Few ideas are more deeply entrenched in our political culture than that of impending ecological doom. Beginning in 1962, when Rachel Carson warned readers that pollution was a threat to all life on the planet, pessimistic appraisals of the health of the environment have been issued with increasing urgency. And yet, thanks in large part to her warnings, a powerful political movement was born and a series of landmark environmental bills became law: the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). These laws and their equivalents in Western Europe, along with a vast array of private efforts, have been a stunning success. In both the United States and Europe, environmental trends are, for the most part, positive; and environmental regulations, far from being burdensome and expensive, have proved to be strikingly effective, have cost less than was anticipated, and have made the economies of the countries that have put them into effect stronger, not weaker.

Nevertheless, the vocabulary of environmentalism has continued to be dominated by images of futility, crisis, and decline. In 1988, Thomas Berry, an essayist popular among ecologists, wrote that "the planet cannot long endure present modes of human exploitation." In 1990, Gaylord Nelson, the former senator from Wisconsin who was a prime mover behind the first Earth Day in 1970, said that environmental problems "are a greater threat to Earth's life-sustaining systems than a nuclear war." And in 1993 Vice President Al Gore said that the planet now was suffering "grave and perhaps irreparable damage." But, at least insofar as the Western world is concerned, this line of thought is an anachronism, rendered obsolete by its own success. Nor are environmentalists the only people reluctant to acknowledge the good news; advocates at both ends of the political spectrum, each side for its own reasons, seem to have tacitly agreed to play it down. The Left is afraid of the environmental good news because it undercuts stylish pessimism; the Right is afraid of the good news because it shows that government regulations might occasionally amount to something other than wickedness incarnate, and actually produce benefits at an affordable cost.

This is a bad bargain—for liberals especially. Their philosophy is under siege on many fronts—crime, welfare, medical care, and education, among others. So why not trumpet the astonishing, and continuing, record of success in environmental protection?