Table of Contents

Chapter 1 • A Policymaking Framework: Defining Problems and Portraying Solutions in U.S. Environmental Politics
Part I • Regulating Polluters
Chapter 2 • The Nation Tackles Air and Water Pollution: The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts
Chapter 3 • Love Canal: Hazardous Waste and the Politics of Fear
Chapter 4 • Ecosystem-Based Management in the Chesapeake Bay
Chapter 5 • Market-Based Solutions: A Forgotten Success Story
Part II • History, Changing Values, and Natural Resource Management
Chapter 6 • Oil Versus Wilderness in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Chapter 7 • Federal Grazing Policy: Some Things Never Change
Chapter 8 • Jobs Versus the Environment: Saving the Northern Spotted Owl
Chapter 9 • Playground or Paradise? Snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park
Chapter 10 • Lessons from the Fish: Crisis and Recovery in New England
Part III • New Issues, New Politics
Chapter 11 • Climate Change: The Crisis of our Time
Chapter 12 • Cape Wind: If Not Here, Where? If Not Now, When?
Chapter 13 • Fracking Wars: Local and State Responses to Unconventional Shale Gas Development
Chapter 14 • Making Trade-Offs: Urban Sprawl and the Evolving System of Growth Management in Portland, Oregon
Chapter 15 • The Salton Sea: A Desert Mirage
Chapter 16 • Conclusions: Politics, Values, and Environmental Policy Change

About the Author

Judith A. Layzer was professor of environmental policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until her death in 2015. She earned a Ph.D. in political science at MIT. After four years at Middlebury College in Vermont she returned to MIT, where she taught courses in science and politics in environmental policymaking, ecosystem-based management, food systems and the environment, urban sustainability, energy and environmental politics, and public policy.

Layzer’s research focused on several aspects of U.S. environmental politics, including the roles of science, values, and storytelling in environmental politics, as well as on the effectiveness of different approaches to environmental planning and management. A recent project asked: Do urban sustainability initiatives significantly reduce cities’ ecological footprints? And which aspects of “green cities” are most effective at reducing cities’ environmental impacts? In addition to The Environmental Case, Layzer was the author of Natural Experiments: Ecosystem-Based Management and the Environment (2008) and Open for Business: Conservatives’ Opposition to Environmental Regulation (2012).

Layzer was an athlete as well as a scholar. In addition to having finished five Boston marathons, she shared nine national championship titles and one world championship trophy with her teammates on Lady Godiva, formerly Boston’s premier women’s Ultimate Frisbee team.

Judith A. Layzer

1961–2015




Dr. Sara R. Rinfret is currently a Professor of Public Administration and Associate Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs at Northern Arizona University. She has more than a decade of higher education administrative experience and is a nationally recognized scholar in regulatory policy, environmental policy, and public administration. She previously served as the Acting Dean for the Alexander Blewett School of Law, Chair of the Department of Public Administration and Policy, and the Director of Master of Public Administration at the University of Montana. To date, she has published 8 books and more than 40 peer reviewed articles, and several book chapters. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Specialist Program in public administration and studied with scholars at the University of Aarhus (Denmark, 2016). She holds an MPA from the John Glenn College of Public Affairs (Ohio State), and PhD in political science from Northern Arizona University.