James Watt, Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, was an environmental paradox. To environmentalists, he personified an obsolete view of nature, a view seeing only commercial value in natural resources. But for the Greens, Watt was a useful icon of rapacious industrial exploitation. As such, he deserves much of the credit for the rise of professional environmentalism. He was the enemy that united their followers. He fueled massive fund-raising campaigns to thwart the Reagan Administration's policy directives.

As an unapologetic voice for industry, Vice President Dan Quayle is a pale incarnation of James Watt. Quayle, who runs the White House Council on Competitiveness, is the focal point of environmental groups for his deregulatory fervor and pro-business attitude; he supported efforts to allow logging in the Northwest's old-growth forests while dismissing concerns about the spotted owl. His message: the environment costs jobs.

The Council's goal is to boost the economy by reducing the burdens of environmental regulations. For example, they proposed reclassifying hazardous waste, allowing the least toxic types to be buried at low cost in municipal landfills. But, independent of the merits of this proposal, it was withdrawn because of election-year environmental sensitivities.

Environmental groups strongly favor Democratic vice presidential candidate Al Gore over Quayle.

Sen. Gore has been an environmental advocate for many years and has recently published "Earth in the Balance," a personal treatise describing his eco-philosophy and prescriptions for change. He advertises his compassion and commitment to environmental issues and speaks constantly of "the dangerous dilemma that our civilization now faces," and how he has renewed his commitment to ecology.

And Gore's prescriptions are radical. One example from his book is "the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a 25-year period." This is a worrisome proposal because Gore considers only the benefits of this idea and not the concurrent costs. He fails to ask the question that good ecologists must ask when confronting a proposed change, "And then what?" What are the likely direct and indirect consequences of his proposals, such as an increased number of power plants to power the presumed electric cars?

When considering the greenhouse effect, Gore asserts that skeptics' theories "should not be given equal weight," because such consideration, "undermines the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take." He ignores a recent Greenpeace poll showing that nearly half of the atmospheric scientists polled agreed that we have experienced no warming due to the Greenhouse effect, and that another quarter or so don't feel sufficiently informed to take a position.

Most disturbingly, Gore wants an elite to make decisions for a public he seems not to trust. His conscious rejection of open scientific debate and blind advocacy for governmental policies that will drastically affect every American are the marks of zealotry, not understanding.

People who "know" the truth often seek coercive government action to enforce their visions. As America's founders so well understood, this approach is seldom the answer to our problems. Gore's unswerving, and uncritical, environmental ideology deserves the same skepticism as Dan Quayle's single-minded and shortsighted protection of business interests.

Gore is right, however, when he sees a false dichotomy between jobs and the environment. We can have a clean environment and economic progress. In the long run they are mutually dependent. That is something which Vice President Quayle does not seem to acknowledge.

But creating institutions that foster these real benefits is not easy. Converting rhetoric into reality is tough.

Both Gore and Quayle could learn that the solutions to environmental problems lie with the cooperation of responsible decision-makers. Solutions must involve knowledge of actions affecting the environment, identification of those decision-makers who influence such actions, and creation of incentives for those decision-makers to act responsibly. The key step is the creation of new legal and economic arrangements that employ property rights and market incentives to achieve environmental ends. This is the environmental leadership America needs.

Several environmental groups, such as The Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, understand and apply this logic. Neither vice presidential contender, talking in absolutes about the apocalypse, whether it be environmental or economic, has yet articulated this understanding. Each promotes his own brand of environmental demagoguery.