Political Patterns in Environmental Issues:

¶ … Political Patterns in Environmental Issues: An Urban Environmental Re-Development Platform

America's environmental policy orientation has endured a tumultuous and often compromised path. Though at one point during its early inception in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was considered a global leader in environmental reform and regulatory improvement, its progress would be frequently curtailed by political pressures, economic interests and the absence of a unified public will. Today, with Democratic President Barrack Obama preparing to embark on a bid for reelection, the conditions surrounding America's environmental policy have shifted. With this shift comes an historic opportunity for the president to make environmental reform a centerpiece of his campaign. A maneuver that might have been considered a politically deadly gambit for a liberal political figure such as Obama, today a focus on economic, sociological and cultural issues as a function of environmental policy may be the paradigm shift required to usher America into a new phase of sustainability.

This is because critical realities such as global climate change, the increasing cost of commodities due to oil scarcity, the melting of the polar ice caps and irreversible damage to the ecological stasis of many of the world's unique natural habitats are raising awareness and collective interest in making meaningful policy strides in environmental regulatory, both domestically and globally. The environmental movement is increasingly becoming less a fringe activist terrain and more a policy area of great importance for not just the United States but all of the industrialized nations of the world. There is increasingly a consensus on the dangers of global climate change; the threat to our health of pollutants in land, air and water; the implications to food scarcity to hungry populations; and the need to change energy harvesting and consumption habits. Collectively, these environmental concerns are registering with ever-greater prominence in the nations of Western Europe, North America and in economically advanced parts of China. Quite certainly, in all of these contexts, there remain considerable challenges ahead in achieving projected future goals for meeting environmental improvements. With the current election, Obama must draw the connection between economic, political and practical interests and the pressing demand to protect the environment on all fronts.

Distributive Land Policy:

One particular area in which policy development can benefit from the connection between voting demographic interests and environmental improvements is distributive land policy. In recent years, political attention has been turned to the inherent socioeconomic inequality of common land use practices. The environmental impact of private activities tends to be experienced more directly by impoverished populations. According to Vig & Kraft (2005), one "side of community deveolopment on which policy must continue to focus is the distributive effects of activities that negatively affect people and the environment. Substantial evidence indicates that low-income and minority groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards such as lead poisoning, industrial air pollution, and toxic waste sites. African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans have formed hundreds of new grassroots organizations to fight pollution in their communities, and mainstream environmental groups have become more sensitive to such inequities." (Vig & Kraft, p. 381)

This should have a direct impact on the approach which the president takes in drafting his platform for the upcoming election, with a focus on improving the way that land use is regulated in those areas unequally impacted by exploitation in the past. According to Vig & Kraft, the primary responsibility for improving equality in this area rests with the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice. This office is charged with addressing the crossover between environmental and civil rights issues, using the authorization provided by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in order to identify and reverse discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. (Vig & Kraft, p. 382) the patterns which Vig & Kraft describe denote that such discrimination can be identified in our land use practices and can therefore be considered an irrefutable rationale for improving the legal protections of such lands. As the discussion here will demonstrate in greater detail upon selecting an issue-position, a focus on the conditions in many of America's blighted urban centers may have the potential to improve land equality and economic fortunes all at once.

By bringing clearer attention to the connection between impoverished minority status and exposure to harmful environmental conditions, the President may effectively garner public support for such positions on making more stringent regulatory conditions for private land use and demanding greater government accountability for urban environmental conditions. Simultaneously, strengthening visibility of this connection between impoverished minority status and exposure to harmful environmental conditions will raise the political stakes for his opponents. This offers the president an opportunity to present a position that projects him as a public advocate, thus rendering many of his opponents among Republicans, Tea Party activists and other conservatives as apparent enemies of the public interest.

Regulatory Pollution Policy:

America's regulatory pollution policy is an area which has been especially vulnerable to vitriol and political partisanship. This is because the issue of global climate change generates such a wide spectrum of emotionally charged and economically determinant implications. This spectrum of implications is predicated on a heated battle between environmental scientists and private industries, which have often viewed their respective causes as inherently incompatible.

However, because of its growing urgency and a clear need to recognize and diminish those factors causing it, the reality of 'global warming' is increasingly becoming the scientific and rational consensus. It falls upon President Obama to also create political consensus on the issue. As the selected policy issue will demonstrate in a subsequent section of this account, the best avenue to accomplishing this feat will be to tie economic interests directly to a reduction in the pollutants, toxins and emissions relating to global warming. Global warming is a term which surfaced several decades ago to identify the emerging patters of climate shift that would be associated with manmade ecological hazards such as toxic emissions and the dismantling of the world's tropical rain-forests. In spite of substantial evidence to the favor of this viewpoint, the threat of environmental restraint to the bottom line for many industrial polluters has produce a considerable public backlash against the view of global warming. In the decades since its rise to prominence, the theory has been discredited in the media to the extent that the term 'global warming' has actually lost credibility. This, however, has been paired with rising evidence of its validity as a theory, predisposing its replacement with the term 'climate change.' The atmosphere in which this term has come to prominence suggests that with people increasingly prepared to acknowledge its reality, the fight against 'global warming' may actually be psychologically aided by the transition to a different label.

Today, the fight against 'global climate change' rings with more political credibility, especially with President Obama in office. And just as we can see the environmental movement using language in order to share or argue against certain beliefs and perspectives, it is also to oppose a manipulation in language to the destruction of the environment. Both environmental activists and polluters depend on the public impression for the furthering of their causes, and this makes the discussion on environmental language a very crucial one if we are to understand the psychological factors of the environmental movement for the public. This is to say that in spite of the valid evidence produced by environmental scientists, it is only now that public is making note of previously forecasted environmental patterns.

In 2005, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report on the effects and reality of global warming. In the investigative commission that gave the findings, an admission said that there is no way to fully determine how much of the planet's climatic change has been due to natural variation in whether and temperature patterns. However, the report did state the certainty that global warming is in large part due to human behavior and environmental practices. Moreover, our course literature demonstrates that policy development and regulatory policies often fail to truly account for the increasing intensity of patterns impacting the environment. For instance, where emissions are concerned, the Bush Administration made 'improvements' through the Clean Air Act that appeared on the surface to reduce collective emission levels. But closer inspection shows that this policy did not adjust its regulatory limitations to the real demands created by human population growth and continued industrialization. According to Rosenbaum (2007), "economic growth and population expansion often diminish the effectiveness of pollution controls over time. The automobile emission controls and reduced lead levels in gasoline required by the Clean Air Act together have lowered the average new car's hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions significantly. But the number of automobiles in the United States has increased nearly 71%, from 80.4 million in 1970 to 137 million in 2006, with an additional 60 million new trucks since 1970. This vehicle population explosion counteracts the emission reductions achieved for individual vehicles and leads eventually to widespread urban violations of federal air quality standards." (Rosenbaum, p. 12-13)

This demonstrates the uphill climb facing President Obama, not just in terms of gaining political momentum to return the United States to a place of respect in the global environmental movement but also to develop regulatory goals and standards that will have a meaningful impact on environmental standards. It is important for Obama to differentiate himself from his predecessors during this campaign with a policy agenda that does more than pay political lip service to important environmental issues.

Regulatory Energy Policy:

America's energy policy also carries extremely complex and nuanced political implications. Today, the world is coming to terms with the reality of a global oil shortage. The petroleum which has constituted the dominant and exponentially consumed energy source of the last century is becoming scarcer and more costly. The race is on to determine the most practical substitute for this precious but environmentally destructive, politically inflammatory and economically pertinent resource, with such clean burning but as yet technologically inefficient alternative fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and hydrogen cells all under consideration by environmental scientists and industrialists alike.

Other considerations are such renewable sources of energy as hydroelectric or solar power. And if regulated to determinable safety, a considerable increase on reliance upon nuclear power could help to alleviate our oil dependency. These alternative fuel references are intended to underscore the great imperative upon both businesses and world leaders to alter the course of industry, transportation and such specific sectors as automobile manufacturing and building architecture in order to promote more sustainable, environmentally sound and economically rational solutions to our energy demands. They also have emerged as part of an active and intensive discourse on the subject of oil dependency and global petroleum consumption, both of which fly in the face of logic given the unstable nature of this key commodity. And certainly, President Obama's tenure comes at a time where the pressure is ever-greater to reduce this dependency. Today, political will are shifting because of the economic imperatives correlated to the diminishing supply of petroleum. According to Rosenbaum, "in mid-2001 George W. Bush's administration released its much anticipated national energy plan, titled Reliable, Affordable and Environmentally Sound Energy for America's Future. The report began with a warning from the task force preparing the plan under the leadership of Vice President Dick Cheney. 'America in the year 2001 faces the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970s. The effects are already being felt nationwide,' it observed. 'This imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably undermine our economy, our standard of living, and our national security,' it added." (Rosenbaum, p. 253)

Ironically, the Bush Administration would go on to boast one of recent history's worst records on energy dependency, with its foreign policy and environmental position typically reflecting the interests of large energy conglomerates and petroleum companies over those of the American public or the global environment. As the price of gas rises unpredictably today, most notably so in light of the rippling political changes gripping the whole of the Middle East right now, the American public is gradually shifting in its attention to the matter. Rosenbaum notes that, according to a Pew Center report issued in 2006, "energy matters ranked only tenth in a public opinion poll concerning the issues to which most Americans thought the president and Congress should give priority." (p. 255)

That position would shift considerably in just the space of year, with a Gallup Poll in 2007 finding that 43% of respondents from the general public "worried a great deal" about America's oil policy. With a prolonged struggle in Iraq and sustained economic woes, Americans have felt the pinch of America's aged energy policy. President Obama's next campaign big must remind the public of the connection between its economic interests and the imperative to wean American off of its oil dependency.

Selected Scientific and Issue Position:

Here below is a policy recommendation and assessment driven by the three major dimensions discussed above. The issue-position taken here is that the Obama Reelection Campaign should focus on urban environmental redevelopment through sustainable building practice, community involvement, regulatory improvement and sustainability job development.

Through a combination of poor use-of-space and unsustainable building design, our urban and suburban settings have drawn us ever-nearer to a point of inevitable transition, where the over-consumption of natural commodities and the degradation of the natural environment will have widespread consequences concerning our way of life. With the notions of alternative fuel and environmental regulatory improvements still legislatively and principally embattled and described above, it is sensible for the president to turn to our architecture as a means to changing behaviors and attitudes in a manner that might better preserve our resources, our environment and our species. 'Green' housing philosophies are coming ever-more into mainstream architectural and policy consideration as decision-makers in economic and political positions of leadership alike meditate on ways to reduce CO2 emissions while simultaneously remaining conscious of economic demands. The proposal here would provide a policy framework for the proper encouragement, funding and administrative support in the development of sustainable principles in building development, infrastructural maintenance and use of geographical spaces, both urban and otherwise.

As a result of economic and sociological inequality, architectural concentration within the most desirable environments has infrequently been driven by pragmatic use of land and instead has typically been driven by economic interest. Indeed, where our studies tell us that communities and societies ought to be designed around the premise of human need and natural space use, instead, they have most frequently been driven by the social parameters servicing the wealthy. The result is that the United States is the single most prolific releaser of CO2 emissions both in sum and per individual. This dictates the need for a serious change in policy direction and funding which helps us to design an inherently more ecologically sound approach to new structural and infrastructural development.

It is thus that we enter into a discourse over the proper approach to design competence in an urban setting, with the inevitable relevance of technology to future outlooks informing the parameters of this approach. Such is to argue that, though it is evident in many urban localities today that technological ascent (especially the automobile) has contributed to an intensification of the social ills typically associated with city-existence -- such as overcrowding, crime, poverty and carbon toxification -- it may become more apparent through the present policy discussion that in fact, it is the manner in which a metropolis is conceptually planned which will most directly effect its capacity to accommodate both the human and technological aspects of ecological change. A regrettably commonplace urban pattern fails to accommodate this even as it comes to play an ever-greater role in shaping realities of living standards and survival.

Thus, for developers, public officials and members of the public with a vested interest in seeing to the improvement of blighted and neglected neighborhoods as a way to enter these locales into the housing market and to place such locales on a track toward revitalization, working with the city to improve the environmental outlook would be considered a primary goal. This means that private developers, corporate leaders, city councils, city executives and state political bodies must work together to renew our cities our sustainability goals established at the federal level. The City Council to present concerns, grievances or prospects for the future. Evidence also denotes that there are living standard issues which impact the poorest areas most directly but which of course permeate city life as a whole and which are correlated to environmental shortcomings or misconceptions. So is the denoted by the emphasis on green space, which though positive to the use-of-space issues concerning the city, do not address the larger environmental concerns the negatively impacted residential spaces.