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Weekly UpdatesKraft, Michael E. 2007. New York: Pearson Education, 308 pages, ISBN 0-321-24353-6 (paper) US $44.20 (paper).
Reviewed by Eric R. A. N. Smith, Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
Michael Kraft's Environmental Policy and Politics has long set the standard for excellence as a textbook for courses on American environmental politics. His new fourth edition rises to that standard again. Concern about climate change and the coming peak of world oil supplies have both increased the attention given to environmental issues and brought heightened conflict to the field, yet Kraft continues to do an outstanding job describing and explaining the issues.
Kraft does an especially good job of sketching out the big picture. He opens with a review of environmental problems, showing that much has been done, but that much more remains to be done. American air and water are far cleaner and healthier than they were forty years ago, but air and water quality still pose health risks in some areas, and an entirely new and more difficult set of problems has developed associated with climate change.
Kraft's discussion of the stages of the policy process model in Chapter 3 is particularly useful because it emphasizes that there is much more to environmental policy making than just passing a law through Congress. The process begins with the critical stage of agenda setting: how problems are perceived and defined, and how the public and policy makers decide which problems to address and which to ignore. Proposed policies are developed and presented to policy makers. Eventually Congress or other decision makers pass laws to establish new policies. But the process does not end there. How laws are implemented can have a huge impact on whether they help solve the environmental problems they were designed to address. Finally, program evaluation and possibly further policy change turn the policy process into an unending cycle. These latter steps of implementation, evaluation, and further policy change are often ignored by the public despite the fact that they are critical to progress on environmental issues.
In Chapter 5, Kraft addresses government efforts to limit pollution. Here we see the daunting tasks faced by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its efforts to implement seven major environmental laws regulating clean air, water quality, drinking water, toxic substances, pesticides, hazardous waste and abandoned hazardous waste dumps. Although Kraft is not a policy advocate, it is hard to read his description of the myriad barriers that the US EPA must overcome--one of which is the agency's inadequate funding--without demanding that Congress vote an enormous funding increase to the EPA. That the EPA does not have enough in-house scientific expertise and must turn to outside sources, sometimes including sources of expertise that are associated with the corporations being regulated, is especially troublesome.
Some readers might suspect that an environmental politics textbook written before the release of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and the latest round of IPCC reports would be outdated because it would miss the revival of environmentalism. One might think that everything has changed. The truth, however, is that we have not seen much change yet. Public opinion polls show that the public continues to think that climate change ranks well below the war in Iraq, terrorism, the economy, immigration, health care, and many other issues. There is some chance that Congress may act on climate change, but other issues are clearly receiving more attention from the new Democratic majority. Besides, President Bush stands as a roadblock preventing any serious action before 2009. As a result, Michael Kraft's book remains timely. Moreover, it still stands as the best introduction to environmental politics and policy in print.
References:
On the public's priorities, see
On the public's opinions of environmental issues, see
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