Web Site WildLaw: A Nonprofit Environmental Law Firm Statutes, Regulation, and Help http://www.wildlaw.org/Eco-Laws/start.html See also: Clean Air Act; Clean Water Act; Endan-gered Speci
Trang 1source Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA)
Al-though RCRA relates to solid waste generally, its key
regulatory provisions are found in Subtitle C, which
imposes “cradle to grave” controls on hazardous
waste Strict regulatory controls apply when material
falls within the definition of “hazardous waste.” Some
wastes are specifically listed as hazardous, while others
may be determined to be so based on the presence of
a hazardous characteristic such as toxicity, reactivity,
corrosivity, and ignitability In general, household
waste is excluded from the program There are also
separate provisions regulating underground storage
tanks such as those used for gasoline and other
haz-ardous liquids
Under Subtitle C, generators of hazardous wastes
are subjected to strict recordkeeping and reporting as
well as to specifications for containment and labeling
Transporters are required to comply with a manifest system which identifies the waste and assures that it is taken to a permitted facility for treatment, storage, or disposal (TSD) TSD facilities must comply with elab-orate permitting requirements, usually issued and en-forced by a state agency, including not only technical standards but also financial responsibility and back-ground review Under the 1984 amendments, land disposal is regarded as the “least favored method for managing hazardous wastes” and is severely re-stricted Landfills may be permitted, provided they meet strict technical requirements such as double plastic liners and leachate collection systems Treat-ment systems are preferred; they must meet “best demonstrated available technology” standards The RCRA regulates hazardous wastes prospec-tively Although RCRA provides for injunctive relief to eliminate “imminent and substantial endangerment
to the health or environment,” Congress addressed in another program, the Comprehensive Environmen-tal Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), the need for cleaning up areas which are already contaminated Sometimes referred to as
“Superfund” because of the trust fund created by the act to fund cleanups, CERCLA is a comprehensive ap-proach to hazardous chemical dump and spill sites It authorizes the president of the United States, through the EPA, to clean up facilities at which haz-ardous substances have been released Hazhaz-ardous substances subject to the act are identified predomi-nantly by cross-reference to lists established under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act Petroleum substances not otherwise contaminated or listed as hazardous are exempted from the purview of the act CERCLA re-quires persons in charge of certain facilities to report releases of hazardous substances, subject to strict pen-alties for failure to do so It also created a system of list-ing hazardous sites, a National Contlist-ingency Plan (NCP), setting forth the protocols and standards of remedial investigation, feasibility study, removal and long-term remediation, and a National Priorities List listing the cleanup sites in order of priority
Under CERCLA, hazardous substance removal and site remediation is accomplished in two ways: first, the EPA can issue an order requiring potentially responsible parties (PRPs) to clean up a site; alterna-tively, the EPA can clean up the site itself and bring a cost recovery action against the PRPs for response costs and natural resource damages Private parties
Activists rally in 1985 at the U.S Capitol for the passage of
amend-ments to Superfund legislation, a group of U.S laws focused on
haz-ardous waste remediation (Time & Life Pictures/Getty
Im-ages)
Trang 2who have incurred response costs may also seek
rebursement CERCLA’s cost recovery provisions
im-pose “strict liability”—without any required showing
of fault—upon present and past owners and
opera-tors of facilities from which there has been a release or
threatened release of hazardous substances, upon
those who “arranged for disposal,” and upon
trans-porters who took part in site selection Although cost
recovery must be consistent with the National
Contin-gency Plan, there are only a few very limited defenses
to liability, and the act’s provisions tend to encourage
voluntary settlements and cleanups Nevertheless,
liti-gation often occurs among PRPs who are jointly and
severally liable for the full amount but may apportion
their liability in actions for contribution In 2002, the
Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields
Revi-talization Act amended CERCLA Brownfields are
derelict commercial or industrial complexes that can
be revitalized for new uses The amendment provides
funds for the cleanup of these areas
Endangered Species
The Endangered Species Act (1973) was elevated to
national debate by a small fish, the snail darter, the
threatened demise of which caused the U.S Supreme
Court to cease construction of the Tellico Dam on the
Little Tennessee River In Tennessee Valley Authority v.
Hill (1978) the Court held that there are no
excep-tions to the Endangered Species Act command that
all federal agencies ensure that actions authorized,
funded, or carried out by them do not jeopardize the
continued existence of an endangered or threatened
species or result in the destruction or modification of
habitat of such species Congress amended the statute
in 1978 to provide some flexibility, but the
prohibi-tions of the Endangered Species Act remain strong
The act prohibits the importation, exportation, and
“taking” of endangered species; the Department of
the Interior, which administers the Endangered
Spe-cies Act, has defined “taking” not only to prohibit
such predatory activities as hunting, pursuing,
shoot-ing, woundshoot-ing, killshoot-ing, trappshoot-ing, or capturing
endan-gered species but also to outlaw harming such species
by “significant habitat modification or degradation
where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly
impairing essential behavioral patterns, including
breeding, feeding, or sheltering.” A narrow exception
is made for “incidental taking” of species in pursuit of
otherwise lawful activity Since its enactment, the
En-dangered Species Act has remained a contentious
po-litical issue; presidential administrations have often differed substantially on their stances on this issue The Reagan administration attempted to limit protec-tive status for certain species, a policy that hampered the enforcement of the act and caused more than a decade of legal battles that resulted in the expansion
of the designation of critical habitat The Clinton ad-ministration enacted the Safe Harbor agreement that encouraged landowners to make their territories friendlier to endangered species Nearly fifty species previously considered endangered have been re-moved from the protection of the Endangered Spe-cies Act, an indication that the act has been generally successful
National Environmental Policy Act The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), en-acted in 1970, was designed to force federal decision makers to take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of their actions NEPA provides that
“all federal agencies shall include in any recommen-dation or report on any proposal for legislation or other major federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment a detailed state-ment on environstate-mental impact any adverse effects which cannot be avoided alternatives to the proposed action,” and other considerations Envi-ronmental impact statements (EISs), conforming to regulations promulgated by the Counsel on Environ-mental Quality, may be required for a variety of gov-ernmental activities—including the construction of airports, dams, and highways; the issuance of fed-eral licenses or permits; and decisions regarding the management and use of federal lands and resources NEPA is regarded as a procedural statute because it imposes no substantive requirements Despite much debate over its effectiveness as a tool to protect the environment, it has been emulated by some state en-vironmental policy acts and in international law as well
Joshua I Barrett
Further Reading
Ashford, Nicholas A., and Charles C Caldart Environ-mental Law, Policy, and Economics: Reclaiming the En-vironmental Agenda Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2008
Brooks, Karl Boyd Before Earth Day: The Origins of Amer-ican Environmental Law, 1945-1970 Lawrence:
Uni-versity Press of Kansas, 2009
Trang 3Buck, Susan J Understanding Environmental
Adminis-tration and Law 3d ed Washington, D.C.: Island
Press, 2006
Findley, Roger W., and Daniel A Farber
Environmen-tal Law in a Nutshell 7th ed St Paul, Minn.:
Thomson/West, 2008
Kubasek, Nancy K., and Gary S Silverman
Environ-mental Law 6th ed Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008
Manheim, Frank T The Conflict over Environmental
Reg-ulation in the United States: Origins, Outcomes, and
Comparisons with the EU and Other Regions New York:
Springer, 2009
Pearson, Eric Environmental and Natural Resources
Law 3d ed Newark, N.J.: LexisNexis Matthew
Bender, 2008
Schnaiberg, Allan, and Kenneth Alan Gould
Environ-ment and Society: The Enduring Conflict New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1994 Reprint Caldwell, N.J.:
Blackburn Press, 2000
Vietzen, Laurel A Practical Environmental Law New
York: Aspen, 2008
Weinberg, Philip, and Kevin A Reilly Understanding
Environmental Law 2d ed Newark N.J.: LexisNexis
Matthew Bender, 2008
Web Site
WildLaw: A Nonprofit Environmental Law Firm
Statutes, Regulation, and Help
http://www.wildlaw.org/Eco-Laws/start.html
See also: Clean Air Act; Clean Water Act;
Endan-gered Species Act; Environment and Natural
Re-sources Division; Environmental impact statement;
Environmental Protection Agency; National
Environ-mental Policy Act; Superfund legislation and cleanup
activities; Takings law and eminent domain
Environmental movement
Category: Historical events and movements
In the United States, the environmental movement can
be divided a number of distinct periods of development,
each of which is noteworthy for the level of activism
and the impact the movement has had on natural
re-source policy.
Background Although a handful of environmental organizations were founded in the late nineteenth and early twenti-eth centuries, they were not influential enough to comprise a social movement For example, the Sierra Club (founded in 1892), the National Audubon Soci-ety (1905), and the National Parks Association (1919, now the National Parks Conservation Association) had specific political agendas, and their memberships were relatively small The environmental movement did not begin to coalesce until after World War II, with public concern about the management of resources and growing apprehension about pollution
The Age of Ecology The 1960’s have been called the age of ecology be-cause the decade brought conflict between those who sought to enhance postwar industrial growth and those who sought government regulation over the by-products of growth—smog in cities such as Los An-geles and London, water pollution in virtually every major urban area, and environmental crises such as the oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, which received extensive media coverage in 1969 Public awareness of the magnitude of environmen-tal degradation was magnified by the work of two authors Rachel Carson’s exposé on the dangers of
pesticides, Silent Spring (1962), and Paul Ehrlich’s warnings about population growth in The Population Bomb (1968) lent credence to the groups that were just
beginning to have an impact on the policy-making process
During the 1960’s, the environmental movement began to have an impact on the U.S Congress, which realized that environmental problems were rapidly becoming a salient political issue Most of the hall-mark pieces of 1960’s legislation, such as the Clean Air Act (1963), Clean Water Act (1965), Endangered Species Conservation Act (1966), and National Envi-ronmental Policy Act (1970), can be traced directly to one or more of the environmental groups pushing for their passage
The decade also marked a tremendous expansion
in the number of environmental groups and political strategies The Environmental Defense Fund (founded
in 1967), for example, used litigation as a powerful tool, while the more venerable organizations such as the Sierra Club focused on public education From
1952 to 1969, the Sierra Club’s membership grew ten-fold, while the Wilderness Society’s membership grew
Trang 4from twelve thousand in 1960 to fifty-four thousand in
1970
At the same time, new organizations such as the
African Wildlife Foundation (1961) and the World
Wildlife Fund (1961, now the World Wide Fund for
Nature) began to broaden their approach to include
environmental issues of global concern While the
majority of groups were dedicated to preserving
wild-life and their habitats, there also began to be a parallel
growth of organizations in Europe that were dealing
with pollution in their own regions These groups
became the core of what later became an
interna-tional environmental movement
Earth Days and Crises
If one event could be said to have galvanized the
envi-ronmental movement, it would be the observance of
Earth Day on April 22, 1970 An estimated twenty
mil-lion Americans participated in events ranging from
protests and demonstrations to educational seminars
to call attention to the declining health of the
envi-ronment That year also was the beginning of an
exceptional period of development for new groups,
including Friends of the Earth, the League of
Conser-vation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense
Coun-cil, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest
A year later, the American branch of Greenpeace was
founded, along with the environmental watchdog
organization Public Citizen
Although public opinion polls showed that
Ameri-cans were deeply concerned about
the environment during the period
immediately before and after Earth
Day 1970, that interest was partially
replaced over the following fifteen
years by the Vietnam War, the 1973
Arab oil embargo, and a declining
economy The environmental
move-ment seemed to lose much of its
early momentum as both legislators
and the public turned to other issues
Although Congress enacted several
significant pieces of legislation, such
as the Marine Mammal Protection
Act (1972) and the Toxic Substances
Control Act (1976), by 1980 the pace
of legislative activity had slowed
con-siderably—and with it the growth of
the environmental movement
From 1970 to 1990, the
environ-mental movement’s ebb and flow seemed tied to crisis
or controversy When an accident at the Three Mile Is-land nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylva-nia, triggered a meltdown, environmental groups op-posed to nuclear power gained prominence Groups associated with fighting toxic waste gained new mem-bers in 1978 when the media reported that homes and
a school at Love Canal, New York, had been built in an area previously used as a toxic dumping ground by a chemical company A deadly leak of poisonous gas at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984, led to legislative initiatives in the United States, such as the reauthorization of the Comprehensive Environmen-tal Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, better known as Superfund Pressure by the environmental movement’s leaders led Congress to investigate whether a Bhopal-type incident could occur at a simi-lar Union Carbide facility in Institute, West Virginia
The Reagan and Clinton Eras
In one sense, the environmental movement’s lowest ebb may have been during the administration of Pres-ident Ronald Reagan, whose policies of deregulation, budget and personnel cuts, and conservative political appointments scaled back the implementation and enforcement of the prior decades’ environmental laws However, it also galvanized the movement, creat-ing a common enemy for environmentalists to rally against Through their lobbying efforts, they forced the president to fire his secretary of the interior,
Greenpeace activists in France protest to call attention to the danger of radioactive waste.
(AFP/Getty Images)
Trang 5James G Watt, and the head of the Environmental
Protection Agency, Anne M Burford
The most noteworthy trend within the
environ-mental movement in the early 1990’s was the
global-ization of issues and participants The 1992 Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro brought together the
larg-est group of environmental organizations ever
assem-bled and reiterated the need to view issues in global,
rather than local, terms It also forced groups to focus
their attention on a wide spectrum of emerging
envi-ronmental issues, such as global climate change and
transboundary pollution, and highlighted disputes
over whether developed nations should help pay for
the cleanup of degraded environments (like those of
the former Soviet Union) or for new pollution control
technology in developing countries
The Bush Era: Rollbacks, Repudiation,
and Redemption
As the twenty-first century commenced, so too did the
presidency of George W Bush For environmentalists,
the eight Bush years were characterized by the “three
R’s”: rollbacks, repudiation, and redemption
Envi-ronmentalists witnessed rollback of environmental
legislation and regulations of the past, repudiation of
scientific findings on global warming in particular,
and a final act of redemption—the designation of
nearly 520,000 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean
and all of the marine life within as national
monu-ments a few days before Bush left office The rollbacks
occurred on several fronts: Clean Water Act and
Clean Air Act tampering; the curtailing of funds for
clean-up programs at hazardous waste sites; the
weak-ening of the Endangered Species Act and removal of
animals, such as grizzly bears, from the list of
pro-tected species; endorsement of commercial whaling,
which causes severe depletion rates because of
tech-nologically sophisticated hunting and harvesting
ap-paratuses; the opening of protected lands to mining,
logging, and oil and gas drilling; and the elimination
of obstacles to mountaintop removal mining Status
quo economics, especially in the energy industry,
re-ceived preference over support for research and
de-velopment for green alternatives to the use of finite
fossil fuels
The repudiation of scientific findings on global
warming and the reluctance to sponsor studies of its
effects on animal species proved demoralizing to
sci-ence professionals in several federal agencies The
Bush administration was accused of ignoring or
sup-pressing credible scientific studies on numerous envi-ronment issues
Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)
The environmental problems of the Bush era were bal-anced by two counterweights While the environmen-tal movement in the United States went on the defen-sive during the first decade of the twenty-first century, it also inspired the international upsurge of environ-mental nongovernenviron-mental organizations (NGOs) The upsurge in NGOs became an international phenome-non, occurring in many countries, both rich and poor, democratic and despotic Dedicated groups of citizen activists allied with scientific experts emerged
to focus attention on local, national, and global envi-ronmental concerns Impressive NGO fund-raising capabilities, aided by the Internet, meant indepen-dently sponsored scientific research, educational ini-tiatives, the monitoring of hazardous conditions, and remediation of contaminated sites Such activities of-ten supplemented government projects or acted in place of them in developing nations Some NGOs, like Greenpeace or the World Wide Fund for Nature, have supranational status, but others, such as China’s Friends of Nature or Brazil’s SOS Mata Atlântica (SOS Atlantic Forest), exist with localized mandates Over time, countless efforts to amend environmental dam-age caused by humans on both small and grand scales created a climate of awareness that Earth was in trou-ble In turn, this created a climate of receptivity for ad-visories issued about global warming and the need for worldwide cooperation to reverse it
Al Gore and the Environmental Movement The power of the individual to make a difference in the world still exists Before Al Gore was a citizen sol-dier in Vietnam, journalist, businessperson, senator,
or U.S vice president, he was an environmentalist In
1967, he enrolled in a life-changing course called “cli-mate science” at Harvard University During that class,
he learned about the seriousness of global warming and the need for action to halt it As a legislator in Congress for many years, he focused on the need for the United States to redirect its dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy options The scientific com-munity had convincingly established that fossil fuel emissions from automobiles and factory smokestacks raised carbon dioxide levels with dire planetary con-sequences
Trang 6As his political career waned, Gore became an
in-ternational spokesman for the twin concerns of global
warming and the need for green energy relief Gore
used his ability to explain complex scientific issues to
the general public in the documentary film An
Incon-venient Truth (2006) The film garnered an Academy
Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2007 A
com-panion book entitled An Inconvenient Truth: The
Plane-tary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do
About It (2006) became a best seller However, the
greatest recognition of his efforts came in 2007 Gore,
along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
The Kyoto Protocol and Beyond
All of these strands of human endeavor—efforts to
maintain the status quo and actively stave off
chal-lenges to it, or calls for sweeping, planetary change—
converge in the Kyoto Protocol The United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UN-FCCC) began the process of voluntary emission
re-duction in 1992 All of the accords and protocols that
succeeded it led to the Kyoto Protocol, calling for a
mandatory 55 percent global reduction of carbon
di-oxide based on 1990 levels by all signatories The
United States signed the treaty in 1997 but agreed to
only a 6 percent reduction at the time; Bush refused to
ratify the treaty in 2001 A nineteenth century
busi-ness model based on short-term profit margins that
once brought the United States unrivaled prosperity
and world hegemony bumped up against twenty-first
century reality, in which global interdependence holds
sway and all life is threatened by self-indulgence
De-spite Bush’s contrarian approach to the environment,
several states and cities in the United States have
en-acted Kyoto-inspired provisions to circumvent the last
stand of the guardians of old energy In the meantime,
the Kyoto Protocol took effect on February 16, 2005
As the Bush administration came to an end and a
new Democratic president, Barack Obama, took
of-fice in 2009, scientific evidence for human
contribu-tions to climate change were mounting and forming a
consensus in the minds of many—scientists and the
public alike—that international action must be taken
to avert (or at least prepare for) the more catastrophic
effects of global warming However, the
contentious-ness surrounding international cooperation was
highlighted in December, 2009, as representatives of
193 nations met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to decide
whether to extend or replace the Kyoto Protocol, due
to expire in 2012 Kyoto had obligated only signatory developed (industrialized) nations to meet carbon emissions standards Some representatives of devel-oping and poorer nations at Copenhagen strongly ob-jected to the new call for all nations to curb emissions, pointing out that the industrialized nations (particu-larly the United States), with their disproportionately high emissions, were more responsible for climate change and should bear the brunt of its mitigation Al Gore urged participants to reach an agreement, and the secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned that climate change could lead to crop failure and, in turn, “rebellions which eventually could fuel radical movements, extremism and terrorism.”
Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer, updated by JoEllen Broome
Further Reading
Dewey, Scott Hamilton Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollu-tion and U.S Environmental Politics, 1945-1970
Col-lege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000
Dowie, Mark Losing Ground: American Environmental-ism at the Close of the Twentieth Century Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995
Dunlap, Riley E., and Angela G Mertig, eds American Environmentalism: The U.S Environmental Movement, 1970-1990 Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1992 Egan, Michael, and Jeff Crane, eds Natural Protest: Es-says on the History of American Environmentalism New
York: Routledge, 2009
Kline, Benjamin First Along the River: A Brief History of the U.S Environmental Movement 3d ed Lanham,
Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007
Lytle, Mark Hamilton The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” and the Rise of the Environmen-tal Movement New York: Oxford University Press,
2007
Merchant, Carolyn The Columbia Guide to American En-vironmental History New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002
Mongillo, John, and Linda Zierdt-Warshaw Encyclope-dia of Environmental Science Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx
Press, 2000
Nash, Roderick Frazier, ed American Environmental-ism: Readings in Conservation History 3d ed New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1990
Philippon, Daniel J Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004
Rome, Adam The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban
Trang 7Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001
Shabecoff, Philip A Fierce Green Fire: The American
En-vironmental Movement Rev ed Washington, D.C.:
Island Press, 2003
Victor, David G The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the
Struggle to Slow Global Warming Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2001
Web Site
Ecology Hall of Fame
Environmental Movement Timeline
http://www.ecotopia.org/ehof/timeline.html
See also: Climate Change and Sustainable Energy
Act; Conservation; Conservation International; Earth
Summit; Endangered species; Environmental ethics;
Friends of the Earth International; Gore, Al;
Green-peace; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;
Kyoto Protocol; Montreal Protocol; National
Audu-bon Society; Natural Resources Defense Council;
Si-erra Club; United Nations climate change
confer-ences; United Nations Convention on Long-Range
Transboundary Air Pollution; World Wide Fund for
Nature
Environmental Protection Agency
Category: Organizations, agencies, and programs
Date: Established 1970
The U.S Environmental Protection Agency is charged
with administering various environmental regulatory
and distributive programs in the United States as well
as conducting environmental research activities.
Background
From the inception of the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) in 1970, the organization has been
be-set by differing conceptions of its mission as the
pri-mary U.S government environmental regulatory
agency The EPA expanded during the 1970’s but
came under severe attack in the 1980’s, particularly
during Anne Gorsuch’s tenure as director The
agency was revitalized and its mission expanded in the
late 1980’s and early 1990’s, only to suffer setbacks
during the second Bush administration in the early
twenty-first century The EPA aims to protect the
health of the human population by reducing the pol-lution of the environment It has attempted to achieve this goal primarily through enforcing congressional legislation and issuing regulations
Organization and Mission The EPA is headed by a director appointed by the president and has its central headquarters in Wash-ington, D.C It also has ten regional offices, each headed by a regional administrator Although regional offices deal with all manner of environmental issues, national offices, each with a commissioner as head, deal with specific issues These offices include the Air Pollution Control Office, the Pesticide Office, the Radiation Office, and the Solid Waste Office In ad-dition, the Council on Environmental Quality coordi-nates federal and international environmental efforts This group of three is appointed by the president and works closely with, though is independent of, the EPA
In some cases the implementation of the EPA’s regula-tory burden is entrusted to state environmental agen-cies The major regulatory tasks assigned to the agency include air quality, water quality, disposal of hazardous and radioactive wastes, the regulation of chemicals (including pesticides), and the setting of noise levels for construction equipment, transporta-tion equipment, motors, and electronic equipment Legislation that the EPA is charged with implement-ing includes the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (1947), the Clean Air Act (1963), the Clean Water Act (1965), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), the Toxic Substances Act (1976), the Compre-hensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (“Superfunds,” 1980), and the Energy Policy Act (2005)
The EPA suffers from overload and has found im-plementing its various mandates difficult and in some cases impossible In part this inability stems from con-gressional action Congress has often specified unre-alistic deadlines with various statutory penalties at-tached should the EPA not comply and given detailed management instructions for action In addition, some members of Congress have used environmental legislation (for example, Superfund) as political pork barrels so that the EPA is not always able to allocate its funds in the most efficient fashion In addition, as Marc Landy, Marc Roberts, and Stephen Thomas
point out in The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions from Nixon to Clinton (1994), the
Trang 8U.S Environmental Protection Agency
ADMINISTRATOR
DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR
EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT
EXECUTIVE SERVICE
OFFICE OF COOPERATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
ENVIRONMENTAL
APPEALS
BOARD
SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD
OFFICE OF
SMALL AND
DISADVANTAGED
BUSINESS
UTILIZATION
OFFICE OF
CIVIL RIGHTS
OFFICE OF
ADMINISTRATIVE
LAW JUDGES
ASSOCIATE ADMINISTRATOR FOR CONGRESSIONAL AND INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS PUBLIC AFFAIRS
POLICY, ECONOMICS, AND INNOVATION
ASSISTANT
ADMINISTRATOR FOR
ADMINISTRATION
AND RESOURCES
MANAGEMENT
ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR ENFORCEMENT AND COMPLIANCE ASSURANCE
ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION
ASSISTANT
ADMINISTRATOR FOR
INTERNATIONAL
AFFAIRS
ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
ASSISTANT
ADMINISTRATOR FOR
AIR AND RADIATION
ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR PREVENTION, PESTICIDES, AND TOXIC SUBSTANCES
ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR WATER
ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR FOR SOLID WASTE AND EMERGENCY RESPONSE
INSPECTOR GENERAL
GENERAL COUNSEL
REGION I
BOSTON
REGION II NEW YORK
REGION III PHILADELPHIA
REGION IV ATLANTA
REGION V CHICAGO
REGION VI DALLAS
REGION VII KANSAS CITY
REGION VIII DENVER
REGION IX SAN FRANCISCO
REGION X SEATTLE
ENVIRONMENTAL
EDUCATION AND
CHILDREN’S
HEALTH
PROTECTION
THE AGING INITIATIVE
HOMELAND SECURITY
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER
Trang 9EPA itself has often “asked the wrong questions”
con-cerning its mission By concentrating on enforcement
from its inception, the EPA has not always been able to
establish its scientific credentials in order to lend
sci-entific credibility to its actions The EPA has also
missed opportunities to educate the public regarding
environmental issues, and therefore citizens often
have unrealistic expectations regarding the agency’s
ability to deal with environmental problems The
leadership of the EPA has not always been attentive to
the need to develop a strategic perspective in dealing
with environmental issues, a failing that is fostered by
leaving conceptual ambiguities unresolved At times
factionalism has also detracted from the
accomplish-ment of the EPA’s mission
The Impact of Politics
Public support for the EPA’s mission has shifted since
its founding in 1970 In the early 1970’s, many
Ameri-cans thought that the EPA was not moving fast enough
to clean up environmental problems By 1980, some
people had begun to question the cost of
environ-mental regulation, saying that the EPA had become
too stringent During the 1990’s public opinion
shifted in the direction of a more supportive stance
for environmental regulation This stance continued
even during the administration of George W Bush
One difficulty that continues to beset the EPA is the
changing national political climate Many aspects of
the organization’s mission are highly charged
politi-cally Therefore, the agendas of each presidential
ad-ministration have affected the ability of the agency to
carry out its mission Until the presidency of Ronald
Reagan (1981-1989), presidents and much of the
pub-lic demanded tough enforcement of environmental
laws At times, the EPA had difficulty keeping up with
public opinion in trying to clean up various
environ-mental problems During the Reagan administration
the approach shifted as Gorsuch and Secretary of the
Interior James G Watt opposed stringent
environ-mental regulation, often placing agency staff at odds
with its leadership The presidency of George H W
Bush turned slightly to tough environmental
regula-tion The Clinton administration (1993-2000)
height-ened this tough stance Carol M Browner, who headed
the EPA during much of the Clinton presidency, was
an able administrator with a clear idea of the role of
the EPA Also, she enjoyed support within the agency
The election of George W Bush in 2000 marked a
return to presidential hostility to much of the EPA’s
mission Christine Todd Whitman, the onetime gov-ernor of New Jersey, became the head of the EPA and tried to maintain several initiatives, such as regulating mountaintop removal in the coal fields of West Vir-ginia Soon after, she was politically marginalized and was forced out in 2003 by opponents of environmen-tal regulation Vice President Dick Cheney played an important role in trying to base environmental regu-lation in economic reasoning favorable to business rather than in scientific reasoning
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the presidential philosophy regarding the EPA moved in the opposite direction of the Bush administration Lisa P Jackson, the head of the EPA in the Obama administration, came to the post with a strong envi-ronmental record The agency shifted back to using scientific reasoning in tandem with economic consid-erations in its decision-making processes
Related to the mission challenges imposed by changing political climates has been a high turnover rate in the leadership of the agency From its incep-tion to the Obama presidency, the EPA has had eleven different administrators, most of whom have served for short periods of time Browner served the longest, from 1993 to 2001, but several of the other administra-tors served for only two years Thus, maintaining lead-ership continuity has been difficult
Public Health and the EPA Protecting the public’s health is at the core of EPA’s mission Regulating human contact with and possible ingestion of dangerous pesticides and improving water quality are two obvious examples of this mis-sion Cancer prevention, while not always a stated goal, has been one of the key concerns of the agency
In the late 1970’s, the EPA, the Food and Drug istration, the Occupational Safety and Health Admin-istration, and the Consumer Product Safety Commis-sion worked together through the Interagency Regulatory Liaison Group to formulate standards for dealing with chemicals that might cause cancer How-ever, the resulting document did not enunciate a clear standard of risk assessment, nor did it establish a sound level of cancer risk It also failed as an attempt
to educate the public concerning cancer risks and sci-entific uncertainty
By contrast, the EPA’s efforts at regulating water and air pollution have led to several successes Water quality has improved in the United States Air quality has improved in some areas In both cases the EPA
Trang 10had a clear mandate that it was able to implement
and, therefore, was more easily able to achieve its
goals
The risk of cancer also underlay the public
contro-versy concerning the implementation of Superfund
legislation Part of the problem with Superfund was
Congress’s inability to set cleanup priorities or
cleanup levels for Superfund sites The EPA was
defi-cient in providing Congress with the detailed
infor-mation necessary to make these decisions Because
Superfund was conceptually deficient, the EPA often
had to react to what the public perceived as crisis
situa-tions, such as the Times Beach, Missouri, dioxin
cleanup in the early 1980’s Such actions were not
al-ways based on reliable research and often displayed
an inability to educate the public regarding
environ-mental risk
Impact on Resource Use
Although public health concerns have been the
stated rationale for much of the EPA’s actions, further
concerns have been the protection of the
environ-ment and resource conservation Enhancing water
quality, for example, has obvious benefits for aquatic
life Controlling the negative impact of pesticides has
an impact from the bottom to the top of the food
chain The threat of acid deposition to forest products
and water quality in some regions of the country is
substantial; the EPA’s efforts to establish air-quality
standards under the 1990 revisions of the Clean Air
Act attempted to deal with this issue Indirectly, the
EPA’s regulations dealing with improving automobile
mileage have decreased the consumption of both
steel and oil The question of mileage requirements
remains a hotly debated issue, as the EPA has
ex-panded its emphasis to encourage innovative types of
automobiles as a means of decreasing pollution The
goal of much of the EPA’s regulatory efforts has been
waste reduction By its very nature, waste reduction
lowers the amount of natural resources consumed by
the economy
The 1984 revisions of the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act (RCRA) directed the EPA to
advo-cate conservation as a means of dealing with
hazard-ous materials RCRA stated that the placement of
haz-ardous wastes in landfills was the least favored option
in dealing with these materials The most favored
ap-proach was for industry to generate less of the
mate-rial, thus practicing resource conservation In the
early 1990’s, many industries continued to generate
large amounts of hazardous wastes, although some in-dustries were beginning to find substitutes for hazard-ous materials In the early twenty-first century, dis-posal of these wastes continued to be a problem that was further complicated by the efforts of some pollut-ers to ship their wastes abroad
In all likelihood the EPA will continue to be beset
by political changes Because its regulatory power touches many aspects of American life, various groups will continue to try to influence EPA policy directly and indirectly Many of the EPA’s decisions have eco-nomic impacts, and the agency faces continual chal-lenges from, on one hand, groups and individuals who desire economic growth and, on the other hand, those who see environmental protection as more im-portant than short-term economic gain
In addition to continuing to deal with the environ-mental issues of the past, the EPA will be challenged
by evolving issues One of the concerns has to do with environmental equity: Are environmental hazards being imposed on the less-advantaged in American society? The EPA will need to balance questions of en-vironmental protection and social justice in its deci-sions
Part of the EPA’s mission overlaps with that of other agencies in regard to climate change and its impact EPA regulators have become increasingly concerned with the issue of carbon dioxide and other green-house-gas emissions These issues are related to sus-tainable development and the use of natural re-sources, an issue that is at the heart of the American environmental movement The EPA will continue to coordinate with other agencies and cabinet depart-ments that have oversight roles for natural resource management Because many resource questions, such
as global warming, affect more than the United States, the EPA will need to develop better means for coordi-nating its actions with the world community
John M Theilmann
Further Reading
Collin, Robert W The Environmental Protection Agency: Cleaning Up America’s Act Westport, Conn.:
Green-wood Press, 2006
DeLong, James V Out of Bounds, out of Control: Regula-tory Enforcement at the EPA Washington, D.C.: Cato
Institute, 2002
Jasper, Margaret C “The Environmental Protection
Agency.” In Environmental Law 2d ed Dobbs Ferry,
N.Y.: Oceana, 2002