COLUMN LEFT : When the Pill Is Worse Than the Poison : Environmentalists won’t make inroads on toxics without a believable alternative.

The past two decades have been years of apparently phenomenal success for the environmental movement. Support for environmental causes has grown rapidly--so rapidly that some enthusiasts have been lulled into believing that they were becoming, if they weren’t already, a clear majority of the country. After all, when even George (Oil Man) Bush, the popularity President, wants to be known as an environmentalist, can a majority of the country be far behind?

The rejection of numerous environmental initiatives in the last election suggests otherwise. The movement appears to suffer from the “freeze syndrome”--its support is broad but not deep. For years, when push has come to shove on the environment, it has proved easier to settle for cosmetic changes rather than take any really significant action against polluters. Despite all the members and all the money and all the media and all the acts of Congress, the environmental movement has failed to achieve its principal goal. Total toxic emissions and the concentration of toxic substances in the air, the water and on the land, with few exceptions, still continue to increase.

The simple fact is that environmentalism remains overwhelmingly a crusade of the well-to-do. According to a recent poll by the Roper Organization, active support for environmental initiatives is concentrated in the wealthier and most-schooled upper fifth of the population. A little more than half those polled were not very concerned about environmental issues, either out of conviction or cynicism; and another 26% were inconsistently concerned, supporting some environmental causes but not others.

The reason for the movement’s restricted appeal is not hard to find. Initiatives like Proposition 128, “Big Green,” in California and the several proposals for toxic-use reduction and pollution prevention now pending before several state legislatures may strike at the heart of the toxics problem. But they also, awkwardly, strike at the heart of the American economy.

A Labor Institute study found that industries in the “toxic economy,” which either produce or depend on toxic materials, employ 30% of the work force in New Jersey, many of whom are among the highest paid and most highly unionized production workers in the state. These industries also account for 46% of all value added in the manufacturing sector.

The toxic economy plays a similar role in other states. To call for “toxic-use reduction” is thus to call for a major transformation in the nature of the existing system of production. And to most workers, whether rightly or wrongly, it is also to call for the elimination of their jobs. A nontoxic economy might create more and better jobs than the current system. But to a highly paid worker in the toxic economy, a job in the hand is worth two in the plan. Workers prefer the jobs they’ve got now to the ones they might get later.

It is upon this fact that the environmental movement has been hoisted. Toxic industries play such an important part in the U.S. economy, and so many people are dependent upon them for their livelihoods, that the environmental movement has little or no realistic prospect of significantly reducing the use of toxics without offering some believable alternative to the people whose paychecks would be directly affected by their proposals.

For starters, the movement ought never again to support specific pollution-prevention measures without also insisting on adequately funded income guarantees for workers and others who might lose their livelihood as a result of any new regulations. The lack of such guarantees was the Achilles’ heel of “Big Green.” This kind of commitment will be difficult to sustain at first. It would have required, for example, that environmentalists oppose the amended Clean Air Act recently signed by President Bush.

But it will pay off in the long run. Working people are the natural allies of environmentalists. They know that they are the first to die from exposure to hazardous materials on the job. They also know that without a job, they would live less well for fewer years. For environmentalism to become a majority crusade, it simply must address these economic realities.