Week One: Contemplating the Abyss

After finishing the excerpt from Speth's book and somewhere into the first chapter of Kraft's Environmental Policy and Politics, I found myself in a familiar state of mind. A dark cloud, bursting with heavy drops of depression and doom, hung over my desk.

I have been developing a strong distaste for the drastic and lucrative language of death and destruction that often accompanies such materials. While I agree that these problems are serious, current, and require immediate action, the immense flooding of these facts about the deterioration of Eath's environment has snowballed into sensory overload. The consequence of such large informational storms is often apathy, an emotion too often equated with my generation.

Therefore, it was with particular appreciation that I read through Toward Sustainable Communities (Mazmanian and Kraft), which shifted focus from the various crises overtaking the globe into a discussion about the development of policy to counteract these destructive and threatening changes. TSC shed light on US regulation without accusing with an open-ended bias the failures of the command and control system. Yes, each epoch that Mazmanian and Kraft identify displays a developmental shift, and each incorporates a healthy dose of criticism toward its contemporaries, but where TSC succeeded with me was here:

Where Kraft and Speth had both called for a public discussion on how and why to improve current policy failures and also how to combat the many environmental problems, they failed to discuss themselves. I interpreted TSC to have a conscience...Mazmanian and Kraft do list the undeniable progress the EPA made in the 1970s, but they made a point to also include the implications of such a large and tough bureaucratic agency in attempting to constantly adapt and regulate a growing number of environmental challenges. This is the conscience that the other readings call for, yet fail to fully implement. Speth’s chapter, while informative, assumed a degree of doom that was irreversible, even if he personally maintains hope. Kraft as well, dedicated much of his first two chapters to an outline of pressing issues by the numbers, which, when read closely, spell out doom just as much as Speth’s prose.

Critically speaking, while all the facts and numbers about the crises the Eath is currently facing are important, the information overload the public receives about these problems every day can have a negative effect. TSC’s approach to reflecting on past and present policies and processes in light of the changing environmental challenges was inherently (and personally) more encouraging.