1 Politics and the Environment

For nearly 150 years, environmental concerns have been part of the U.S. political agenda. As early as 1864, the U.S. Congress debated the proper use of national lands, and, motivated by press accounts of the logging of Giant Sequoia trees, decided to protect Yosemite Valley for aesthetic reasons (Brulle 2000). Since then, as industrialization and environmental impacts have risen in tandem, environmental politics has expanded its range over an increasingly wide spectrum of political action, ranging from local level land use decisions to global controls over CO2 emissions. Thus the study of environmental politics encompasses a range of issues across virtually all political arenas. As the range of environmental politics has expanded, so too has the scholarship on this topic. Using a wide variety of intellectual tools, ranging from legal studies to geospatial analysis, the literature on environmental politics has expanded into an immense field.