and will continue its downward spiral in the future. A Roper Poll in 1998 found that 57 percent of Americans agreed that "the next 10 years will be the last decade when humans will have a chance to save the earth from environmental catastrophe."
        In fact, the U.S. track record on the environment is a spectacular success story, and the American experience is starting to be emulated in other nations around the world. Emissions of the basic pollutants targeted under the Clean Air Act, for example, have fallen by two-thirds since 1970. Although smog remains a problem in several metropolitan areas, the peak concentrations of smog are about two-thirds lower than they once were in the worst cities, greatly reducing the health risk to children and seniors.

Stellar Achievements

he most substantial improvement has been in airborne lead, down nearly 99 percent since 1970. This dramatic decrease has contributed to a more than 80 percent decline in blood lead levels in children, who are most vulnerable to the effects of lead poisoning. Some health

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Ecorenaissance

experts attribute the across-the-board increase in IQ in children over the last generation to the reduction of lead in our environment. (High blood lead levels can stunt brain development in children and reduce IQ scores.)
        The use of toxic chemicals in the United States has declined by 45 percent since 1988, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started carefully tracking toxics. Pesticide residues in bird eggs and other wildlife show similar large declines, and many once-vulnerable bird populations are increasing. DDT residues in human tissue have fallen 80 percent since 1970. The Centers for Disease Control is starting to track long-term human exposure to a wide variety of potentially dangerous chemicals; the early data suggest that amounts of chemicals in human tissues are well below the threshold for health risk.
        The data on water quality are not as comprehensive as those for air quality and toxic chemicals (partly because water quality is much more difficult to measure thoroughly and consistently), but several measures suggest we have made major advances. The Great Lakes, on the brink of becoming the American Dead Sea in 1970, are today thriving to the point where the most significant environmental problem is that too many species are proliferating there (so-called exotic species that have come in from overseas clinging to ship hulls).
        The most significant water pollution problem today comes not from industry or inadequate wastewater treatment but from runoff from farm fields and paved surfaces. Meanwhile, the loss of wetlands has been halted and probably reversed. In the 1950s, the United States lost nearly 500,000 acres of wetlands a year. By the early 1990s, this figure had fallen to about 30,000 acres a year, and recent data suggest that we are probably now gaining wetlands.
        There are lots of gaps in our data, and our knowledge of many environmental problems is incomplete. For example, we do not have a good analytical grasp of species extinction and habitat loss, probably the most serious environmental issues of our time. Understanding of these matters is expected to grow rapidly.

Easing of Population Pressures

e can also anticipate the species-extinction problem to improve, not only here but around the world. There are two reasons:

The "population bomb" is fizzling out, and credible projections suggest that world population will begin to decline slowly, perhaps starting as soon as 2050. The population bomb was always the cornerstone of scenarios of global environmental ruin; now it is increasingly apparent that there will be room for both humans and nature.

The world is getting wealthier at a rapid rate, and wealth is the prerequisite for environmental remediation.
The more important question is why so many environmental conditions have improved in the United States over the last generation. The modern environmental movement and landmark federal statutes, passed in the aftermath of the first Earth Day in 1970, deserve their share of the credit for changing public perceptions and introducing rigorous regulation.
By far the chief factors in improving environmental conditions, however, have been economic growth and technological improvement. For example, some categories of air

*Favoring fowl*: Across the United States, many once-vulnerable bird populations are now increasing as pesticides in the environment decline.

pollution have been declining since the 1920s, and available data from the 1950s and early 1960s show that sulfur dioxide pollution was declining more rapidly before the first Clean Air Act than after it. The environmental movement's emphasis on regulation and litigation, which, according to many critics, too often generates million-dollar solutions to thousand-dollar problems, blinds most people to the fundamental creativity of humans who put their minds to solving practical problems.
An equally important question is why the public fails to perceive the progress that has been made on the environment. The answer may be that the more politicized (and publicity-hungry) environmental organizations thrive on bad news--they might be called "crisis entrepreneurs"--because, their opponents say, it is good for fund-raising and membership drives. (This is why many environmentalists were secretly delighted, according to their critics, that Bush won the election; it gave them someone to demonize.)
Government agencies such as the EPA have little incentive to tout progress, critical observers say, because it would be bad for their budget appropriation and regulatory authority. The media, as the clich?goes, do not hanker to report good news so much as bad. This means in practice that they are eager to seize upon every speculative environmental scare. To be fair, it should be noted that much of the improvement in the environment has been slow and steady. A 1, 2, or 3 percent a year improvement in ambient urban air quality, for example, doesn't seem like much until you add up 20 years of such increments.

Positive Media Coverage

appily, this is starting to change. There are more newspaper headlines about environmental progress, and one national broadcast network recently led a newsbreak capsule with the story that air quality had improved so much in New York City that it would likely be taken off the list of the EPA's nonattainment areas. And, on the thirtieth anniversary of Earth Day last year, USA Today editorialized: "Hidden Environmental Gains: Polls Find Misplaced Gloom. Air, Water Improve. New Tools Emerge."
U.S. News & World Report carried a similar feature: "It's a Breath of Fresh Air: Thirty Years After Earth Day, America Is Getting Its Environmental Act Together."

*Breath of fresh air*: The air in Los Angeles was once so smoggy that it was often yellow and acrid. Today, peak concentrations of smog are roughly two-thirds lower.

"America's record of environmental progress," David Whitman reported, "shows that despite the grave problems that persist, there is reason for hope."
        There has been growing media coverage of improvements in air quality, especially for Southern California, which has always been the smog capital of the United States. The San Diego Union Tribune carried a front-page story with the headline, "We Can Breathe Easy: Air Pollution Is Down." The Los Angeles Daily News offered the headline "Smog's Dirty Grasp Easing."
        Newspapers elsewhere in the United States took note of what has been happening in California. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch titled a story "L.A. Area Makes Major Headway in Its Battle Against Pollution."
        Nor is recognition of the turnabout in environmental trends limited to the United States. The London Observer recently carried the headline: "Mexico City Cleans Up Its Act: The War on Pollution."
        Such stories are beginning to affect public opinion. The Gallup Poll shows that the proportion of the public

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North America's Expanding Forests

believing we have made "a substantial amount of progress on the environment since 1970" has more than doubled, up from 14 percent a decade ago to 36 percent today.
Extreme environmentalists worry that if progress on the environment is acknowledged, public support for ecological protection might wane. More moderate environmentalists see this fear as misplaced. Just because the crime rate has fallen by 50 percent in New York City, they reason, doesn't mean it's necessary to lay off police and prosecutors, nor does public concern about street crime disappear.
The environment is a much more dramatic case. Twenty years ago, sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote that "it is entirely possible that when the history of the twentieth century is finally written, the single most important social movement of the period will be judged to be environmentalism." Nisbet may, if anything, understate the case; environmentalism represents a permanent and fundamental change in human outlook that is commensurate with the rise of liberal individualism and modern democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Environmental Pessimism Backfires

xtreme environmentalists seem almost congenitally incapable of acknowledging good news or being hopeful about the future. This was not always the case. In 1980, on the tenth anniversary of the first Earth Day, one of the organizers of that year's observance told Time magazine, "We decided it was time to celebrate. We've accomplished quite a lot." Very few environmentalists talk this way today.
        The great movie producer Sam Goldwyn used to say, "Never prophesy--especially about the future." It is unavoidable, however, in the case of the environment, because the environment is all about the future. There is every reason to think that our grandchildren will drive emission-free autos and will routinely say, "Smog--what was that all about?" Notwithstanding the puzzling problems of climate change and habitat loss, the likelihood is that in 100 or 200 years, our successors will enjoy a thriving environment.
        The relentless pessimism of extremist environmentalists is already turning into their worst enemy. For example, if Al Gore hadn't written Earth in the Balance, or hadn't written it in such an apocalyptic tone, he would likely be president today, because he wouldn't have lost West Virginia. Even Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis carried the state, and Walter Mondale almost won it in the Republican landslide year of 1984.
        It is very difficult for a Democrat to lose that state, but Gore found the one way to do it--by threatening the livelihood of the coal industry. It isn't clear why the former vice president felt compelled to single out coal for demonization: Sulfur dioxide emissions from coal use are down 65 percent since 1970. It just may be an indication that environmentalists need to put more emphasis on the good news to achieve good news politically for themselves.

Steven Hayward is director of the Center for Environmental Studies at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and author of the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, a report released each year on Earth Day.