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Advocates for eating locally raised animals claim that their practice is helpful in protecting the environment. However, the opposite is true. As such, their references to "nature" have less to do with a scientific stable ecosystem and, instead, represent a call for a return to a "natural" order of human's supposedly benevolent domain over other animals. Instead of a science-based environmental policy, local meat operates as a type of "postcommodity fetish." It is because of the desire to escape the confines of consumerist culture, to return to romanticized idea of Edenic-purity, which underlies the desire to purchase "locally" produced animal products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistance to U.S. President Donald Trump's policies on gender equality, health care, race relations, the environment, and immigration has been large, widespread, and persistent. Following President Trump's election, millions of people across the United States protested, creatively using slogans, signs, costumes, chants, and songs. Others engaged in resistance with online videos, songs, memes, and hashtags. By employing the communicative informatics model, we examine the relationship between online communication and the creative and active audience involved in U.S. political resistance in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political polarization is often analyzed at the mass level through examination of attitudinal differences, but little attention is devoted to how polarization might be manifested through differences in individual behavior, especially in areas that do not appear to be explicitly political in nature. Political polarization, however, may extend to differences in lifestyles among individuals, especially differences in prosocial environmental behavior. This could be especially true for behaviors that are perceived as markers of political attitudes. In an examination of self-reported recycling and conservation behavior, we find that controlling for a range of alternative explanations for why individuals engage in pro-environmental behavior, partisan and ideological dispositions are among the most robust causes of such behavior. We demonstrate that these behavioral differences are exacerbated by attention to political news. The findings indicate that the effects of polarization extend beyond political attitudes into social and economic choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do we understand political polarization within the U.S. climate change debate? This article unpacks the different components of the debate to determine the source of the political divide that is so noted in the mainstream media and academic literatures. Through analysis of the content of congressional hearings on the issue of climate change, we are able to explain political polarization of the issue more fully. In particular, our results show that, contrary to representations in the mainstream media, there is increasing consensus over the science of the issue. Discussions of the type of policy instrument and the economic implications of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, however, continue to polarize opinion. This article concludes by exploring how these findings help us understand more recent political events around climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analysis of three cross-sectional polls administered by the Gallup Organization at 10-year intervals—in 1990, 2000, and 2010—demonstrates that partisan identification has become an increasingly important determinant of environmental concern within the American mass public. Polarization on global warming is especially clear, even when compared to a variety of other social, economic, and political problems, but party sorting seems to occur only as citizens acquire information and become familiar with elite cues. The implications of this for the U.S. environmental movement and the strategies it employs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been engaged in a process of organizational learning to build civic capacity for nearly 4 decades, in effect discovering its civic mission. This article examines how EPA has increasingly become a more effective enabler of democratic network governance in the watershed arena and has developed ambitious cross-media initiatives to help transform the culture of the agency. Its very progress, however, highlights significant challenges that the agency must address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for democratization as the crafting of democratic public space. Through ethnography of grassroots contestation in Appalachia, the article examines the social substrate of collective mobilization on environmental issues. It proposes shared stewardship of "place" as important grounds for democratization—helping to overcome divisions of class, culture, and ideology and to encourage integrative deliberation and knowledge. Collective labors to steward particular places create understandings of a shared world arising from civic and environmental commons. Place-stewardship can engender integrative forms of knowledge—multicausal, multiscalar, multitemporal—as people deliberate about complex ecological and social phenomena over time. However, citizens typically face an environmental policy system that displaces integrated, community-centered perspectives into specialized government mandates and scholarly expertise. Against this fragmenting political terrain, civil society develops "counterexpertise" based on multiscalar and multi-issue networking. Such networks are not reliably democratizing, however, unless grounded in democratic public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American Indian science encompasses tribal processes of conceiving, considering, and experimenting that produce ways of knowing about the physical and natural worlds. The cultural science of Chemehuevis and their Southern Paiute relatives is deeply rooted in the Americas, where Indians have learned paradigms and scientific philosophies for successfully navigating diverse environments for thousands of years. Varied indigenous knowledge systems systematically build on the collective wisdom, practical experiences, and adaptations learned throughout time and among generations through the oral tradition. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, science is "[t]he state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance or something specified or implied." American Indians have enjoyed centuries of scientific knowledge based on observation, experimentation, and application and referred to as tribal traditional knowledge. Chemehuevis see the Tribal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a powerful instrument of change that can slow devastating processes putting tribes at physical, mental, spiritual, and cultural risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differential national responses to the European Union's environmental policy have led to the idea that two worlds of environmentalism exist in Europe. In its harsh version, Europe is divided into North and South, with the South suffering from a Mediterranean syndrome. Southern European countries are viewed as environmental laggards, a perception attributed to, among other factors, a weak civil society intertwined with political systems characterized by patronage, clientelism, and lack of respect for public authority. This article provides new evidence documenting that civil society in Greece, Italy, and Spain appears to be much stronger on environmental matters than anticipated by the proponents of the above view. It also offers an alternative theorization of environmental politics, emphasizing aspects of organizational structures and political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceptualizes two distinct dimensions of community attachment—socially based attachment and attachment to a community's natural environment—and examines their connections with attitudes about local environmental issues. The findings indicate that the two dimensions of attachment are distinct and relate differently to environmental concern. In cases where the social attachment dimension is a statistically significant predictor of attitudes toward local environmental issues, the issues are representative of community culture and identity or health. In contrast, when natural environment attachment is a statistically significant predictor of local environmental concern, the topics reflect issues involving resource protection. Building on the previous work of Vorkinn and Riese, this study further clarifies that community-focused factors may be more useful variables for understanding attitudes toward environmental issues than sociodemographic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy development in 30 advanced and developing countries is examined using the capacity-building approach. Findings indicate that an appropriate mix of institutions is decisive for policy performance and that formal institutionalization is helpful for longer term policy-learning processes. Globalization is not found to be negative, as often claimed: Rather, the globalization of environmental policies and proponents counteracts ecologically ignorant economic interests and fosters diffusion of environmental innovations. Assistance from international organizations and regimes plays an increasingly critical role. Environmental and politico-administrative reforms appear to be mutually supportive. Democratic structures and institutions are a basic precondition for effective environmental policies. Although many countries have been able to achieve environmental gains from new technologies, policies, and forms of stakeholder cooperation, even the most advanced need to strongly increase environmental policy and management capacities to meet the continuing challenge of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a model of environmental regulation that promises to be at once more flexible, democratic, and effective than the familiar methods of central command or market-based control. Local units--such as firms, factories, or regional ecosystem management authorities---enjoy the autonomy to determine their environmental protection goals and methods to reach them. In exchange for this latitude, they report their plans and progress to central authorities that monitor local planning efforts and pool the information generated by them to formulate minimum performance standards and identify effective practices. This arrangement produces contextually tailored regulation, rich information feedback, and continuous adjustment of ends and means in light of new learning. Elements of this model have been adopted in large-scale reforms in areas as diverse as toxics use reduction, endangered species protection, and ecosystem management. Writ large, this model entails a fundamental reorientation of government institutions that the authors call neo-Madisonian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the need for environmental protection is generally accepted in the United States, there is debate over what form environmental policies should take. The articles in this collection offer a variety of perspectives on the need for policy innovation to deal with the challenges of the future. Their common themes are the need for bottom-up problem solving, the value of nonregulatory approaches, the importance of citizen participation, the use of the precautionary principle, and a focus on ecological as well as health issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of third-party information providers in assisting regulated facilities with environmental compliance technology choices. A key contribution is the finding that regulated facilities that rely more heavily on environmental consultants than in-house information sources choose conventional compliance options more frequently than facilities relying primarily on in-house information. Consultants also perceive environmental regulatory barriers to technology change as being significantly higher than regulated facilities do. Whereas consultants are primarily concerned with environmental regulatory barriers to technology adoption, facilities are primarily concerned with financial barriers. The findings suggest that the biases of consultants and their importance in shaping technology choice decisions should be considered in designing policies to promote environmental technology adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policies have brought dramatic improvements in air and water quality during the past 25 years, but further expansion of command-and-control regulations is likely to have diminishing marginal returns. Corporations are taking new initiatives in managing their environmental impacts in ways that reduce their costs, increase their efficiency, lower their liabilities, and enhance their competitiveness while reducing pollution, conserving resources, and eliminating waste. In the future, significant gains in environmental quality are more likely to come from widespread adoption of pollution prevention practices than from more stringent regulation of end-of-pipe emissions. Bridging the gap between public policy and the trends in private-sector management will require .fundamental changes in .federal and state governments' approaches to regulation. New policies must use economic incentives to encourage clean manufacturing and the adoption of pollution prevention technologies and forge public-private partnerships for improving environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes whether the move from direct government regulatory control of air pollution to the adoption of the Los Angeles RECLAIM (Regional Clean Air Incentives Market) emissions trading system, a more private form of air quality management, has indeed resulted in greater effectiveness and efficiency in an equitable and democratic manner as promised. The study begins with a brief description of RECLAIM and federal SO[sub 2] emissions trading programs. The study then analyzes the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in policy implementation and addresses whether the RECLAIM emissions trading scheme has been, as promised, effective and efficient. This is followed by an investigation of whether the RECLAIM system is equitable and democratic, both of which are concerns of those who are opposed to the adoption of emissions trading. Evidence from the SO[sub 2] emissions trading program is also introduced at certain points in the analysis. The implications of the study's findings are reviewed at the end of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which examined the degree of trust accorded by environmental policymakers in Japan and the U.S. on the sources of information used in policy formulation. Background on environmental politics in Japan and the U.S.; Methods and measures; Results and discussion.