Less Yuck for the Buck.

"We face the millennium in stark realization that time is running out," warns an Earth Day flier distributed at Yale. "Industry and agriculture have fouled the air, the water, and the soil. Lumber suppliers and consumers have decimated our forests and rainforests. We are straining the earth's ability to sustain our exploding populations.

This view, although leaning to the extreme, is not an aberration. Year after year, three in four Americans expect the environment to keep getting worse, finds the Wirthlin Group's environmental poll. One in two Americans think the air is grittier than it was a decade ago, according to a survey by the Foundation for Clear Air Progress.

Not only is the Yale flier wrong on environmental and population trends--there have been demonstrable improvements in air and water quality over the last 30 years; global population isn't exploding, but growing slower than expected; and it's wrong about the source of degradation as well. American business is not the villain increasing pollution, but it's increasingly the source of environmental improvements. And it's been that way for some time.

Capitalism in general, and American business in particular, have spawned environmental improvements in two ways. First, by making us wealthier, it has made us both more willing and able to pay for environmental amenities. "These wild things," Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife ecology, reminds us in A Sand County Almanac, "had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast."

Second, the relentless competition of the free market makes waste costly and drives the technological innovation that allows producers to make more from less. Consider this proclamation: "The ideal is to have nothing to salvage." This may be the sentiment of deep ecologists and committed environmentalists. But long before anyone knew what "deep ecology" meant, they were the views of Henry Ford. As Lynn Scarlett of Reason Public Policy Institute (RPPI) points out, the pioneer of mass production understood that wasting resources was bad for the bottom line. Ford's plant managers eliminated 80 million pounds of steel scrap and bronze in a single year, says Scarlett, simply by "trimming and slimming materials and by changing metal-cutting patterns."

America's businesses have been "dematerializing" ever since. Call it less yuck for the buck. Today it is popular to decry suburbs, as our Vice President does, and denounce the way many Americans choose to live as being the essence of sprawl, which gobbles up precious farmland. The internal combustion engine--also on Gore's enemy list--and the cars they power are held responsible for facilitating such mobility and thus the environmental destruction. But the true story is happier on every account. Prior to cars, we had to rely on horses for our "horsepower." They are hungry and dirty, as Steven Hayward, senior researcher at PRI and author of The Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2000, reminds us. A horse consumed roughly 30 pounds of feed a day. At its peak in 1915, 93 million acres of land were dedicated to growing feed, roughly the area that is occupied by all U.S. cities and suburbs today. And don't forget the output. A horse produces 12,000 pounds of manure and 400 gallons of urine annually, which must go someplace.

It's not that cars don't pollute; they just pollute less per mile than horses and it's dropping all the time. Since 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency notes, U.S. population has increased by a third and GDP and vehicle miles traveled has more than doubled. Yet, over the same period, emissions of air pollutants fell by a third. By one estimate, one dollar of economic activity today produces just 8 percent as much sulfur dioxide emissions as one dollar of economic activity at the turn of the last century. The drops in other pollutants are even greater. All told, worldwide emissions were 60 percent less than they would have been if the world were stuck with 1950 technology.

The economy is rife with examples of such efficiencies. RPPI's Scarlett notes that 30 years ago it took 164 pounds of metal to make 1,000 cans. By 1995 it took a mere 33 pounds to manufacture the same cans. 90 million phone numbers can be placed on a CD-ROM, making superfluous five tons of phone books.

Environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook recently noted that the lesson of the last 30 years is that economic growth doesn't require a growth in pollution. This is because of capitalism, not in spite of it. Someday, this truth might trickle down to places of higher learning such as Yale.

Sally C. Pipes is president of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a San Francisco-based think tank that analyzes national economic and social problems arid proposes free-market solutions.