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“Help Keep the Peccadillo Alive”: American Environmental Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

D. J. S. Morris
D. J. S. Morris
Affiliation:
Lecturer in American History and Institutions in the Department of American Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, England.
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Type
Review Essays
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , December 1988 , pp. 447 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 For two useful overviews see McEvoy, James III, “The American Concern with Environment,” in Burch, William R. Jr et al. , eds., Social Behavior, Natural Resources, and the Environment (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 214–36Google Scholar, and O'Brien, Jim, “Environmentalism as a Mass Movement: Historical Notes,” Radical America, 17 (1983), 2–28Google Scholar

2 Environmentalism has been part of the “new regulation” of products and processes, inaugurated by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, but only gathering momentum in the 1970s. See Lilley, William and Miller, James, “The New ‘Social Regulation,’” Public Interest, 47 (1977), 49–62Google Scholar, and Marcus, Alfred, “The Environmental Protection Agency,” in Wilson, James Q., ed., The Politics of Regulation (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 267–303.Google Scholar

3 “Clearing the Air: Public Opinion and Public Policy on the Environment,” Public Opinion, 5 (1982), 16–37.Google Scholar

4 Noting that changes in public attitudes towards the environment have been “much faster than any changes in the environment itself,” Anthony Downs has argued that issues go through a five stage cycle of “heightening public interest and then increasing boredom with major issues.” The final “stage” for any policy issue according to Downs is when, after public concern has shifted elsewhere, it moves into “a prolonged limbo — a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” This will happen, not only because even “concern” is a consumption good, and treated as such by the mass media, but also because the real costs of substantial change will eventually become apparent, and cause even its proponents to temper their enthusiasm. The problem with such hypotheses is their inherent circularity as explanations, however useful they might be from the heuristic point of view. The various measures of salience (“issue-attention,” legislation, and interest-group activity) are mutually re-inforcing on the cyclical upswing as an issue takes off, but they are as much symptoms or effects as they are causes. See “Up and Down With Ecology – The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’” Public Interest, 28 (1972), 38–50.Google Scholar For the initiation of policy change see Cobb, Roger W. and Elder, Charles, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1972).Google Scholar

5 For the mélange of executive units and congressional committees that dealt with pollution prior to the 1970s see Davies, J. Clarence III, The Politics of Pollution (New York: Pegasus, 1970).Google Scholar Air pollution was treated as an urban issue, unlike water pollution which was treated as a rural issue. Thus the Clean Air Act of 1963 “was produced by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a member of the General Counsel's Office of HEW, and an air pollution expert from the Public Health Service” (62).

6 Why the new “public health movement (rarely given that name) has grown up as part of the larger environmental movement, rather than having a momentum of its own,” is an interesting question asked by O'Brien in “Environmentalism as a Mass Movement: Historical Notes.” One answer is that the very success of the earlier movement caused it to lose momentum, and to become the almost exclusive preoccupation of public health officials; but this does not explain the neglect of industrial hygiene, and although the absence of proven “scientific” cause is certainly one explanation, the first case of cancer from asbestos exposure was diagnosed as early as 1906, and “by 1918 US and Canadian life insurance companies had stopped selling personal life insurance policies to asbestos workers.” See also Melosi, Martin V., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930 (Austin: Texas University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, Berman, Daniel M., Death on the Job (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978)Google Scholar, Epstein, Samuel S., The Politics of Cancer (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978)Google Scholar, and Freudenberg, Nicholas, Not In Our Backyards: Community Action for Health and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984).Google Scholar

7 Fox, Stephen, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), 333–57.Google Scholar Madison Grant was an influential conservationist, and William T. Hornaday, a conservationist and Director of the Bronx Zoo claimed in 1913 that “All members of the dangerous classes of Southern Europe are a dangerous menace to our wild life. The Italians are spreading, spreading, spreading.”

8 McConnell, Grant, “The Conservation Movement — Past and Present,” Western Political Quarterly, 7 (1954), 463–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which describes it as “small, divided, and frequently uncertain.”

9 For statistics on the increasing membership of the five “traditional societies” see Fox, , 315: (1966, 1975)Google Scholar: Izaak Walton League (52,600, 50,000); National Audubon Society (45,000, 321,000); National Wildlife Federation (271,800, 612,100); Sierra Club (35,000, 147,000); Wilderness Society (35,000, 87,000). Their combined annual percentage growth rate peaked in 1969 at 18 percent. In 1980 40 percent of organizations with offices in Washington had been founded since 1960, with a disproportionate number being “public interest groups,” of which 23 percent were environmental groups. See Scholzman, Kay Lehman, “What Accent the Heavenly Chorus? Political Equality and the American Pressure System,” Journal of Politics, 46 (1984), 1006–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Less than half of the financing of public interest groups has come from the membership, as distinct from other sources, above all the more public-spirited foundations, while 30 percent have been found to have no members in any real sense of that term. See Walker, Jack, “The Origins and Maintenance of Interest Groups in America,” American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 390–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Berry, Jeffrey M., Lobbying for the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

10 For a comparison see Gale, Richard P., “From Sit-In to Hike-In: A Comparison of the Civil Rights and Environmental Movements,” in Burch, Social Behavior, Natural Resources, and the Environment, 280–305Google Scholar, and for that typically late-1970s amalgam of interests represented by Mother Jones, Mother Earth, and Ms, see Scully, Michael Andrew, “Would Mother Jones Buy ‘Mother Jones’?” Public Interest, 53 (Fall, 1978) 100–8.Google Scholar

11 See Berry, , Lobbying for the People, 85, 88, 94Google Scholar, and McCann, Michael W., Taking Reform Seriously: Perspectives on Public Interest Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 34.Google Scholar

12 Vogel, David, “The Public-Interest Movement and the American Reform Tradition,” Political Science Quarterly, 95 (1980–1981), 606–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Without doubt the judiciary is the public interest movement's favorite branch of government. It epitomizes their ideal of public authority without public bureaucracy.” For the effort to have public amenity rights considered on a par with private property rights see Stone, Christopher D., Should Trees Have Standing?; Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, California: W. Kaufman, 1974).Google Scholar

13 See Lake, Laura M., “The Environmental Mandate: Activists and the Electorate,” Political Science Quarterly, 98 (1983) 215–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mitchell, Robert Cameron, “Public Opinion and Environmental Politics,” in Vig, Norman J. and Kraft, Michael E., Environmental Policy in the 1980's: Reagan's New Agenda (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984), 51–74.Google Scholar

14 See Vig, and Kraft, , and Kraft, Michael E. and Vig, Norman J., “Environmental Policy in the Reagan Presidency,” Political Science Quarterly, 99 (1984), 415–39.Google Scholar

15 See Marcus, , “The Environmental Protection Agency,” 273–74.Google Scholar Thus the new pollution control laws of the early 1970s used deadlines, and specific goals, designed to reduce discretion in implementation (as criticized by Theodore Lowi in The End of Liberalism [New York: W. W. Norton, 1969]). “The ‘inventor’ of this notion was a group of academics; the ‘transferers’ were public-interest activists; and the ‘adopter’ was Senator Muskie and Congress.” This gave the “transferers,” the public-interest groups, a semi-official role as watchdogs of the administration of policy.Google Scholar

16 See Vogel, , “The Public-Interest Movement and the American Reform Tradition,”Google ScholarMcCann, , Taking Reform SeriouslyGoogle Scholar, and Lazarus, Simon, The Genteel Populists (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984).Google Scholar

17 McFarland, Andrew S., “Public Interest Lobbies Versus Minority Faction,” in Cigler, Allan J. and Loomis, Burdett A., eds., Interest Group Politics (Washington, DC, Congressional Quarterly Press, 1983), 324–53.Google Scholar See also Lowe, Philip and Morrison, David, “Bad News and Good News: Environmental Politics and the Mass Media,” Sociological Review, 32 (1984), 74–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Mitchell, Robert Cameron, “How ‘Soft,’ ‘Deep,’ or ‘Left,’? Present Constituencies in the Environmental Movement for Certain World Views,” Natural Resources journal, 20 (1980), 345–58Google Scholar, and Lake, , 215–33.Google Scholar

19 See, for example, Tucker, William, “Environmentalists and the Leisure Class,” Harper's (12 1977), 49–80.Google Scholar The Sierra Club has had a predominantly professional-managerial membership, and in 1976 members of the Audubon Society had an average income of $37,700, with 43% of them having gone to graduate school.

20 Hülsberg, Werner, The German Greens (London: Verso, 1988)Google Scholar, and Porritt, Jonathan, Seeing Green (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).Google Scholar