Innovation, Learning, and Environmental Policy: Overcoming “A Plague of Uncertainties”

The "Environmental Era" arrived in the United States unanticipated, surprising Congress, the White House, and even the emerging environmental movement as much by its form as by its abruptness.The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the first and least anticipated among the many environmental laws that redefined the nation's policy priorities within a decade, was passed on January 1, 1970; it intended nothing less than a reconstruction of national public policymaking.It was, in the words of one of its most influential drafters, "an effort to restate the priorities and responsibilities of government (Caldwell, 1982, p. 28)."Not coincidentally, this first major onslaught of legislative environmentalism was directly aimed at the administrative process.The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was created by a small cadre of environmentalists drawn from Congress, private organizations, and academic life who then successfully enlisted, the support of the growing environmental movement to assure its passage.Nonetheless, the NEPA was the first, overt legislative expression of an ideological priority inherent in American environmentalism from the inception of the "Environmental Era": to compel more environmentally benign public policy by