Capitalism makes you cleaner: the underrated environmental qualities of the Kuznets Curve.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Editorial

ONE OF THE MOST rightly celebrated books of the early environmental movement was New Yorkerwriter John McPhee's 1971 pageturner, Encounters with the Archdruid. The quasi-religious figure referenced in the title was naturalist legend David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of a half-dozen other environmentalist organizations, including Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters.

McPhee's concept was elegantly simple: Send Brower out into environmental noman's lands with his antagonists--a mining magnate in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area, a goff-loving real estate developer on Georgia's Cumberland Island, and United States Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy on the Colorado River, which Dominy had recently helped disfigure with the Glen Canyon Dam. Brower was a larger-than-life figure, by turns prickly and pragmatic, conversational and condemnatory; yet his opponents on these trips also viewed themselves as responsible stewards of Mother Nature, and the ensuing repartee is a fascinating collision between mid-century faith in engineering progress and the first stirrings of a more pessimistic countercultural backlash.

Yet the anecdote from the book that sticks out most to contemporary eyes is a literal throw-away line about McPhee himself. Brower, Dominy, and the author are floating down the Colorado, opening up cans of beer in the hot sun. "They put the aluminum tongues inside the cans," McPhee writes. (For those of you under 35, these were the bits that you had to rip off a can in order to get at the deliciousness within.) "I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone."

Here was the man widely considered to be the best long-form environmental journalist of the past so years, just hucking trash into an endangered river under the watchful eyes of the 20th century's leading Friend of the Earth. An act that seems almost deliberately shocking to our modern sensibilities--like the scene in the first season of Mad Men, in which the Draper family ditches the detritus of a lovely picnic lunch onto a grassy knoll--was presented in 1971 more as a commentary on the extreme pieties of oversensitive nature lovers. Unwittingly, this passage might be the best literary rendering of a concept too little understood in our sky-is-falling culture: the environmental Kuznets Curve.

In the 1950s, the Belarussian-born American economist Simon Kuznets hypothesized that income inequality as a...