Understanding Key Concepts

The environment consists of the physical surroundings in which humans, animals, plants, insects, bacteria, and other organisms exist. As a policy and political issue, the environment is hard to compartmentalize; it overlaps with almost all other policy issues. Politics and policy are different but related terms; one is a process of decision-making, the other is a course of action (or inaction). Environmental politics are distinguished from most other arenas of politics by varieties of scale, which range from the local community to the entire earth. The environment may be the only political issue that has truly global dimensions. Environmentalism seeks political and economic change, but there are competing views about how this can be achieved, ranging from change within the existing capitalist system to an entire rejection of that system. Environmentalism emerged in different places and for different reasons, was influenced at first by events and thinking in the West in the 1960s, and later included the concerns of poorer parts of the world. While concerns about the deteriorating relationship between humans and their environment date back at least to the Industrial Revolution, the political response was late arriving. The earliest efforts to change policy date back to the late 1800s, but the environment has been a regular feature of the public policy agenda only since the 1960s, and while we now understand much more about the sources and effects of environmental needs and problems, the record on addressing them has been mixed at best. They vary by time and place, there is disagreement on their implications, government and industry often disagree on the best and most practical responses, the economic implications are not always clear, and the science behind many environmental problems is still debatable.