The Development and Context of American Environmental Policy

This chapter focuses on the contextualization of environmental policy and its history. This chapter begins by considering the history of environmental protection in the United States, starting with the conservation and preservation movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We focus on the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and overview the social and political movements that culminated in more than two dozen major environmental laws which continue to provide the backbone of US environmental policy. These discussions culminated in an exploration of the dramatic turn environmental policy and regulation has taken as a result of the 2016 elections. We situate the trajectory we appear to be on in this policy arena with sharp turns taken in the past. The final section of this chapter explores the role of scientific knowledge and information in environmental policy discussions. Many of the insights we can draw about environmental issues can be understood by how American society views scientific information.