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Chapter 1 Resourceful Leaders Governors and the Politics of the American Environment Sarah Phillips Over the twentieth century, a commitment to economic growth has generated a powerful political consensus that crosses both partisan and regional boundaries. Most politicians have viewed growth either as a democratic end in itself, or as the source of public resources for reform and the raw material for interventionist economic management. Not without reason was ecology dubbed the ‘‘subversive science’’: notions of environmental limits pose significant challenges to expectations of continued economic expansion. It remains somewhat surprising, then, that the twentieth century also witnessed a series of shifting yet sustained attempts to manage the nation’s natural resources for future generations and to restrict ecologically exploitative activities. Though the term ‘‘environmental policy’’ was largely unknown before the 1960s, strategies of public management over natural resources and urban waste prompted new forms of governance and administration beginning around the turn of the twentieth century. While significant action took place at the state level, the federal government took the lead in this Progressive Era transition, setting aside vast tracts of public land and forests, initiating programs of river management , and sponsoring a network of conservation professionals. Indeed, historians often pinpoint one particular White House gathering called by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908—the Conference of Governors on the Conservation of Natural Resources—as a crucial moment in ushering in this new sensibility. The federal government has continued to occupy center stage in most analyses of conservation history, and for good reason: the federal government owns much public land, especially in the West, and it has historically provided the funding and institutional expertise for agricultural expansion and large public works projects. Pressures on the national 26 Sarah Phillips government only intensified in the period following World War II, which witnessed a key transition from earlier, ‘‘conservationist’’ policy regimes promoting the use and public supervision of income-generating natural resources to a new ‘‘preservationist’’ regulation of environmental quality , which included measures to curb air and water pollution and to protect besieged recreational areas and endangered ecosystems. Because environmental problems never confined themselves within state borders, the formulation of federal policy has usually remained front and center in both activism and scholarship. This almost exclusive focus on the national government, however, has concealed an important history of policy innovation and negotiation at the state level. ‘‘All politics is local,’’ as the saying goes, but nothing strikes the local resident more concretely than sudden shifts in land use or the despoliation of the air, a river, or a favorite natural haunt. Indeed, environmental concerns often percolated from the bottom up, and activists usually called upon statehouses and governors’ offices for assistance . Although many natural resource and environmental problems required regional or national solutions, states often took the lead in publicizing threats, passing protective or regulatory legislation, and forcing the national government’s hand by crafting standards exceeding federal guidelines. In fact, a specific focus on state governors offers not only a more complete perspective on the development of twentieth-century environmental policy; it also offers an opportunity to address one of the thorniest scholarly questions about the assumed trajectory of this area of public policy. Historians have most often accepted a picture of discontinuity between the conservation era of the early decades and the environmental era of the postwar and contemporary periods. The salient change appears to have been a profound shift from a regime of resource utilization to one of resource protection, or from a politics of production and development to an affluence-driven politics of consumption fueled by the desire for environmental amenities among the rapidly expanding postwar middle class.1 It is difficult to argue with this model of discontinuity given environmentalists’ remarkable cultural and political success in cultivating ecological sentiment, curbing pollution, preserving open space, and restoring degraded landscapes and waterways. Yet this picture of an abrupt transition raises the question of how a postwar political economy geared toward unprecedented economic expansion would have opened up any significant maneuvering room for politicians and policymakers to embrace environmental concerns.2 Rarely do firmly established institutional missions and cultural prerogatives turn on a dime, so how exactly did the environmental policy regime emerge from the earlier conservationist one? A look at state governors 5.209.249] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 02:14 GMT) Resourceful Leaders 27 reveals a more continuous story in which the seemingly new discourse of environmentalism overlapped and resonated with traditions of economic development and resource...

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