Environmentalists: high, low, and dangerous.

Some environmentalists are in it for ideology others for profit. But the profit motive, and other attractions of Private Property, could be put to the service of a genuine environmentalism.

THERE ARE THREE forms of organized environmentalism in the United States. All three are motivated by a genuine concern for nature, and all three also use environmentalism as an excuse for power. Two of the strains are based on perverse ideologies; the one without an ideology is causing the most harm.

The first form of organized environmentalism is the Greens. These are the New Left and New Age environmentalists, peaceniks, student radicals, Hollywood activists, and a few oft-quoted scientists and pseudo-scientists such as Paul Ehrlich, Lestei- Brown, and Jeremy Rabkin. This is revolutionary environmentalism, a romantic effort to reshape society along primitive anticapitalist formulas. The Greens have significant influence in Europe. In the U.S., conservatives have taken great delight in attacking them (they are such an easy target), but their influence on federal environmental policy is trivial.

Such influence as they do have, they obtain by association with a separate and more respectable form of organized environmentalism. This second strain is supremely establishmentarian: Abercrombie & Fitch environmentalism. This group is made up of the spokesmen for such organizations as the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Defense Fund, as well as environmental journalists, Washington-based activists, and, in the Bush Administration, environmental policy-makers.

This is a lily-white movement (the Greens are too, but it bothers them). It is affluent (the average income of a Sierra Club member is $76,000; the World Wildlife Fund has an annual budget of over $50 million). And it is overwhelmingly professional-polls show that the middle and lower-middle classes are either indifferent or hostile to it.

Far from living lives of communal modesty, as the Greens do, these Abercromble & Fitch environmentalists are unabashed about their affluence. Their conferences have become notorious for their plush locales (Switzerland, Beverly Hills, Sundance) and their fine, low-cholesterol dinners. EPA Director William Reilly spent the first weeks of his tenure trying to get a limo to take him home from work. His Reagan Administration predecessor, Lee Thomas, drove a Toyota Tercel.

Yale has become the launching pad for leading members of this strain: a visitor to New Haven in 1966 could have stumbled across World Resources Institute head Gus Speth, Natural Resources Defense Council cofounder Richard Ayres, and Environmental Defense Fund counsels William Butler and James Tripp, as well as the director of the EPA'S Office of Toxic Substances, Charles Elkins, and former EPA counsel John Bonine.

EPA DIRECTOR William Kane Reilly, who grew up in the middle-class community of Fall River, Massachusetts, but graduated from Yale in 1962, exemplifies the type. He went on to get a law degree from Harvard and a degree in urban planning from Columbia. He is a polished, well-mannered, and genial man, who seems conciliatory even when he is not. A member of the Cosmos and University Clubs, he has an aristocratic languor about him. For 16 years he was president of the Conservation Foundation, one of the more genteel environmental groups, supported by the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations. His nickname around the White House is Clean Air Head, for he is not known for a sharp intellect. But his rivals fear him at Cabinet meetings, comparing him to the William Hurt character in Broadcast News. A master of delivery, he can win every five-minute debate, even if he would be annihilated in one that lasted an hour.

Reilly also has the advantage of serving a President who is culturally simpatico. On Capitol Hill, two of the three leading environmentalists-John Heinz (Yale '60, Harvard MBA  63) and Al Gore (Harvard 69) are also scions of famous families. The third, Tim Wirth (Harvard 61), has spent virtually all his life working for the Federal Government.

The common joke about this strain is that an environmentalist is someone who already owns a summer house. But establishment environmentalism is more generalized than anti-development activism. It is foremost a moralistic movement. Peter Sandman of Rutgers was almost right when he wrote, "Our society has reached a near consensus that pollution is morally wrong-not just harmful or dangerous . . . but wrong." That is not a social consensus but a Social consensu consensus of the American establishment.

It seems on the face of it ridiculous to say that a level of ozone smog of 1.0 part per million is moral but a level of 1.4 is immoral. It would seem a matter of science (determining health risks) and economics figuring out how much poverty would be caused by reducing the risks). But when people talk about the environment they are really talking about values.

The values of environmentalism are the values of the socially secure. American environmentalism is a celebration of spiritual refinement and a repudiation of materialism and empire building. The environmentalists celebrate sensitivity, subtlety, a sense of connection to the past-a stewardship in which someone else always pays the bills. To them, pollution is the result of brute energy, powerful ambition, economic tumult, unrefined entrepreneurialism-the qualities of the arriviste. The environmentalists are fastidious. They dislike mess, and economic or technological change. Their vision is of nature as a playland in which only man is vilely energetic.

Establishment environmentalists dominate public debate. Come Earth Day, the airwaves and newspapers will be stocked with their purple rhetoric. They exert influence on policy in various ways. First, they create a crisis atmosphere that encourages a rush to action. Secretary of State James Baker has pushed environmental legislation arguing, "The political ecology is now ripe for action. We can probably not afford to the uncertainties have been solved." Also, they are quick to declare scientific disputes settled, and they Mau-Mau anyone who dissents. Writing in Time, Strobe Talbott made the ludicrous statement that "no respectable scientist denies" the greenhouse theory. They end up treating environmentalism as a moral crusade in which scientific and technological considerations are dismissed as irrelevant or even wicked. Thus they have frequently intimidated politicians into not applying cost-benefit criteria to environmental legislation. Janet Hathaway, a leading spokesman of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), recently declared that "allowing the EPA to condone continued use of a chemical whenever the benefits outweigh the costs is absolutely anathema to the environmental movement." This is moral absolutism masquerading as public policy.

The establishment environmentalists have powerful influence on the broad outlines of environmental legislation. But in environmental regulations, as in others, the real power is in the details. According to the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, the nation now spends over $100 billion a year on environmental cleanup. The clean-air bill that President Bush will have no choice but to sign will probably push that figure up by at least $40 billion. These kinds of figures draw serious moneymen and not merely Ivy League apocalyptics with a house in the Adirondacks. These managerial environmentalists form the third organized branch of environmentalism and the most powerful. Driven not so much by ideology as by institutional interests-the interests of environmentalist groups environmental lawyers, corporations affected by environmental legislation, and environmental bureaucrats-this strain is made up of what Mancur Olson has called "distributional coalitions." Put brutally, they are the special interests that clog up the economy and divert resources to themselves.

SOME OF THESE managerialists work for the mainstream environmental groups, and it is impossible to tell whether their behavior serves ideological goals or simply organizational goals. When Greenpeace disrupts a naval missile launch it is dramatizing a practice it opposes, and also ginning up the kind of publicity required for a successful direct-mail fundraising drive. When an apocalyptic scientist makes headline-grabbing predictions, he may be accurately reporting his conclusions, but he may be also discarding scientific skepticism for the sake of fame and plentiful foundation grants. Environmental groups are not going to be able to raise money if their "studies" do not predict doom around the corner.

Similarly, when a corporation donates money to an environmental groups it is hard to tell if it is the gift of an environmentalist mole in the donations office, or a cynical effort to buy silence. What is one to think, for example, about Dow Chemical or General Motors giving to environmental groups that then lobby against them? Or about the behavior of Waste Management, Inc., a company that was rated by Franklin Research and Development, a Boston investment firm, as one of the worst polluting companies in the nation? Waste Management officials boast that they give at least $355,000 a year to environmental groups. But Waste Management is in the cleanup business and therefore benefits from certain kinds of environmental legislation.

Environmentalist groups often denigrate opposing studies as "industry-funded." But they got so much money from corporations that, more often than not, their studies are industry-funded as well.

Recently the Wall Street Journal reprinted a confidential memo from publicist David Fenton, in which he boasted about how he manufactured the Alar hysteria for the NRDC. "A modest investment by NRDC repaid itself many-fold in tremendous media exposure (and substantial, immediate revenue for future pesticide work)," he bragged. Significantly, in the first paragraph of his report, Fenton wrote, "Overnight, suppliers of organic produce cannot keep up with demand. Traditional supermarkets are opening pesticide-free produce sections." There is no evidence that the organic farmers are instigating these scares, but they benefit greatly from NRDC hysteria, and the two groups are certainly intertwined elsewhere. Organic-farm groups have worked closely with the NRDC and another consumer scare group, the National Toxics Campaign, in support of higher farm subsidies and mandatory production controls. A Canadian food distributor, Loblow, goes further. According to The Economist, Loblow offers to give royalties to any environmental group that endorses its products.

Business groups have also been quick to cash in on the environmental movement. When managerial environmentalists stay within the private sector, the results are overwhelmingly positive. Atlantic Richfield developed a cleaner gasoline. Wal-Mart markets environmentally safer products. 3M has mounted an aggressive campaign to recover its wastes: each year the program deals with 100,000 tons of air pollution, 275,000 tons of solid wastes, and more than 1.5 billion tons of waste water; over 15 years, 3M has saved nearly $300 million in disposal costs. In Nigeria, crop sprayers use wasps instead of pesticides to kill the cassava mealybug. The wasps are cheaper and more effective.

But when the managerialists meddle with regulations, things get messy. Novice congressional staffers are sometimes shocked to discover corporations arguing for stricter regulations. It is not the love of nature that drives these lobbying efforts. A large firm can leap regulatory hurdles that block firms just starting up. A single piece of legislation, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which covers the disposal of more than 450 substances, now has 17,000 rulings related to it. It can cost as much as $1 million and take as long as four years to get RCRA approval to operate a business. A small entrepreneur cannot afford to wait that long or spend that much.

Firms use regulations to gain competitive advantage in numerous other ways. In Europe tighter emissions standards give GM an advantage over Ford: GM had been tooling up for American-style standards while Ford had been spending heavily on experimental lean-burn engines. In West Germany, bottlers have been teaming up with the Greens to get aluminum cans banned.

In the United States, the new Clean Air Bill is overloaded with rigged regulations. Standards for planned coal plants are tougher than for existing plants [see "Clean Air, Hot Air," p. 201. In part this is because, as one Bush Administration official told me, "Plants that exist have more clout than plants that don't yet exist." In addition, congressmen from the Northeast try to stem job flows to the Southwest. One way of doing this is to make energy in the developing Southwest as expensive as possible.

The effect is that firms continue to use old plants even when more efficient and environmentally sound plants would be feasible. In general, regulations discourage innovation. Regulators can't regulate what hasn't yet been developed, so they mandate what already exists.

The final interested parties are the lawyers (the benefits to whom are fairly obvious) and the environmental bureaucrats. For example, the Superfund law has been a boon to bureaucrats and to the independent consulting firms that live off them. Since 1980, the government has spent $10 billion on the Superfund program. An Office of Technology Assessment report recently found that about 60 per cent of that was spent for "research" and administration."

DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENTAL legislation provides Washington dirigistes with plenty of opportunities to manage sectors of the economy. But the big enchilada is the global economy. A warming trend, environmentalists say, would require global treaties, global management, global organizations. The hot phrase in environmental circles is once again "sustainable development." The idea, pioneered by William Ruckelshaus, the former Reagan EPA director and current CEO of Browning Ferris Industries, a large waste-management firm (and another of the firms rated by Franklin Research as one of the worst polluters in the nation), is based on the presumption that the First World developed in ways that were too raucous and messy. Mother Earth is too frail for the Third World to try to repeat that pattern. Accordingly, its development must be managed to meet ecological imperatives in a planned global economy.

This management would be conducted, according to Ruckelshaus, by the United Nations Environmental Program. Ruckelshaus and others argue that the UN should have an independent source of income, preferably a "climate protection tax" imposed on the citizens of First World nations. The global bureaucrat's wish-list, unfurled at conferences around the posher sections of the world, includes an expansion of the World Bank, the IMF, the Un-sponsored World Commission on Environment and Development, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the UN Development Program. The Worldwatch Institute predicts/hopes that First World nations will pay out $150 billion a year by the year 2000 to fund the effort. French President Francois Mitterrand told the UN that a sound environmental policy "implies the idea of renouncing a bit of ... sovereignty."

Parts of the Third World actively support the movement, since debt forgiveness is one of its primary planks. Others have begun to resent having a bunch of affluent First World bureaucrats telling them how they can and cannot seek to grow wealthy. After Zimbabwe's environmentally sound elephant-ranching industry was closed down by a UN body, the director of the country's Wildlife Department called environmentalists "fat little puppies from urban environments who don't know a thing about Africa."

THERE is nothing sinister about global bureaucrats trying to extend their power. There is nothing surprising about companies trying to use government regulations to enhance their profits, or about private interest groups whipping up public hysteria as a tool in fundraising. The problem with the environmental debate is that environmentalism has been portrayed as a philanthropic enterprise, not as a matter of competing legitimate interests.

Environmentalists are not saints, and pollution is not evil. It is an unpleasant by-product of human activity, and it should be cleaned up so long as the benefits of clean-up exceed the costs. The keys to a clean and prosperous economy are found in regions the environmentalists are ideologically compelled to ignore: in the advancement of science, in the birth of new and cleaner technologies, in the empowerment of man, in the creation of wealth. When conservatives make an alternative case for growth environmentalism, then the environmental debate will become balanced. Until then, perverse ideologies and narrowly interested managers will carry the day.