Environmental Policy in Practice

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is to present a few environmental dilemmas (e.g., air pollution, water contamination, garbage disposal, and species protection) in order to examine the choices that the United States has made about these issues. Then, we introduce the reader to the central theme of our book: we need to pay attention to the doers of environmental policy, as they are the people on the front-lines of environmental policy, implementing society’s choices. With the term “front-lines,” we are referring to the people who implement or carry out environmental policy on a daily basis. These individuals on the front-lines include environmental rule-writers, who translate congressional statutes into actionable policy, and environmental inspectors, who ensure that your neighborhood waste management company is complying with federal law to ensure that your waste is properly stored. They also include members of advocacy groups who urge collective action as well as policy analysts who provide the important facts and analysis we need to make decisions. Further, we cannot overlook those businesses that cooperate with rule-writers and environmental inspectors to protect the environment (Pautz and Rinfret in The Lilliputians of Environmental Regulation: The Perspectives of State Regulators, Routledge, New York, 2013). The argument we make in this book is simple: in order to understand environmental choices made in the United States, we need to pay attention to the doers of environmental policy, many of which occupy the so-called fourth branch of government (i.e., the bureaucracy).