Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries

"PREFACE Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries Draft: May 13, 2013 Teaching at Nanjing University in China as a Fulbright professor shaped this book into its final form. I spent the Spring semester of 2009 there at the School of the Environment. My manuscript was half done, and I used those chapters as a textbook. At the time I had not written a chapter on China because I was waiting to learn about it first-hand. Having published American Environmental Politics in 1998, and Ignoring the Apocalypse in 2007, the next step for me seemed to be to look at other countries. I was aware, of course, that many countries had policies similar to the American ones. I was interested in their common features and their differences. Furthermore I was interested in how the United States learned from others, and how the US sent its ideas abroad. Soon I learned that the interchange has been extensive. All around the globe, democratic countries had had an Environmental Decade in the 1970s, and had emulated each other. They had copied laws on water pollution control, sometimes word for word, and had copied techniques like popular mass demonstrations. This was less true for the Communist world, yet even there, the ideas spread, if not as fast. The worldwide diffusion of ideas could be fast. After Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, her book was soon translated into German and other languages. A decade before that books and films by Jacques Cousteau like Eighteen Meters Deep and Silent World had won an international audience. Back in the nineteenth century, the idea of a national park like Yellowstone had spread to Canada and Australia. The technique of mass public demonstrations, with roots in India for its independence movement and in the US for its civil rights movement"--