Postscript: Sustainability and the Environmental Protection Agency

In Chapter 7, we completed our formal examination of environmental politics, policy, and administration. In our analysis throughout the book we examined the histories of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as seen through the lens of conceptual agency life cycle models. In this postscript, we step outside this theoretical framework to offer some thoughts on the path U.S. environmental policy and administration have been taking, in halting steps, toward the ambitious processes and goals of sustainability. In considering the practical implications of this emerging realignment of focus, we use climate change as an example. As we discussed in Chapter 2, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) was a prescient document helping chart new directions in environmental management both in the United States and globally. Although NEPA does not specifically mention sustainability, the act includes text that clearly anticipates current understanding of the concept, declaring it a policy of the federal government “to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.” In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development built on this language to define sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” At the 1992 Earth Summit, 178 nations committed to adopting this framework in promoting future development. While this declaration, known as Agenda 21, did not immediately transform global priorities, it did put sustainability on the international agenda. Since then, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a multilateral group of thirty-four nations made up primarily of developed economies, has been particularly active in encouraging member countries to incorporate sustainability into policymaking. Over the past decade or so, sustainability has become a more visible part of the vocabulary of U.S. environmental policy and administration.