Clean Air and Water Acts and Kraft's Epochs

Progress in environmental policy is possible. Mazmanian and Kraft illustrate this in this week's readings. This is a striking improvement from past readings, many of which have cited the passing of legislation in the 1970s as a great start to a set of initiatives that eventually lost steam, deteriorating into the present, where our initiatives just don't cut the environment-saving mustard.

Both in Wisconsin's Fox River Basin and in Los Angeles, efforts to improve water and air respectively have made major headway in monumental problems, only to still suffer rising standards and greater pressure from environmental movements both local and national. Still, what is important are the giant leaps in initial cleanup and prevention, and then the necessary moves away from command-and-control regulation towards collaborative sustainable methods. In between lies the rather dense system of market incentives (the "second epoch"), however, at least in Los Angeles this system came with a number of setbacks to environmental progression as stringent legislation was relaxed.

In Wisconsin, efforts to clean up the Fox River Basin ran into a wall with their first attempts at collaborative methods, but what is most important is that the methods weren't given up on at the first sign of opposition. As Mazmanian and Kraft point out, efforts in Wisconsin showed that a cross-section of industries and municipalities could come together and share their resources to create a cleaner basin. The success (to a degree) of these efforts, should be a signal to other areas of the country facing serious pollution issues.

In Los Angeles, standards of living (and consequently local politics and industry) create a large wall blocking greater progression into sustainable efforts. As the authors point out, further progression towards cleaner air would mean great changes in the transportation habits of Angelinos...unfortunately this seems often the case in heavily polluted areas.

The trouble in Los Angeles demarcates a line of status quo that is not impassable, but still serves as the greatest barrier toward the necessary improvements in clean air. It is the status quo that many residents find comfortable and thus it is the job of many politicians to keep that status quo...in other words, let people keep driving to work by themselves and sitting in hours of traffic with their cars and air conditioners running. But, changes are being made in many other places toward more sustainable activities, and soon enough, if industry is convinced, the changes will be necessitated. At the very least, Los Angeles will have to choose its fate: impose change collectively with the knowledge that individual sacrifice will benefit all, or be satisfied with remaining a very polluted place while other initiatives across the country succeed and move forward.