11:374:279 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Environmental Politics, Conservation Movement, Environmental Policy

• School: Rutgers University
• Department: Environmental Policy, Institutions, and Behavior
• Course: 11:374:279
• Professor: Schoolman

Document Summary

Defining problems and portraying solutions in the u. s. Environmental politics concerns how humanity organizes itself to relate to the nature that sustains it. Environmental policy conflicts almost always concern fundamental differences in values. The way problems are defined and solutions depicted plays a central role in shaping how those values get translated into policies. Nearly all environmental policy disputes are contests over values. The clash of values at the heart of environmental policymaking. The participants in environmental debates fall into two broad camps based on entrenched differences in their beliefs about the appropriate relationship between humans and the natural world. Not a single philosophy but a congeries of beliefs with several roots. Most historians date the origins of american environmentalism to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century romantics and transcendentalists, an elite community of artists and writers who celebrated wild nature as a source of spiritual renewal and redemption.