Why the environmental movement is in trouble.

The U.S. environmental movement is unable to win on even its top priorities, even though it has the advantage of mostly being right. The main problem is that environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public. In the 1970s, the movement said the Alaska oil pipeline would devastate the caribou herd; it has quintupled. Environmentalists were right about DDT's threat to bald eagles, but blocking all spraying in the third world has led to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths. (Industry has also hyped risks with wildly exaggerated warnings that environmental protections will entail a terrible economic cost.) There are many sensible environmentalists, of course, but overzealous ones have tarred the field. The loss of credibility is tragic because reasonable environmentalists are urgently needed to avoid irreversible damage from the Bush administration's plans.