Another Earth Day has come and gone, and though the greens keep implying that each one may be our last, every year the environment gets cleaner.

* Another Earth Day has come and gone, and though the greens keep implying that each one may be our last, every year the environment gets cleaner. The run-up to this year's Earth Day included a breathless New York Times Magazine cover story with an ominous photo of a power-plant smokestack belching forth a huge cloud of steam. While enviros scream that the Bush administration is "gutting" the Clean Air Act, they pass over EPA data showing that coal-fired power-plant emissions (and all other kinds of emissions) continue to go down. Most other areas of the environment--water quality, forestlands, toxic chemicals, wildlife preservation--show similar improvement, according to Steven Hayward's ninth annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. A Gallup Poll released just before Earth Day found that the environment is at its lowest point ever as a salient political issue. Environmentalists have never absorbed the lesson of the fable of the little boy who cried wolf. In fact, they can't even cry wolf much longer, as the northern gray wolf is on its way to being taken off the Endangered Species List.