Gordian Unknotting: A Call for a Renewed Environmental State

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 71-75

71

Gordian Unknotting:

A Call for a Renewed

Environmental State

By Oliver Houck

Mother Ear th and Uncle Sam : How Pollution and Hollow

Government Hur t Our Kids, by Rena I . Steinzor. University of Texas

Press. 280 pages.

From the July/ August 2008 issue of The E nvironmental Forum .

The surge of attention to climate change

may not yet have produced tangible

results, but it has at least served to

re-legitimize the notion of environmental

protection. At the same time, however, there

is a da nger that the intense focus on ca rbon

emissions will obscure other serious environ-

mental problems that have been deected and

otherwise lost in “the vast hallways of the fed-

eral bureaucracy.” Lost for exactly the same

reasons that stymied the regu lation of carbon,

it is an environmental protection system made

so dysfunctional it can no longer protect.

Such is the thesis of University of Maryland

Professor Rena I. Steinzor in Mother Earth and

Uncle Sam: How Pollution and Hollow Government Hurt Our Kids, and she

knows what she is talking about. A former Capitol Hill staer and then envi-

ronmental law teacher and litigator for nearly two decades, she has made the

workings of the federal establishment her specialty, publishing articles along

the way on pollution regulation, benet-cost ana lysis, voluntary compliance

programs, and Oce of Management and Budget review, the pistons and

gears of the environmental state. As some indication of her passion for the

subject, she took her last academic sabbatical in Washington, D.C., working

with a public interest rm to create an administrative reform agenda. She has

now put these pieces together in a frame that attempts to tell why the system