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Redistributed as a Service of the National Library for the Environment* |
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RL30760: Environmental Protection: New Approaches II John E. Blodgett December 11, 2000 Contents For This Section Incentives Incentives, including both financial and technical support, predated the regulatory command and control environmental protection programs. They remained a critical complement to those programs - most notably sewage treatment grants as a complement to the water quality regulatory program. And new forms of incentives are components of various alternatives - for example, of the best management practices approach to controlling agricultural pollution (see under Management Principles below). Of various new incentives being proposed, rewarding entities that undertake environmental protection initiatives that go beyond regulatory requirements has gotten particular attention. Beyond Compliance: Incentives for Environmental Performance.25 The concept of businesses and other regulated entities achieving improved environmental performance beyond what is strictly required to meet regulatory obligations is often called "beyond compliance." Some say that, besides being overly prescriptive, the current environmental management system fails to reward excellent performers. Truly voluntary initiatives by some businesses that are intended to encourage improved environmental performance (such as environmental audits and Environmental Management Systems) attract some businesses and industries, but participation is limited. While businesses enter into such voluntary commitments for various reasons, including a perception by some that good environmental practice is good for business, the numbers that will do so without some type of incentive is likely to be small. Recent literature and activity advocating beyond compliance. A number of recent reports and contributions to the policy literature have examined how the United States could adopt environmental management systems using alternatives to command-and-control regulation. Some of this literature explicitly recommends that whatever new systems evolve and develop should include incentives to encourage and reward those whose environmental protection performance exceeds basic requirements. For example, the 1995 report of the National Academy of Public Administration, Setting Priorities, Getting Results, recommended that EPA support legislation to provide flexibility and accountability to businesses and local governments in exchange for better-than-required performance A similar theme was expressed in the 1996 report of The Aspen Institute, Alternative Path, which recommended that in the future the United States should utilize two parallel environmental regulatory tracks. One would be the existing system. An alternative would allow volunteers to propose pilot demonstrations of better ways to achieve environmental progress. Only projects yielding a greater net benefit than expected from existing or anticipated regulations could become pilots, but participants would receive regulatory flexibility in order to encourage their environmental protection innovations. The concept of providing incentives to encourage beyond compliance environmental performance underlies a number of EPA's recent regulatory reinvention projects and programs. These include the ongoing Project XL, which was largely based on principles in the Alternative Path report and seeks to encourage up to 50 site-specific experiments to achieve better environmental outcomes along with operational flexibility and other benefits. The Common Sense Initiative (CSI), which lasted from 1994 to 1998, is related to Project XL. It sought to remove barriers to innovation by implementing multi-media projects in six specific industrial sectors. EPA's newest regulatory reinvention program, called the National Environmental Performance Track, was announced in June 2000. EPA says it is intended to reward companies which exceed minimum regulatory requirements and take extra steps to reduce and prevent pollution, including having an operational Environmental Management System. Benefits for participants will include national recognition, regulatory and administrative flexibility, a more cooperative relationship with EPA, a reduction in record keeping and reporting requirements, and flexibility in meeting certain regulatory requirements.26 Several states (including New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota) also have adopted regulatory reinvention programs which provide qualifying facilities with flexibility under state and/or federal rules in exchange for improved environmental performance. The types of incentives appropriate or necessary to encourage beyond compliance environmental performance are varied. They range from direct financial incentives (e.g., tax subsidies for installing pollution control equipment), to indirect financial incentives (such as more rapid permitting, less stringent standards or monitoring, more flexibility to meet standards, or less frequent renewal of permits), to public recognition in the form of a Presidential merit award or EPA certificate, to better relations with regulators, corporate customers, or non-corporate customers. The most powerful incentives are likely to be those that contribute directly or indirectly to the corporate bottom line.27 Support and criticism. Proponents of providing incentives for beyond compliance performance include business and industry participants, who favor the prospect of regulatory flexibility and other benefits, and top federal and state environmental officials, who view such policies as integral to more efficient, performance-based management systems in the future. Opponents include some environmentalists who criticize policies that potentially would allow companies to sidestep regulations or obtain regulatory relief with no guarantee of environmental outcome. As with a number of other recent environmental management tools, there is a fundamental conflict between business's desire for flexibility and simplicity and environmentalists' desire for certainty and enforceability. As a tool of environmental policy, incentives for beyond compliance are related to a number of other ideas intended to move beyond rigid regulatory strategies and towards performance-based approaches, especially use of market incentives, management practices, and devolution or defederalization. Unlike most of these other new or newer approaches, however, beyond compliance incentives lack statutory authority, a fact that some proponents believe is an obstacle. These supporters argue that many companies (especially small ones) will remain reluctant to innovate because they view the transaction costs as being too high in terms of uncertain rules, consensus requirements, and unclear benefits at the end of the process. At the same time, there has been little discussion and there is no consensus on how to change statutes to address these kinds of uncertainties. For further reading, see:
Employing market mechanisms in environmental protection has been an evolving policy approach for certain types of problems since the mid-seventies. Such mechanisms have the potential to reduce the compliance costs of some environmental protection actions. These cost saving potentials are an important reason that the EPA introduced greater flexibility in implementing some Clean Air Act regulations and that Congress authorized a market-based approach to acid rain control. Such mechanisms have also been authorized in the international treaty dealing with possible future actions to slow global climate change. This gradual development of supplements to the "command and control" regulatory approach in practice has also has been preceded and accompanied by a growing body of academic and policy community attention. Proponents of market- based approaches include think tanks, academics, and some leading environmental advocacy groups. They argue that properly structured incentive mechanisms can produce significant reduction in pollution control costs while achieving agreed upon environmental standards. Pollution Trading and Pollution Taxes.28 Market-based mechanisms fall into two distinct groups with many variations in each category. The first are trading mechanisms which allow businesses to meet a facility, regional, industry-wide, or a national cap on a pollutant by shifting their individual compliance obligations within their business operations or to other businesses subject to the same compliance requirements. For the case of trading between companies, this mechanism operates when companies with low compliance costs control their pollution beyond what is required by regulation and then sell the excess compliance to companies with high control costs. The latter companies are thus relieved of some of their pollution control obligations, avoiding costly abatement expenditures. The net effect is to concentrate compliance at the points of lowest cost, thus reducing overall compliance costs. Environmental protection is achieved in a more economically efficient manner. A second market mechanism is the explicit taxation of a polluting activity in order to include in the cost of a good or service the social costs (environmental or human health damage) that the polluting activity may cause. By raising the cost of polluting inputs or outputs for businesses or raising the cost for consumers using polluting substances (e.g.; gasoline combustion), businesses or consumers have an incentive to economize on the polluting activity. Businesses or consumers can respond as they choose, with some paying the higher costs and others making changes that avoid the effects of the tax. The combined responses to the cost incentive in.. theory will result in a reduction in the polluting activity to a point where further reductions by businesses or consumers would cost more than paying the tax or be inconvenient or impractical. The potential reduction in pollution depends on the level of the tax. This is set, in theory, based on what is needed to meet a targeted reduction in pollution. Alternately, the tax can be set to achieve a given level of reduction in the incremental monetized damages caused by the pollutant. This assumes that complex environmental and human health values and attributes can be translated to monetary surrogates. Although widely advocated by economists, this incentive mechanism has never been employed in U.S. environmental laws or regulations except as fees or charges intended to raise revenue or cover regulatory administrative costs. Such charges typically are low enough not to create incentive effects for reducing pollution levels. Both trading mechanisms and pollution taxes have defined circumstances in which they have been or could be effective in environmental management. For trading mechanisms, like sulfur allowance trading for acid rain control or the EPA's netting, banking, and offset programs for some criteria air pollutants, several business and institutional circumstances are necessary for effective implementation. These programs are likely to be effective when: 1) the pollutant is one where transactions and information costs are low, typically when industries have long experience with monitoring and controlling a pollutant, there are a large but fairly set number of possible market participants, and there are intermediary institutions to facilitate trading; 2) security of long term investments in pollution control by companies is highly certain, so that unanticipated future changes do not impede long term planning and financial commitments; 3 ) there are several technically and financially feasible options for reducing pollution among different industry segments (fuel switching, process changes, etc.); and 4) reductions are sought across a broad geographical area for a pollutant that does not involve local public health or environmental effects or alternately within one jurisdiction or facility, so that third party impacts are minimized. Thus, the advantages of trading mechanisms are their potential for lower-cost implementation of environmental controls in situations where a set number of large sources can potentially optimize expenditures on abatement through mutually beneficial exchange of the location of control. On the other hand, for pollution from diffuse and numerous sources, trading mechanisms do not appear very practical given the high transaction and information costs needed for implementation. Taxation as a tool for reducing environmental damage is particularly applicable to problems where pollution is the result of small, diffuse, and numerous sources. In these cases, meeting environmental objectives requires an overall reduction in the total consumption or use of a polluting material or activity, but the large number of contributors makes traditional regulation or targeted reductions difficult. With population, GDP, material consumption, and waste flows all growing, mitigating environmental deterioration may be extremely difficult or impossible to manage without the use of incentives. Some forms of air and water pollution, 002 generation, and traffic congestion are examples where taxation or other price signals could be a relevant management tool. Taxes on polluting substances and activities send a signal to consumers and businesses to make short and long term alterations, without prescribing how or what to modify. The advantages of using this tool are its administrative simplicity; the flexibility it gives those affected to respond; and its long term effects on innovation and technical and behavioral changes. While the theory and logic for using taxes to reduce certain types of environmental deterioration are straightforward, this approach meets public as well as policy objections on several fronts. First, those who would pay such taxes may oppose this approach as being unfair if other types of pollution sources are not being taxed, and as diverting monies that could be used for pollution abatement investments. Second, if large sums of money are involved, how such revenue is used is a critical question (some argue for use in environmental programs or recycling through income tax relief, but questions of tax base stability arise). Third, agreeing on the appropriate level of a pollution tax is problematic due to uncertainty about the exact reductions in pollution that may result. Finally, questions of pollution taxes become involved in broader tax policy issues which complicate practical implementation. For further reading, see:
Private Markets and Legal Actions.29 Under some circumstances, environmental protection can be achieved between private parties without direct statutory and regulatory involvement. Some argue that these tools if used more extensively could avoid the inefficiencies of bureaucratic regulation, although critics contend that the circumstances are more narrowly delimited than proponents acknowledge. In one case, if pollution rights are clearly defined between two parties where one is generating pollution, bargaining can lead to an economically efficient reduction in the pollution level. In a second case, tort actions based on injuries suffered due to pollution can result in court rulings that restrict defendants or compensate plaintiffs; and polluters will consider the benefits of reducing the threat of liability in accounting for costs of pollution reduction. Finally, in a third situation, private property rights can be used to protect resources vulnerable to the "tragedy of the commons" (in which common ownership leads to overexploitation as each participant seeks to maximize gain). Markets in pollution rights. In the case of bargaining between private parties, the potential for finding an economically efficient reduction exists when a clearly traceable pollution source operated by one party is causing verifiable damages or loss to another party. Under specific and site-dependent circumstances, such private transactions can produce economically efficient environmental protection. If the right to discharge pollution is clearly defined or alternately, the right to be free of pollution is clearly defined, negotiations between the parties can lead to an efficient balance between reducing pollution damages and expenditures to reduce pollution. This occurs because either party has an incentive to bargain with the other. In the case where the polluter has the rights to discharge wastes, the negatively affected party can offer to pay the polluter to reduce discharges to the point that the monetary value of remaining damages is below the cost of additional abatement expenditures to the polluting party. On the other hand, if the party that potentially would be damaged has the right to be free of pollution, the party that needs to pollute in order to operate can negotiate a level of compensation in order to find a balance between abatement expenditures and purchasing from the other party the right to discharge some pollution. Depending on equality in bargaining positions, an "optimal" reduction in pollution would result. Which party draws the greater benefit from the exchange depends on who holds the initial pollution rights. This type of situation is an example of what is called the Coase theorem (after a classic article by Professor Ronald Coase) in which a clear assignment of property rights in theory will lead to an economically efficient reduction in pollution through private party bargaining. This outcome, however, rests on the assumption of no barriers to transactions such as imperfect knowledge, limited rationality, or communications costs. It assumes equality of bargaining positions, clear and provable linkages between polluter and the injured party, minimal transaction costs (meaning, generally a limited number of parties), and the absence of potential free riders on the agreements reached between the bargaining parties. Private legal remedies. In the second case, where pollution rights are ill- defined, or custom has implicitly assumed that pollution is accepted as part of economic activity, legal remedies sometimes can lead to a balance between pollution reduction costs on the one hand and avoided injuries to other parties on the other. A variety of legal theories may be available to plaintiffs such as nuisance, negligence, trespass, infliction of mental distress, and strict liability. For example, under the common law doctrine of nuisance, as well as under other legal theories, courts can award compensation of injuries or injunctions to parties injured by pollution. In situations where there is one polluter and the nature of hardships favors the plaintiffs, nuisance remedies can be an effective management tool. This assumes that plaintiff has the money, time, and patience to see the action through. Class actions also help. As a hypothetical example, if air emissions from a factory were causing damage to crops on downwind farms, the farmers could seek an injunction and compensatory damages for any losses in the value of their crops. A court could find any number of ways to address the situation depending on the severity of damages to the crops and the economic consequences of enjoining further pollution from the factory. For example, if the plant was the mainstay of the local economy and had already undertaken extensive pollution abatement expenditures and the aggregate damages to crops were small, a court could find against enjoining the factory from further pollution. In this type of situation, some state courts have chosen to "balance the equities" and deny injunctions since the resulting hardships to the defendant outweigh the harm to the plaintiffs. However, where injunctions are denied, sometimes courts have awarded past or ongoing compensatory damages to plaintiffs. In general, nuisance law has had only limited effectiveness in controlling wide- spread pollution. In addition to the tendency to balance the equities and deny injunctions, other factors have limited nuisance law as an effective tool in controlling widespread pollution. One important limitation is the lack of eligibility to sue. The common law distinguishes between private and public nuisances, where the latter may involve small damages to large numbers of people. In cases of public nuisances, in general, only a state attorney general or a local prosecutor has been allowed to bring a law suit against polluters. Reluctance by governments to bring suits that would harm local industries has mostly limited the role of injunctive relief, though some states now allow individuals to bring suits to mitigate public nuisances. Another complication that has limited the usefulness of nuisance remedies is the burden of proof on the plaintiffs. Widespread pollution typically comes from many sources, none of which alone could be shown to produce the resulting injury. It is further difficult to achieve a group of defendants among whom potential damages can be allocated. In general, then, common law remedies under nuisance law do not provide a sufficiently systematic means for managing widespread pollution discharges to environmental media. In other types of legal actions, similar issues of causation and accountability limit such methods for dealing with widespread pollution which is typical of must contemporary environmental problems. Environmental markets. In a third situation, creating markets for transactions of environmental "goods," may lead to efficient outcomes. (In pollution control, trading programs, as discussed above, constitute a type of environmental market). In some cases, private parties may act through existing markets to achieve environmental protection ends, as for example when the Nature Conservancy buys private land in order to protect it and its resources, or when a private landowner sells hunting or fishing rights (and thereby has a vested interest in maintaining healthy populations of the sport game or fish). In other cases, governmental intervention may be needed to create the market for an environmental good or service, as for example when governmental bodies allow the selling of development rights as a way of channeling development from environmental sensitive areas to less sensitive areas, or when state and federal governments provide for market transactions of water rights. Market approaches are being actively debated for allocating water resources 30 and certain fisheries.31 Proponents of what is sometimes called "envirocapitalism" have cataloged numerous other examples that demonstrate the potential power of environmental markets. Examples include the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas, the marketing of paddlefish roe in Montana, the retirement of salmon quotas by the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, and wildlife management in Zimbabwe.32 How to generalize from the anecdotal successes of environmental markets (and from failures of common ownership of resources) is not easy, however. A key issue is the original endowment of rights: first-in-time, first-in-right effectively legitimizes historical patterns of income and property; while changing those rights raises questions of due process. For example, should fishing rights be vested to those now fishing, or should those rights be auctioned to give every one an opportunity of entry? (In the case of sulfur oxides emission allowances,33 existing facilities received allowances based on historical emissions, and new sources have to buy into the limited number of allowances available.) A second key issue arises from the complex interactions that can be affected by transactions in environmental markets. Promoting markets for resources such as game animals and fish may have divergent impacts on broader ecosystems and other community and public values - for example, on nongame species, helping some and harming others, or on other resources, such as water use. As with so many of the other alternatives to command and control regulation, the creation of environmental markets is an evolving tool. It includes not just markets in goods and services, but also in qualities, over time, as with the sale and transference of development rights. While these initiatives can bring the power of the market to bear on environmental goods, they may require governmental structuring of the markets and defining of the transactions. For further reading, see:
Addressing environmental protection as a problem of changing decisionmakers' values underlies a set of approaches that may be called "management principles." These approaches focus on the way managers make decisions with environmental consequences. The managers involved can include not only corporate managers, but also managers of public lands and resources, individual property owners, and, in some cases, regulatory officials as well. The "command-and-control" regulatory system specifies what is to be done or accomplished; enhancing information and "market-based" systems presume environmentally protective decisions will follow from neutral competence and/or self- interested responses to the information or the price and cost signals. In contrast, the management principles approaches seek to achieve environmental protection goals by redirecting managers' criteria for making decisions affecting the environment. New information, changed cost/price signals, incentives, even regulatory standards maybe involved; but the key elements of management principles approaches involve, first, inculcating a heightened awareness of environmental protection needs in managers, and second, providing some criterion or yardstick for decisionmakers to assess the environmental implications of choices. If a manager can accurately anticipate the consequences of decisions and has accepted environmental values, environmentally preferable choices should follow voluntarily - a crucial difference from regulation. Management principles approaches themselves range from the relatively abstract, such as "sustainability," to the pragmatic, such as "best management practices" for agricultural tillage and environmental "audits." Sustainability - Sustainable Development.34 The term sustainable development emerged in its current form in 1987 in the final report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), known as the Brundtland Commission after its chairman, then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The definition most widely quoted in the WCED report is: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." In the more detailed treatment of the term, the report identified requirements for sustainability to include citizen participation in the political system, a self-reliant and sustained economic system, a social system that allows for solutions for tensions from "disharmonious development," a production system that respects the ecological base, a technological system that continuously searches for new solutions, an administrative system that is flexible and has the capacity for self-correction, and an international system that fosters sustainable patterns of trade and finance. Summing up these components, the WCED report stated, "In its broadest sense, the strategy for sustainable development aims to promote harmony among human beings and between humanity and nature." Popular usage has made sustainable development nearly synonymous in many circles with "environmentally compatible development." In 1992, following up on the Brundtland Commission report, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, popularly known as the Earth Summit) was held in Rio de Janeiro. The Conference produced the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, plus a 40-chapter action plan called "Agenda 21" (referring to the 21st Century). Agenda 21 posits sustainable development as key to most areas of development, and discusses both what individual nations should undertake to achieve it and what the international community should do. The Rio Declaration endorses actions such as environmental impact assessment, public participation, effective environmental legislation, cooperation to promote an open international economic system, and the precautionary approach (this last is discussed in a following section). One of the most general principles, number 25, states, "Peace, development and environmental protection are interdependent and indivisible." At a practical level, sustainable development is a planning and decision framework. For example, optimal management of a fishery or of lumbering of a forest can be based on the criterion of sustainability, in which, as a first principle, harvesting only the annual growth from a fish or timber stock assures a perpetual yield from the resource base. In other words, society consumes only the interest from its asset, not the principal itself. At a broader level, sustainable development involves both an understanding and a commitment (by individuals, businesses, communities, and various levels of government) to set and meet goals or constraints on key determinants of the ecological or environmental health of an environmental system. The goals or constraints represent indicators or variables which must be maintained at certain levels if the system in the long term is to yield desired human uses and benefits without degrading or seriously damaging the system. The goals or constraints set the context for decision makers to use various economic and regulatory tools, such as tradable permits, taxation of pollution, best management practices, cost-effectiveness, risk assessment, or cost-benefit analysis. The local, interstate, and federal efforts to improve the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay can be viewed in the sustainability framework. Science and research have determined that, in order to enhance the fishery and recreational values of the Bay and ensure their sustainability into the future, dissolved oxygen levels and water clarity must improve from current levels and harvest levels on commercial and recreational species must be established and enforced. To achieve those goals, nutrient and sediment loadings must be reduced. To do that, a host of watershed- wide land use management practices (buffering tributaries with forest-cover, protecting and expanding wetlands, improving urban storm water management, limiting agricultural runoff, etc.) and a similar host of direct pollution control improvements (upgraded sewage and industrial waste water treatment, reduced nitrogen oxide emissions from transportation and industry sources, improved septic system performance, etc.) must be undertaken. Achieving such improvements, then, is a process of applying a range of tools (informational, economic, and regulatory) within numerous government and citizen planning and decision making processes. The ultimate measure of success would be the long-term viability of the Bay's resources. In practice, the application of the sustainability concept to environmental program management is proceeding along several lines, notably: (1) within the economic discipline, evaluating what it means with respect to economic concepts of growth, development, and social welfare; (2) within executive and ministerial bodies, assessing what it means for environmental planning and management; and (3) within specific programs, focusing on what it means for accomplishing "on the ground" practices. The Economics of Sustainability. At present, "sustainability" remains on the periphery of economic practice; however, a number of economic theoreticians have been exploring how to incorporate the insight behind the concept into economic theory and understanding.35 So-called "green accounting" is the idea of modifying national accounts, such as Gross Domestic Product, so that resource depreciation is incorporated. However, efforts to develop "national indicators of progress toward sustainable progress" have been controversial and in the United States they have yet to be widely endorsed or to be formally adopted.36 Planning.37 In the eight years since UNCED, the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) has met annually at the United Nations to review what countries are doing to implement the elements of Agenda 21. National reports submitted to the CSD detail what countries are doing in various focus areas such as pollution control, forestry, water resources, agriculture, etc. In many, if not most, cases it is difficult to sort out which, if any, actions proceed with conscious reference to Agenda 21 or to sustainable development as an organizing principle. In some developing countries, such as China, action plans around principles of Agenda 21 have been identified. However, the concept of sustainability has been adopted and integrated into the terminology of development in a number of European government efforts,38 and in the United States there has been extensive activity - particularly at the state and local level - around this term. In 1993, the President established the President's Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD), bringing together high-level participants from government (Cabinet secretaries), business and industry (at the CEO level), and non- governmental and academic entities, usually the heads of these organizations. The Council formed Task Forces, held extensive hearings and public meetings, and prepared numerous reports on topics such as eco-efficiency, population and consumption, energy and transportation, sustainable agriculture, etc. The Council submitted a report Sustainable America: A New Consensus in 1996, having adopted the Brundtland Commission definition. It outlined a vision statement that "articulates the Council's broad concept of the benefits of sustainability to the Nation." The Council outlined 10 broad goals, such as ensuring a healthy and clean environment, economic prosperity, equity, conservation of nature, civic engagement, population stabilization, education, and sustainable communities. It published a second report Towards a Sustainable America in 1999. It included chapters on Climate Change, Environmental Management, Metropolitan and Rural Strategies, and International Leadership, with each chapter including recommendations for concrete actions. Since the appearance of this report, it is unclear whether a federal entity charged with a comprehensive sustainability mandate will be continued, although some federal agencies have incorporated this concept into their policy framework. Practical applications. At the local level, a Joint Clearinghouse on Sustainable Communities was established by the National Association of Counties and the National Conference of Mayors in 1996 at the request of President Clinton (for information, see http://www.usmayors.org/USCM/sustainable/background.htm), in which the quite extensive array of activities undertaken by communities, towns, cities and states in the United States are tracked. In most cases, these efforts begin with a decision by a town, county or state government to commit to sustainable development, followed by the convening of multi-stakeholder councils, commissions, or committees to decide on the process to be used. The dialog that follows usually attempts to identify key goals of the community, then arrive at recommended actions to achieve sustainability as those goals are conceived. The key concept underlying these attempts is that sustainability can be achieved only if the trade-offs between potentially conflicting goals are identified early in the process, and mechanisms devised to assure that one stakeholder's goals are not undermined as other stakeholders' goals are achieved. Participants in this dialog often feel that they have had a beneficial learning experience when unrecognized trade-offs are brought to their attention. But arriving at a means of achieving all stakeholders' goals usually requires some compromises. As these compromises are identified and debated, the sustainable development effort often becomes a very painful process, and it often breaks down without arriving at action points. . Overall, the effort to define and achieve sustainability has involved a significant amount of consciousness raising about the trade-offs involved in community decision- making, especially those such as environmental ones, which economic development activities often tend to ignore. At its best, it is a process for ensuring that otherwise overlooked perspectives and constituencies are not excluded from decisions. But it remains an ill-defined process in which operational results remain elusive. For further reading, see:
Precautionary Principle.39 How managers should assess potential hazards has been debated for many years. It was a key issue in the debates over the Toxic Substances Control Act, enacted in 1976. Its resolution of the issue was that chemical producers should be responsible for research to assess hazards, but that there had to be some trigger of concern before EPA could require such research. In recent years, the European Community has taken the lead in applying what is called the "precautionary principle." It provides a framework for making decisions in the face of uncertainty - described by one observer as a shift in environmental policy from "react-and-cure to anticipate-and-prevent."40 It has also become prominent in international agreements. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Principle 15, stated:
In January 1998, an international group of scientists, government officials, attorneys, and. labor and environmental activists developed the Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle which says, in part, "when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof."42 The precautionary principle or approach has become a basis for European environmental law and, increasingly, European environmental health policies, as well; but in the U.S., the principle is at most implicit in environmental statutes. The precautionary principle is not without its critics. Key objections include its variability in interpretation, its potential role in trade protectionism, and its potential to hinder the development and application of new technologies. The title of a June 1999 Harvard Center for Risk Analysis workshop on "The Precautionary Principle: Refine It or Replace It"43 conveys the concern over how to interpret the principle. Controversies over bioengineered foods have been cited as exemplifying both trade distortions and hindrances to beneficial research and development.44 For further reading, see:
Ecosystem Management.45 Ecosystem management is an approach to land and resource management that has been conceptualized m various ways.46 The scientific community has viewed ecosystem management largely as identifying environmental conditions before European settlement of North America, and examining how subsequent activities and management have altered ecosystems from these conditions. The environmental community has seen ecosystem management as using the scientific information on pre-settlement conditions to set management goals for restoring or preserving ecological processes and biological diversity. The federal land and resource management agencies have adopted ecosystem management to improve their planning processes, both expanding the geographic and ecological scope under consideration and broadening the participation of stakeholders.47 The USDA Forest Service has recently revised its planning regulations to include "ecological sustainability" as a way to implement ecosystem management.48 Ecosystem management is one of several approaches that attempt to expand the historic, geographic, ecological, and participatory aspects of land and resource management. Other efforts, some of which have existed far longer than ecosystem management, include watershed management, landscape management, and multiple- use management. These approaches are all generally similar in attempting to consider interactions among uses on lands and resources, typically on broader geographic scales and over longer time periods than traditional management. They differ primarily in their geographic basis (ecosystems, watersheds, landscapes, or politically- defined management units) and their emphasis (ecological conditions; water supply and quality concerns; ecological interactions; and land and resource uses). Background. Policies to manage resources based on an understanding of the broad environmental and social consequences of decisions have existed for decades. Multiple-use management for the national forests, for example, has been required by law since 1960, and arguably was the intent in the original 1897 forest management authority. Watershed management can be traced easily to the Water Resources Council and river basin commissions authorized in 1965. Ecosystem management appears to have been first used in Professor Eugene Odum's Fundamentals of Ecology in 1971, and arguably is the vision presented by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac in 1949. Ecosystem management, as adopted by the federal agencies, can be traced to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The 1989 U.N. General Assembly resolution initiating UNCED cited concerns about freshwater quality and supplies, deforestation and desertification, biological diversity, and many other' issues. UNCED included discussions of the Rio Declaration (principles on environmentally sustainable development), adopted Agenda 21 (an action program to implement the principles), and opened for signature two treaties — a convention on climate change and a convention on biological diversity. Ecosystem management for U.S. federal land and resource management agencies was an approach announced by the Bush Administration to precede the President's attendance at the Earth Summit. Pro/Con Analysis. The various views of ecosystem management have both support and opposition. The scientific community view of ecosystem management, involving expanded historic, geographic, and ecological information, is seen as leading to better informed decisions by providing a baseline for assessing the results, especially cumulative impacts, of management efforts. However, some argue that the sciences have not progressed sufficiently to develop such information and that the cost of such data collection exceeds any improvement in decisions. There is also some concern that additional information on the conditions and uses of private lands could be used to regulate those lands, constraining the private landowners. The environmental community views of ecosystem management largely as a goal of preserving or restoring biological diversity and ecological processes. Proponents often assert that, because it is generated by scientific research, the information is a "science-based" goal for land and resource management. They also sometimes argue that the improved information and a goal of "naturalness" for federal lands can clarify the role of the federal government, as a provider of public goods and social values, and private landowners as producers of private goods. Opponents argue that a goal of "naturalness" is unlikely to be limited to federal lands, and is likely to be used to restrict private land uses. They also argue that, while recreating historically natural conditions might be desirable for providing certain environmental values and processes, but is only one of many possible options for land and resource management. The federal adoption of ecosystem management has been as an expansion of the planning process. Part of this expanded planning is developing broader historic and geographic information. The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have conducted "ecoregional" assessments at relatively broad geographic scales that include private land conditions and uses. These agencies contend that greater information at expanded scales could lead to a better sense of the possible cumulative impacts of federal decisions, while private land information might provide a clearer understanding of the appropriate role of federal lands within a specific region. Some oppose such data development, however, as a costly exercise with few real benefits. Also, private landowners are concerned about possible regulation of their lands based on information allegedly collected to improve federal land management planning. Environmental interests criticize the federal agencies view of ecosystem management only as a planning process rather than as a goal of restoring natural conditions. This criticism might be alleviated somewhat by the November 2000 Forest Service final revised planning regulations that establish ecological sustainability as a management goal for the national forests. However, this new management goal engendered criticism of the draft regulations from groups whose uses or interests may conflict with this goal.49 Further, some have suggested that this goal differs fundamentally from the direction in the laws currently governing national forest management, and question whether the current laws permit ecosystem management for the federal lands.50 Federal ecosystem management planning is, according to the agencies, also intended to promote greater cooperation in federal decisionmaking through expanded public participation. Collaboration might reduce local antipathy towards federal land ownership and produce a broader, more balanced local and regional economic base. However, the expanded planning process likely will increase the time and cost of planning, both directly by the federal government and indirectly by the public participants, especially if another planning level (ecoregional assessments) is added. The process also could exacerbate current feelings of frustration with federal land ownership if the participants do not feel that the process has been truly collaborative and led to consensus. For additional information, see:
Good Management Practices.51 Good management practices at the individual level are the least intrusive and least consistent end of the environmental policy spectrum because they rely on the good intentions of individuals. These practices encompass stewardship by landowners and leaseholders as they manage private working lands that provide diverse benefits, ranging from producing commodities such as trees and row crops to providing habitat and amenities. The most familiar applications of good management practices occur in the context of resource management activities. However, the essential concept of these practices is that good stewardship of the land - keeping soil on the land, rather than permitting it to erode into nearby streams - will benefit both the land resource and environmental quality. Good management practices are a collage of many possible actions that involve physical modifications to the landscape and sound resource management activities that provide environmental benefits. While the practices usually have a single environmental focus, such as improved water quality, they typically provide multiple benefits. These practices often are voluntarily applied, although that is not a prerequisite. The typical role of the federal government is to provide incentives that encourage participation: (1) public cost sharing funds to help pay for planning, installation, and maintenance; (2) education to explain both their benefits and how to properly use and maintain them; and (3) technical assistance to help design and implement stewardship activities. A cornerstone is planning to assemble the most appropriate mix of practices that will help the land user reach his goals while recognizing the physical characteristics and limitations of each site and its resources. The focus of application has been on the most modified lands, which are usually lands cultivated to produce crops, but also include forest lands, range, and pasture, and at the scale of an individual ownership. Underlying concepts. Good management practices are designed to maintain, restore, or enhance the health and integrity of the resource base - soils, water and air, and the plants and animals that depend on them - by using tools that range from active to passive and from construction to resource management. Individual practices have design and other standards, but they vary widely in what they actually accomplish because of the dynamic nature of land uses and conditions, and users' goals. The unstated assumption is that resources benefit from these practices, not that they should benefit at least to some prescribed level, or standard. Pros and cons. Supporters cite many aspects of good management practices as the basis for continued and expanded use. Participation is incentive-driven, involves willing participants, and attracts those who want to improve their resources. Participation is driven by personal goals about resource protection and improvement rather than externally-generated requirements. Good management can be practiced at many different scales and levels of intensity. Practices have design standards that must be met. Each benefits the resources to different degrees, but all are improvements over the status quo for resource conditions. Land users can change their mix of good management practices; this flexibility recognizes the dynamic ways in which land users may modify their goals from year to year. Reliance on good management practices has also been criticized. Resource problems are not evenly distributed across the landscape, so the relative interest in applying them does not match the distribution pattern of environmental problems. The result is a hodge-podge of practices that inefficiently address resource problems. In addressing the resource problems of a given area, such as a watershed, there is greater benefit when all landowners participate and when all utilize consistent practices. Also, since participation is voluntary, there are few mechanisms to insure that the practices are properly maintained after they are installed, even when federal funds help pay for the installation. Few of these programs have penalties, such as requiring the repayment of public funds if the practices are not maintained; the installation of practices is often publicized, but the ephemeral characteristics are not discussed. Further, there are few incentives for public agencies to monitor the condition or performance of these practices after they are in place, and in many cases, there are no penalties for land operators who decide not to maintain these practices. Historical beginnings. Good management practices can be traced back to defining events or periods. For agricultural land uses, the defining event for soil was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when dust storms from the Midwest blanketed that region and the West. The response was development of conservation practices that would allow crop production while reducing soil erosion. For forests, there was a defining period late in the 19th century rather than an event, with the recognition that much of the forests were disappearing, especially in the East and upper Midwest. The response was the establishment of the National Forest System and the beginnings of efforts to develop sound forest management practices. One part of the institutional structure that supports these practices, the land grant college system, is far older, having been created in the 1860s. Because this system was already well-established when these defining events occurred, the public policy responses have drawn from this structure. The land grant college system has provided a major research component to develop new practices and improve existing ones, and also a major educational component through the USDA Extension Service. Since the broad needs to protect and improve natural resources on private lands were first recognized, both the number of concerns and the tools to address them have expanded. Newer concerns are often more precise modifications of more general ones raised earlier. Newer tools include tillage practices, forest management techniques, and grass and rangeland management techniques. Emerging technologies, such as biotech and Geographic Information Systems, are creating new opportunities for good management practices. Recently, interest has grown in considering resource needs from a systems perspective that combines many of these factors on a scale that is larger than single land holdings, and emphasizes interrelationships among resources that resource management experts view as critical to maintaining healthy resources in the broader landscape. Concluding thoughts. The voluntary approach to managing these resources has generated considerable debate about their effectiveness. The voluntary approach is viewed by some as getting the strongest commitment to installing and maintaining practices because all the participants are willingly involved and have a strong desire for success. Others see limitations in this approach in that the greatest needs or worst problems are not necessarily controlled by willing land owners. They view this approach as being less efficient, both in terms of committing public resources and in terms of results. They also may view it as less enduring, as there are few features built into these programs to insure that environmental benefits are maintained. One aspect of this debate has been the questions of whether resources to conduct these programs should be distributed more-or-less equally over the landscape and be available in small amounts to many participants, as had been the case until recently, or should they be concentrated to address the worst problems or greatest needs, based on some measure of physical conditions, and the role that new technologies might play in making this approach more effective. For further reading, see:
Pollution Prevention/Materials Management.52 Since passage of the Pollution Prevention Act (Title VI of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, P.L. 101-508), the Environmental Protection Agency has been required to develop and coordinate a pollution prevention strategy, and owners and operators of many industrial facilities have been required to report annually on source reduction and recycling activities as part of their submissions under the Toxics Release Inventory. Enactment of the Pollution Prevention Act marked a turning point in the direction of U.S. environmental protection policy. From an earlier focus on the need to reduce or repair environmental damage by controlling pollutants at the point where they are released to the environment - i.e., at the "end of the pipe" or smokestack, or after disposal - Congress turned to pollution prevention through reduced generation of pollutants at their point of origin. Broad support for this policy change was based on the notion that traditional approaches to pollution control had achieved progress but should in the future be supplemented with new approaches that might better address cross-media pollution transfers, the need for cost-effective alternatives, and methods of controlling pollution from dispersed or nonpoint sources of pollution. The Act states that -
These principles were adopted 15-20 years after the development of a complex regulatory structure that governs emissions to the air, water, and land separately, however, and their adoption has had little effect on the day-to-day functioning of environmental regulatory authorities. Further, EPA and its state counterparts are essentially reactive agencies, with little authority to require the use of cleaner production methods or to require the adoption of "environmentally preferable" products. Given the fundamental respect for private property that permeates American society and an economic system that values free enterprise above most competing values, EPA and state environmental agencies are unlikely ever to have authority to regulate production methods or production decisions, except in extreme cases where a production method or product can be demonstrated to pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment.53 Pollution prevention tools in the United States and internationally. Given these constraints, the government's role in pollution prevention has been limited largely to research, information gathering, and information dissemination. Tools such as the Toxics Release Inventory and voluntary programs in which industry commits to reduce pollution beyond the requirements of law ("beyond compliance") in return for public recognition and use of an EPA-developed symbol are perhaps the Agency's most widely recognized tools. In recent years, another pollution prevention tool has been the Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP). SEPs are environmentally beneficial projects that may be proposed by a violator during the settlement of an enforcement action. In FY 1998, EPA settlements produced 221 SEPs valued at $90.8 million. Over the 1996-1998 fiscal years, 20% of all judicial and administrative penalty orders included SEPs. SEPs are often used as a pollution prevention tool: in reporting on its FY1998 enforcement accomplishments, EPA estimated that "60% of SEPs offered human health or worker protection benefits, while 52% offered ecosystem protection."54 Extended Producer Responsibility. There are other possible approaches that combine regulation and pollution prevention. The most frequently discussed is an approach referred to as "Extended Producer Responsibility" (EPR). EPR is a term applied to efforts in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere that hold producers of certain products responsible for managing them at the end of their useful life. This management may be accomplished individually, by requiring manufacturers to take products back after use, or collectively, by allowing take back or recycling to be managed by an industry-wide organization. Perhaps the best known example of EPR is the Green Dot system for packaging recovery and recycling established in Germany by Duales System Deutschland (DSD). Under the German Ordinance on the Avoidance of Packaging Waste, adopted in 1991 and fully implemented in 1993, packaging must be recovered and reused or recycled by retailers and manufacturers. Since retailers did not wish to collect used packages, manufacturers established a consortium to operate a separate collection system for used packaging throughout Germany. (The Green Dot, or recycling symbol, identifies those packages included in the system.) This Dual System collects material for recycling curbside or at drop-off locations in much the same way local governments or private organizations do in the United States, but the system operates nationwide, and is paid for by fees that the manufacturer or packager gives to DSD. These fees are based on the cost of recovering and recycling specific materials (glass, plastic, paper, etc.). Thus, manufacturers have an incentive to minimize packaging waste, since they must pay for its recovery; and packages that are not recyclable are forced out of the system. Many European countries and Japan have adopted systems similar to Germany's Green Dot for managing their packaging waste, and the concept is now being applied in Germany and elsewhere to automobiles, electronic equipment, and other products. By returning products for reuse or recycling, these EPR systems provide incentives for the design of products that are easily reused or recycled and minimize the disposal of solid and hazardous waste. There are many sources of information on pollution prevention and extended producer responsibility. Two comprehensive sources are the EPA Office of Pollution Prevention Website [ http://www.epa.gov/p2/ ] and the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable [ http://www.p2.org ]. For information on extended producer responsibility, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Website [ http://www.oecd.org/env/ ] is searchable using the term "Extended Producer Responsibility." Among OECD publications is a 1996 report on EPR policies in the OECD member countries. Environmental Management Systems and Audits.55 Over the last 10 years, corporations and governments have given a great deal of attention to the use of environmental management systems (EMS) as a tool to lessen environmental impacts and improve compliance with environmental laws. The most prominent efforts to facilitate the use of EMSs have been those of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which has developed a series of standards for environmental management systems referred to as the ISO 14000 standards. Voluntary industry standards. ISO is a nongovernmental, international, industry-based organization. Its U.S. counterpart, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), has a long history - as does ISO - of setting voluntary industry and product standards to facilitate both domestic and international commerce. In the 1990s, ISO (with ANSI participation) developed a set of standards covering environmental management, environmental auditing, life cycle assessment, environmental labeling, and environmental performance. To be certified or registered under these standards, an organization must demonstrate that it has an Environmental Management System in conformity with ISO 14001. Conformity with ISO 14001 indicates that a company or organization has a system in place for setting environmental goals, auditing performance, and taking corrective action. But the company or organization is free to set its own goals; thus, compliance with ISO 14001 does not necessarily certify environmental excellence. Furthermore, the absence of any meaningful public reporting requirement in the standard means that outsiders have no way of judging a company's environmental performance under the standard. Thus, compliance with ISO 14001, often discussed as a new method of stimulating improved environmental performance, is probably not, in its current form, a substitute for environmental regulation. But many feel it has the potential to improve corporate performance and benefit the environment. Environmental audits. The same may be said for a related tool, the environmental audit. Environmental audits presume that there are environmental regulations against which to measure a company's performance. In the absence of regulations, an audit would be relatively meaningless. Audits have been used extensively in the corporate world as a means of improving environmental performance. A 1995 survey by Price Waterhouse found that 75% of 369 companies who responded conducted such audits and another 8% planned to do so. Some argue that audits would be even more widely used were it not for fear that they may provide evidence that could be used against the company in court or in other enforcement proceedings. As a result, there has been a lively debate throughout the 1990s as to whether state and federal governments should consider information collected in audits to be "privileged," or inadmissible in enforcement proceedings. About 20 states have provided some such privilege for environmental audit information, and some states offer immunity from civil and criminal penalties to persons and entities reporting violations detected in such audits, provided that violations detected are promptly reported and corrected. U.S. EPA and the Department of Justice have adopted policies restricting the role of audit information in enforcement proceedings and reducing penalties for voluntary disclosure of violations; but they oppose legislation that they believe would limit their discretion in such matters. Such legislation was the subject of congressional hearings in the mid-1990s, but now appears to have less support. For further reading, see:
Jonathan H. Adler, ed., Ecology, Liberty & Property: A Free Market Environmental Reader (Washington, D.C.: Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2000) Terry Anderson, ed.. Breaking the Environmental Policy Gridlock (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1997) The Aspen Institute, The Alternative Path (1996) [at http://www.aspeninst.org/dir/eee/altpath.html ] Ronald Bailey, ed., Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000) The Business Roundtable, Toward Smarter Regulation (Washington, D.C.: The Business Roundtable, updated 1995) Carnage Commission on Science, Technology, and Government, Risk and the Environment: Improving Regulatory Decision Making (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1993) Marian R. Chertow and Daniel C. Esty, Thinking Ecologically: the Next Generation of Environmental Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) Robert W. Crandall, et. al„ An Agenda for Federal Regulatory Reform (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and The Brookings Institution, 1997) Environmental Protection Agency, National Center for Environmental Economics, [ http://www.epa.gov/economics/ ]. See, for example, Robert Anderson, "Economic Savings from Using Economic Incentives for Environmental Pollution Control" and Robert C. Anderson and Andrew Q. Lohof, The United States Experience with Economic Incentives in Environmental Pollution Control Policy. The Environmental Protection System in Transition: Toward a More Desirable Future (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies. 1998) Peter Humber, Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto (New York: Basic Books, 1999) National Academy of Public Administration, environment.gov: Transforming Environmental Protection for the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Public Administration, 2000) Wallace E. Oates, ed., The RFF Reader in Environmental and Resource Management (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1999) The Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management, Framework for Environmental Health Risk Management (1997) at [ http://www.riskworld.com/ ] Research and Policy Committee of the Committee for Economic Development, Modernizing Government Regulation: The Need for Action (New York: Committee for Economic Development, 1998) Philip Shabecoff, Earth Rising: American environmentalism in the 21st century (Washington, D.C. : Island Press, 2000). lrwin M. Stelzer and Paul R. Portney, Making Environmental Policy: Two Views (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1998). ((25th Anniversary Special Issue," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 39 (May 2000). World Wide Web Virtual Library "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT," at [ http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sustvl.html ] Footnotes 25 Prepared by Claudia Copeland, Specialist in Resources and Environmental Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division. 26 In September, EPA announced that Epson Portland Inc. of Hillsboro, Oregon, is the first company accepted for the National Environmental Performance Track. (For additional information, see [ http://www.epa.gov/performancetrack ].) 27 Davies, Terry, and Jan Mazurek. Industry Incentives for Environmental Improvement: Evaluation of U.S. Federal Initiatives. Global Environmental Management Initiative. Washington, 1996:7. 28 Prepared by John L. Moore, Assistant Director, Resources, Science and Industry Division 29 Prepared by John L. Moore, Assistant Director, Resources, Science and Industry Division. 30 Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, eds.. Water Marketing-The Next Generation (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997; and Richard W. Wahl, Markets/or Federal Water: Subsidies, Property Rights, and the Bureau of Reclamation (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1989). 31 Eugene H. Buck, Individual Quotas in Fishery Management, CRS Report 95-849 ENR. 32 See Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Enviro-Capitalists: Doing Good While Doing Well (Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997). 33 The Clean Air Act specifies that the allowances do not constitute "property rights" (§403(0); hence they could be revoked without penalty. 34 Prepared by Susan R. Fletcher, Senior Analyst in International Environmental Policy, Resources, Science and Industry Division. 35 E.g., "Processes for Environmental Valuation: Procedures and Institutions for Social Valuations of Natural Capitals in Environmental Conservation and Sustainability Policy." See: [ http://alba.jrc.it/valse/noappletvalse.htm ] 36 See Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Towards Sustainable Development: Indicators to Measure Progress (OECD, 2000), especially pp. 194-197, on the experience of the United States. See also, [ http://www.sdi.gov ] 37 The World Wide Web Virtual Library "SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT" gives access to a broad range of activities, at [ http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sustvl.html ]; see also the "sustainable development gateway" on the web: [ http://sdgateway.net/default.htm ] 38 The concept was added to the European Union constitution in 1997 and by July 2001 the European Commission is expected to introduce a "sustainability strategy" to direct policies of governmental sectors. See [ http://europa.eu.int/comm/environment/forum/governance_en.pdf. ] 39 Prepared by Michael Simpson, Specialist in Life Sciences, and John E. Blodgett, Deputy Assistant Director, Resources, Science, and Industry Division. 40 A. Stewart, "Scientific Uncertainty, Ecologically Sustainable Development and the Precautionary Principle," Griffith Law Review, Vol. 8, no. 2 (1999), 364. 41 The United Nations Conference on Environmental Development, Rio de Janeiro 1992, Earth Summit '92 (London: The Regency Press Corp.,1992), p. 13. 42 P. Montague "The Precautionary Principle," Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly, 586 (February 19, 1998), 2. http://www.monitor.net/rachel/r586.html 43 For a brief summary, see Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, "Making Sense of the Precautionary Principle," Risk in Perspective, Vol. 7, issue 6 (Sept. 1999). 44 See Jonathan Adler, "More Sorry Than Safe: Assessing the Precautionary Principle and the Proposed International Biosafety Protocol," Texas international Law Journal, Vol. 35, no. 173 (1999-2000), 196; and Kenneth Foster, et al., "Science and the Precautionary Principle," Science, Vol. 288 (May 12, 2000), 979-981. 45 Prepared by Ross Gorte, Specialist in Natural Resources Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division. 46 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see U.S. Senate, Committee on Environment and Public Works, Ecosystem Management: Status and Potential. Summary of a Workshop Convened by the Congressional Research Service, March 24 and 25, 1994, S.Prt. 103-98 (Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1994), 331 p. 47 For a list of federal agencies with some land and/or resource management responsibilities that are implementing ecosystem management, see CRS Report 94-339 ENR, Ecosystem Management: Federal Agency Activities. 48 65 Federal Register 67514-67581 (Nov. 9, 2000). 49 65 Federal Register 67514-67581 (Nov. 9, 2000). 50 Roger A. Sedjo, "A View of the Report of the Committee of Scientists," Sustaining the People's Lands: Recommendations for Stewardship of the National Forests and Grasslands into the Next Century, by the Committee of Scientists, K. Norman Johnson, Chair (Washington, DC: March 15, 1999), p. 183. 51 Prepared by Jeffrey Zinn, Specialist in Natural Resources Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division. 52 Prepared by James E. McCarthy, Specialist in Environmental Policy, Resources, Science, and Industry Division. 53 There are, in fact, some cases in which EPA has been given and has exercised pollution prevention authority, for example in banning the manufacture and sale of asbestos products or of DDT, or prohibiting the use of lead in gasoline. Several statutes, including the Clean Air Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, provide some such authority. The broadest authority is probably that provided in the Toxic Substances Control Act (P.L. 94-469), which gives EPA the power to control "unreasonable risks" to human health and the environment by prohibiting or limiting production or distribution of harmful substances or products containing them. Use of this authority has been rare. 54 U.S. EPA. Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. FY98 OECA Accomplishments Report, June 1999, p. 4. 55 Prepared by James E. McCarthy, Specialist in Environmental Policy, Resources, Science and Industry Division.
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