The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions, Marc K. Landy, Marc J. Roberts, Stephen R. Thomas, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 304 pp.
Procedural fairness; administrative procedures; politics; of general applicability to environmental problems; written for the first part participant.
The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions is an examination of the creation and evolution of the agency and the affect on it of the Reagan administration. It is forwarded by Congressman Morris K. Udall.
The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions is required reading in multiple political science courses and the Environmental Policy Certificate Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It will be of interest to those who wish an understanding of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This work is divided into three parts. The first part is comprised of an introduction and discussion of the origins and development of the EPA. The second part (the bulk of the book) is devoted to some of the accomplishments of the EPA. The final part is an examination of the affect the Reagan administration had on the EPA.
The authors begin their examination of the origins of the EPA in the post-World War II years and the push toward suburbanization of rural towns and unincorporated areas. This provides the explanation for the emergence of the problems the EPA was established to solve. The authors find the philosophical foundations for the agency's creation in the political climate of the 1960s which gave rise to the environmental movement.
The second part examines five of the accomplishments of the EPA. The first is the establishment and subsequent revising of the ozone standard. The writing of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act regulations and the passing of Superfund are discussed at length. The formulation of a cancer policy and the relationship of the interagency regulatory liaison group to this policy is addressed. Finally, chapter seven "... look(s) at several features of the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to bring the steel industry into compliance with the Clean Air Act."
Part III examines the effect which the Reagan administration had on the EPA. In asserting that the EPA is asking the wrong questions, the authors "... ascribe EPA's failings to its penchant for asking the wrong questions. They offer their opinions on the sources for that tendency. In the concluding chapter, the authors offer "... their own view of what the right questions might be."
The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions offers a political perspective on the creation, history and effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency.
T. A. O'Lonergan
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