Term Paper on "Environmental Politics"

Term Paper 12 pages (3316 words) Sources: 2 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Political Patterns in Environmental Issues: An Urban Environmental Re-Development Platform

America's environmental policy orientation has endured a tumultuous and often compromised path. Though at one point during its early inception in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was considered a global leader in environmental reform and regulatory improvement, its progress would be frequently curtailed by political pressures, economic interests and the absence of a unified public will. Today, with Democratic President Barrack Obama preparing to embark on a bid for reelection, the conditions surrounding America's environmental policy have shifted. With this shift comes an historic opportunity for the president to make environmental reform a centerpiece of his campaign. A maneuver that might have been considered a politically deadly gambit for a liberal political figure such as Obama, today a focus on economic, sociological and cultural issues as a function of environmental policy may be the paradigm shift required to usher America into a new phase of sustainability.

This is because critical realities such as global climate change, the increasing cost of commodities due to oil scarcity, the melting of the polar ice caps and irreversible damage to the ecological stasis of many of the world's unique natural habitats are raising awareness and collective interest in making meaningful policy strides in environmental regulatory, both domestically and globally. The environmental movement is increasingly becoming less a fringe activist terrain and more a policy area of great importance for not just the United States but all of the industrialized nations of the world. There is increasingly a consensus on the dangers of global climate change; the threat to our health of pollutants in land, air and water; the implications to food scarcity to hungry populations; and the need to change energy harvesting and consumption habits. Collectively, these environmental concerns are registering with ever-greater prominence in the nations of Western Europe, North America and in economically advanced parts of China. Quite certainly, in all of these contexts, there remain considerable challenges ahead in achieving projected future goals for meeting environmental improvements. With the current election, Obama must draw the connection between economic, political and practical interests and the pressing demand to protect the environment on all fronts.

Distributive Land Policy:

One particular area in which policy development can benefit from the connection between voting demographic interests and environmental improvements is distributive land policy. In recent years, political attention has been turned to the inherent socioeconomic inequality of common land use practices. The environmental impact of private activities tends to be experienced more directly by impoverished populations. According to Vig & Kraft (2005), one "side of community deveolopment on which policy must continue to focus is the distributive effects of activities that negatively affect people and the environment. Substantial evidence indicates that low-income and minority groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards such as lead poisoning, industrial air pollution, and toxic waste sites. African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans have formed hundreds of new grassroots organizations to fight pollution in their communities, and mainstream environmental groups have become more sensitive to such inequities." (Vig & Kraft, p. 381)

This should have a direct impact on the approach which the president takes in drafting his platform for the upcoming election, with a focus on improving the way that land use is regulated in those areas unequally impacted by exploitation in the past. According to Vig & Kraft, the primary responsibility for improving equality in this area rests with the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice. This office is charged with addressing the crossover between environmental and civil rights issues, using the authorization provided by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in order to identify and reverse discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. (Vig & Kraft, p. 382) the patterns which Vig & Kraft describe denote that such discrimination can be identified in our land use practices and can therefore be considered an irrefutable rationale for improving the legal protections of such lands. As the discussion here will demonstrate in greater detail upon selecting an issue-position, a focus on the conditions in many of America's blighted urban centers may have the potential to improve land equality and economic fortunes all at once.

By bringing clearer attention to the connection between impoverished minority status and exposure to harmful environmental conditions, the President may effectively garner public support for such positions on making more stringent regulatory conditions for private land use and demanding greater government accountability for urban environmental conditions. Simultaneously, strengthening visibility of this connection between impoverished minority status and exposure to harmful environmental conditions will raise the political stakes for his opponents. This offers the president an opportunity to present a position that projects him as a public advocate, thus rendering many of his opponents among Republicans, Tea Party activists and other conservatives as apparent enemies of the public interest.

Regulatory Pollution Policy:

America's regulatory pollution policy is an area which has been especially vulnerable to vitriol and political partisanship. This is because the issue of global climate change generates such a wide spectrum of emotionally charged and economically determinant implications. This spectrum of implications is predicated on a heated battle between environmental scientists and private industries, which have often viewed their respective causes as inherently incompatible.

However, because of its growing urgency and a clear need to recognize and diminish those factors causing it, the reality of 'global warming' is increasingly becoming the scientific and rational consensus. It falls upon President Obama to also create political consensus on the issue. As the selected policy issue will demonstrate in a subsequent section of this account, the best avenue to accomplishing this feat will be to tie economic interests directly to a reduction in the pollutants, toxins and emissions relating to global warming. Global warming is a term which surfaced several decades ago to identify the emerging patters of climate shift that would be associated with manmade ecological hazards such as toxic emissions and the dismantling of the world's tropical rain-forests. In spite of substantial evidence to the favor of this viewpoint, the threat of environmental restraint to the bottom line for many industrial polluters has produce a considerable public backlash against the view of global warming. In the decades since its rise to prominence, the theory has been discredited in the media to the extent that the term 'global warming' has actually lost credibility. This, however, has been paired with rising evidence of its validity as a theory, predisposing its replacement with the term 'climate change.' The atmosphere in which this term has come to prominence suggests that with people increasingly prepared to acknowledge its reality, the fight against 'global warming' may actually be psychologically aided by the transition to a different label.

Today, the fight against 'global climate change' rings with more political credibility, especially with President Obama in office. And just as we can see the environmental movement using language in order to share or argue against certain beliefs and perspectives, it is also to oppose a manipulation in language to the destruction of the environment. Both environmental activists and polluters depend on the public impression for the furthering of their causes, and this makes the discussion on environmental language a very crucial one if we are to understand the psychological factors of the environmental movement for the public. This is to say that in spite of the valid evidence produced by environmental scientists, it is only now that public is making note of previously forecasted environmental patterns.

In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report on the effects and reality of global warming. In the investigative commission that gave the findings, an admission said that there is no way to fully determine how much of the planet's climatic change has been due to natural variation in whether and temperature patterns. However, the report did state the certainty that global warming is in large part due to human behavior and environmental practices. Moreover, our course literature demonstrates that policy development and regulatory policies often fail to truly account for the increasing intensity of patterns impacting the environment. For instance, where emissions are concerned, the Bush Administration made 'improvements' through the Clean Air Act that appeared on the surface to reduce collective emission levels. But closer inspection shows that this policy did not adjust its regulatory limitations to the real demands created by human population growth and continued industrialization. According to Rosenbaum (2007), "economic growth and population expansion often diminish the effectiveness of pollution controls over time. The automobile emission controls and reduced lead levels in gasoline required by the Clean Air Act together have lowered the average new car's hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions significantly. But the number of automobiles in the United States has increased nearly 71%, from 80.4 million in 1970 to 137 million in 2006, with an additional 60 million new trucks since 1970. This vehicle population explosion counteracts the emission reductions achieved for individual vehicles and leads eventually to widespread urban violations… READ MORE

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