Nothing becomes Christie Whitman's tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency as her leaving it. We're referring to her release this week of the agency's first-ever Report on the Environment, which has the courage to admit success.
 
     The professional green lobby is in the pessimism business. Some catastrophe always looms; we're running out of oil, the ozone layer is vanishing, or something. The EPA report -- which used data from 30 agencies, states, Indian tribes and non-profits -- found that America is turning greener all the time.
 
     The air is cleaner, for example, with major pollutants declining 25% over 30 years despite more people, cars and a larger economy. Of 260 U.S. metropolitan areas, 212 have pollution levels that are trending down. The days across the country in which air quality violated a health standard fell to 3% in 2001 from 10% in 1988.
 
     The volume of toxic chemicals released in the environment has declined by nearly half in 15 years. The U.S. has addressed the threats at 846 of its 1,498 most toxic waste sites. The Eagle Mine near Vail, Colorado -- once a major area of groundwater contamination -- is today alive with brown trout. In the Great Lakes region, bald eagle nests increased to 366 in 2000 from 50 in 1961. Forests still cover one-third of America, with acreage increasing by two million from 1997-99. Just 4.3% of the nation's total land area is developed (no, that's not a typo).
 
     There are areas that need improvement. While 94% of the nation drinks water that meets all health standards (up from 79% in 1993), water quality is still poor in certain rivers and lakes. But the main lesson of the report is that Americans have never lived in a cleaner, healthier country.
 
     If cornered by the truth, the green lobby will even drop its veil of woe and admit this good news. But then it will attribute all progress to the power of government regulation and its attendant lawsuits. This is also a mistake. Those of us who believe in free markets understand that pollution is an "externality" that isn't factored into normal transaction costs; even Milton Friedman endorses effluent taxes.
 
     But the point the lefties miss is that only a prosperous country can afford to pay for those externalities. America only developed the political consensus to clean up the environment in the 1970s, after it had become a society of two-car garages. The key to future green progress is maintaining the free-market growth and innovation that can produce hydrogen cars or find a way to turn wind into cheap power. Our main beef with the greens -- other than that they make depressing dinner companions -- is that their household remedies are always the kind of regulation that will stifle this growth.

     President Bush has tried to balance growth with stewardship. The EPA has instituted a new trading program that should clean more water at lower cost. Congress is debating a Clear Skies program that would give business more flexibility to reduce pollution in cost-effective ways. The House has already passed something called Healthy Forests, which recognizes that human management can help stop damaging wildfires. The feds continue to pour money into habitat restoration for endangered species, water conservation, brownfields clean-up, reforestation, and much more.
 
     And yet the professional greens portray all of this as the end of natural days. The League of Conservation Voters gives the Bush Administration an "F" for its "assault" on the environment "on all fronts" -- a fact that merely betrays the League's own relentless partisanship. It sponsored a forum for Democratic Presidential candidates yesterday in which doom, gloom and disaster were also the major themes.
 
     The EPA report deserves wide distribution because it documents the environmental progress that Americans have been seeing with their own eyes, from sea to shining sea.