Is environmentalism dead? That’s the startling question posed by a pair of young environmentalists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, who stirred a kerfuffle at a meeting of the elite Environmental Grantmakers Association last fall by arguing that Americans are tuning out on the environment.

Their evidence: After spending millions to dis-elect President Bush, the environmental community is faced with a Washington that is more Republican, and thus supposedly more anti-environment, than ever. Moreover, Al Gore’s global warming treaty is bogged down; people keep buying those darn gas guzzlers; Oregon’s supposedly liberal voters approved a referendum making it tougher for government to take land for open spaces; and 41% of Americans have come to view environmentalists as “extremists.”

Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger – the former is a pollster and the latter is executive director of something called the Breakthrough Institute – argued in a 12,000-word tract that environmentalism is coming to be seen by most people as “just another special interest.” They proposed that the very term “environmentalism” be dropped in favor of embedding environmental values in a broader, “progressive” agenda, in an effort to rebuild a winning coalition. But the idea that environmentalism is an endangered species is absurd. It might not rank as high on the list of political priorities as today’s environmental mainstream would like, but ask the average American whether he or she considers himself or herself to be an environmentalist, and the answer will be an unequivocal yes – as poll after poll has shown. Even the dread Mr. Bush feels constrained to offer up solutions to presumed threats like global warming despite obvious skepticism about the scientific basis for alarmist claims that the world is about to burn to a crisp.

No, the question is not whether environmentalism is dead. It’s whether a particular brand of environmentalism – precisely the “progressive” brand favored by the likes of Messrs. Shellenberger and Nordhaus – is dead. And the answer there is an equally clear yes.

The Shellenberger/Nordhaus thesis assumes that there is only one possible form of environmentalism: ever-increasing government regulation; public ownership of ever-growing amounts of land; restrictions on where and how people can live; international treaties limiting carbon dioxide (and thus energy use) – in short, a long list of command-and-control strategies predicated on the assumption that the political elites know best how to organize things in a “sustainable” way.

Even many leading Republicans have bought into this view. Richard Nixon invented the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, after all. For that matter, it was Teddy Roosevelt who gave political form to the government/conservationist ideal (and, not coincidentally, the great leap forward for government known as progressivism) in the early 1900s.

But command-and-control strategies in the environmental arena suffer from the same fatal defect as any other socialistic-minded enterprise: vast expense but dismal results, at least when measured by the claims made for most environmental legislation. Less than 20 creatures, for example, have been removed from the list established by the very intrusive Endangered Species Act of 1973. The air and water are cleaner, but they were growing rapidly cleaner anyway prior to the formation of the EPA, according to some environmental historians.

Only by generating scare stories in the press has the environmental movement been able to sustain itself. But now that so many of those scare stories – Alar, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, even DDT – have been debunked as badly overwrought, the movement is losing credibility. Hence the growing equation of environmentalism with extremism.

Around the world, economists also are beginning to understand that the one sure marker of a clean society is a wealthy society – precisely because economic growth means more efficiency, less waste (pollution), and more resources to deal with remaining problems. As wealth increases, so does public desire for environmental amenities. Entrepreneurs are finding ways to capture the value of those amenities and even profit from them – a far more sustainable approach than relying on the goodness of a government bureaucracy. An early example was Hawk Mountain in eastern Pennsylvania, owned by a private foundation that charges bird lovers to watch migrating raptors along the Kittatinny ridges.

Environmentalists like Messrs. Shellenberger and Nordhaus keep on insisting that the answer is for environmental donors to kick in ever-greater gobs of money to progressive causes. But it makes you wonder if they are really interested in progressive results. And it misses the real environmental revolution taking place under their noses.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.