TOMORROW is the Seattle meeting of the President's Council on Sustainable Development. According to their news release, the council's goal is to: "explore and develop policies that encourage economic growth, job creation, and effective use of our natural resources." Council leaders want to learn what works in environmentally sound economic-development policies.

The council includes prominent environmental officials from the Clinton administration such as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, EPA Administrator Carol Browner and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. They know that Al Gore is emerging as the most influential vice president in our history, a leader with genuine responsibility for establishing and guiding policy in several areas, especially environmental policy. With the Clintons preoccupied by health care, foreign affairs and recurrent allegations of scandal, Gore's importance will grow. We may see a Gore presidency in the year 2000 or before.

How might a Gore presidency affect America's natural resource and environmental policies? Will his policies work? For starters, Gore seems to care a great deal about our environment. He correctly identifies many serious problems - species extinction, population pressures, aquifer depletion - in his book, "Earth in the Balance".

Unfortunately, although he gets many facts straight, his proposed reforms are likely to be genuinely harmful; he has learned little from history. Gore sees the problem as evil and ignorant people and insufficient government management. His approach to environmental bliss is naive - place good, intelligent people in positions of authority and empower them to pursue rational, publicly beneficial policies. He assumes that political bureaucracies can consistently promote environmental ends. While this may work at the community level, it normally fails at the national level as both ecological sensitivity and economic efficiency are trumped by politics.

Gore's policy inclinations are right in the trivial sense that many environmental problems could easily be dealt with if we could "rewire" people and produce a new environmental man. This creature would enthusiastically support programs that improved the quality of the environment, even if they implied significant personal costs. Environmental man's self interest is subservient to ecology. But this is as unrealistic as the Soviet's efforts to create a "new socialist man," another altruistic creature. And like the Soviet's efforts, rewiring - or in this case repainting people a new shade of green - will fail, causing much environmental mischief and fostering political opportunism.

The key to environmental protection is not reliance upon more extensive political micromanagement. Neither is it dependence upon good people in high places or mass conversion to a more ecologically responsible perspective. True, my fellow conservationists and I would rest easier if we could count upon having people such as Aldo Leopold, a profound social observer and a founder of wildlife science, as Interior Secretary. And yes, I'd be delighted if voters shared my views and joined in mass support of The Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited.

But in reality, no society has learned how to identify Platonic despots, i.e., people who will wisely and disinterestedly safeguard the public good. Likewise, mass political movements that inspire sacrifice and achieve sustained, dedicated support normally generate horrid results. Castro, Franco, Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin are but extreme examples of the corruption inherent to centralized power.

The temptations to abuse power are enormous in environmental policy and elsewhere. If we accept Gore's approach, with its heavy reliance on good intentions, good people and strong government, we invite abuses. Good people will not always be in top positions and ordinary people will not always act in environmentally beneficial ways. As America's founders clearly explained, government power is likely to be misdirected. Political management and ecological sustainability are not complementary for several reasons.

The most important reason is that a politician must capture campaign contributions to survive. This means he typically must favor his constituents over the national interest. The greater the government's role in the economy, the more costly it is to neglect one's voters in favor of the public interest in the environment.

We can learn this lesson from federal agencies such as the Forest Service (1897), Bureau of Reclamation (1902) and Park Service (1906). The creators of these agencies, the first Progressives, expected good people to use scientific principles to publicly manage natural resources. But as the power of these agencies grew, so did the subsidized abuse to Western environments and citizens. Gore seems not to understand that these earlier efforts failed because their incentives were perverse and the information they generated was of poor quality.

Gore has taken the important first step of recognizing our environmental ills. But like the progressive reformers of a century ago, he has misdiagnosed the causes and hence the cures. A few in the Clinton administration, including Browner but excluding Babbitt, seem to understand the importance of property rights and incentives to a greener future. I'm afraid that if Gore doesn't learn these lessons and we follow his lead, we will have the worst of all worlds: ineffective environmental protection, inefficient economics and a citizenry disenchanted with environmental causes. The trick is to harmonize economics with ecology. Unfortunately, Gore hasn't learned it.