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Article Excerpt
Earth Day 1970 is widely credited with increasing Americans' concerns with environmental problems (Guber, 2003, p. 1; Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2007, p. 21; Rosenbaum, 1973, p. 70; Shabecoff, 1993, p. 113). A lasting facet of its legacy, however, is the effect that the environmental activist-dominated image of environmentalism that is centered on crisis-driven policy making has had on public expectations and opinion. Earth Day's place in popular culture looms large, overshadowing two earlier environmental policy-making events that, had they remained in the public's memory, may have resulted in a different public understanding of environmental problems and how to solve them. After nearly 40 years of "environmentalism," Americans largely endorse the goals of environmental protection, although they are ambivalent about how best to achieve these policy goals. This uncertainty may stem from the origins of Earth Day itself.
It is now commonplace among political observers to recognize the importance of how policy issues are defined, spun, or framed. Most often, issue framing is employed to explain media or elite influence on public opinion (Druckman, 2001; Iyengar, 1991). Several models of policy change (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Kingdon, 1984; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Wilson, 2000; Zahariadis, 2006) use a related, but less developed, notion of a "policy image," "belief system," or "policy paradigm" to describe policy makers and citizens' differing understandings of policy issues. In the public opinion literature, issue frames are applied at the individual level of analysis to aid in conceptualizing how citizens think about an issue (see, e.g., Druckman, 2001). The concept of a policy image has potential for increasing our understanding of a higher level of analysis--the policy-making system--in explaining the evolution of a policy issue.
This paper compares Earth Day 1970 with two related preceding policy events, the Congressional Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Committee (ORRRC) and President John F. Kennedy's Natural Resources Tour in September 1963, to understand the evolution of environmental concerns as policy issues. While there is more than a century of popular and policy efforts to promote conservation (see Andrews, 1999; or Hays, 1987), these two events are chosen because (1) the ORRRC involved policy makers who were pivotal in developing major air and water pollution control and wilderness preservation legislation of the 1960s, and (2) the Kennedy Tour was proposed by Senator Gaylord Nelson, who later founded Earth Day. This analysis employs the "multiple streams" and "policy image" concepts to understand policy change and to suggest how the prevalence of a particular policy image contributes to shaping how public policies are designed.
Earth Day unquestionably is the major focusing event of post World War II environmental policy making and has proven to be an effective political strategy to educate the American public about the human impact on the natural environment and the potential benefits of environmental protection. Earth Day's prominence, however, tends to detract from the importance of other environmental policy activities, efforts, decisions, and events. Additionally, Earth Day's portrayal of environmental policy making as crisis driven and grassroots led influenced the public's expectation for solving policy problems (Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2007, p. 31, make a similar point). The late Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin) initiated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 to "inspire a public demonstration so big it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and force the environmental issue onto the national political agenda" (Nelson, 2002, p. 3). Rubin (1994) argues that this particular perspective resulted in the unintended consequence of creating a public taste for the grand tales of environmental disaster that have captured America's attention but "have done so at the cost of [America's] ability to give them attention in a thoughtful way" (Rubin, 1994, p. 74; also see Guber, 2003, p. 4). Nordhaus and Shellenberger, in 2004, precipitated an environmental intraorganization controversy in an essay "The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World" that raised similar concerns and questioned the underlying premises of the environmental movement (Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2004).
To highlight the relevance of this present article to contemporary environmental politics, it is worth quoting from the book that was an expansion of that essay. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2007) write:
And on April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day. The modern environmental movement was born, and it shone like a candle in the dark night of race riots, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. The new movement's impact on politics was swift and decisive. Public outrage at these new pollution problems, combined with the environmental movement's deft use of science, lobbying, grassroots organization, and the courts, led Congress to pass and presidents to sign dozens of environmental policies into law, from the Clean Air Act to the Endangered Species Act. By the end of the 1970s, the United States had protected millions of acres of wilderness and public land, dramatically improved air quality throughout the nation, and established the strongest environmental protections of any nation on earth. Or at least that's how the story goes. As far as political fables go, this genesis story has served the environmental movement well. It depicts environmental leaders as the parents of America's most important environmental laws. It defines public support for environmental action as a relatively simple reaction to visible pollution. It imagines Earth Day to have been a spontaneous grassroots expression of popular discontent. And it establishes scientific and legal expertise as the basis of the legislative victories of the era. And while most of the facts commonly marshaled to tell the environmentalist birth story are technically correct, the overall narrative is all wrong. (pp. 21-22, italics in the original)
The roots of Earth Day 1970 are in the congressionally initiated Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) established 1958 and in President Kennedy's five-day Natural Resources Tour in September 1963--a tour he made at the suggestion of Senator Nelson. Comparing the principal themes enunciated in the ORRRC, the Kennedy Tour, and Senator Nelson's 1970 environmental agenda shows some continuity in the way conservation/environmentalism has been framed in the midtwentieth century, although revealing a transformation in the environmental discourse, indicating that the framing of environmental concerns evolved and changed during this period. This change in the environmental policy image from 1958-1970 is a result, in part, of the nature of the times in the 1960s but is also a result of the way Earth Day was conceived, organized, and promoted.
This paper examines primary documents and secondary accounts of the three significant policy events to compare their underlying policy image and is organized into four principal parts. First, the multiple streams framework for explaining policy change and the concept of policy image are described. Second, the origin of Earth Day 1970 is reviewed and its legacy examined. Third, the congressionally established ORRRC and its contributions to the environmental policy stream are discussed. Fourth, President Kennedy's Natural Resources Tour of September 1963 is described as an important facet of the environmental political stream of the 1960s contributing to the establishment of Earth Day 1970. Finally, the paper uses six characteristics of a policy image to compare these three significant environmental policy events and to offer lessons about American policy making.
Environmental Policy Change and Policy Images
The American public policy literature contains a multitude of explanatory frameworks useful for understanding policy in general and the evolution of environmental policy making in particular. Wilson (2000) synthesizes this literature, finding that most models consist of, what he labels, power arrangements, policy paradigms, and policy organization components to form a policy regime. Wilson's treatment of policy regime incorporates a wide range of influences on policy making, including political system components, broader social and economic systemic factors, and culture considerations (Wilson, 2000, p. 248). The policy regime sets the context for the three more focused, agenda-setting models appearing in the literature that shape the present analysis. These approaches are the multiple streams (Kingdon, 1984; Zahariadis, 2006), punctuated equilibrium (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993), and advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993). A central notion of all three frameworks is that policy making is dynamic and chaotic, tending to be incremental, but periodically marked with "punctuated equilibrium" (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993) resulting in rather drastic change. A key element in punctuating the equilibrium is the strength of positive feedback where an event sparks a variety of reactions of other participants thereby expanding its space on the policy agenda, thus overcoming policy-making inertia. Growth in public interest, increased civic participation, and more legislative activity are examples of positive feedbacks to Earth Day 1970 that contributed to changing the trajectory of environmental policy development.
Because it is focused at a higher level of analysis of agenda setting--the systemic level (as opposed to the decision-making calculus of an individual)--the multiple streams framework (Zahariadis, 2006) is the primary analytical approach used in this analysis. This multiple streams framework (Kingdon, 1984) is a metaphor for understanding rather than an analytical model that can be subjected to empirical tests. While too general for predictive purposes, the multiple streams approach is useful for understanding policy evolution. One shortcoming, for example, of the multiple streams approach is the lack of independence of the three streams. As is the case with Earth Day, several actors are involved in more than one stream.
According to Kingdon, the problem stream for environmental policy provides information about the state of the environment and data about environmental problems. By Earth Day 1970, books such as Carson's Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) and Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall's The Quiet Crisis (Udall, 1963) were well known and influenced public discourse on the environment, contributing to the problem stream. Major ecological events that received heavy media coverage, such as the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River blaze on June 22, 1969, also played a major role in the activation of the problem stream. These incidents in the environmental...
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