Environmental Politics Domestic and Global Dimensions by Jacqueline Vaughn Switzer, 3rd edition, Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001, 336 pp.

Abstract

The problem that confronts scholars who intend to engage in organizing issues
associated with the environment in a manner that is logical and coherent is that
many of those issues are conceptually overlapping, territorially interrelated, and
academically multidisciplinary. Added to this are the submerged and not so submerged
tensions between environmentalism on the one hand, which restrains the
frontier exercise of human power and control over natural resources, and neoliberali.sm
on the other, which ordinarily considers such limitations oddities. Many
of the scholars who have been successful in this endeavor have tried to focus on
related environmental mediums, issues, or regions.
Despite its wider scope, Environmental Politics: Domestic and Global Dimensions,
which is in its third edition, weaves through the maze of topics it covers using a
process perspective. The book focuses on formal and informal institutions and
processes in trying to develop an understanding about how global environmental
policies are developed in the United States. It is essential to note from the outset
that the domestic and global dimensions of the book basically focus on the United
States' responses to those challenges and, accordingly, a foreign reader may read
into the title: The US. Environmental Politicr: Domestic and Global Dimensions.
The author, Dr. Jacqueline V. Switzer, does not waste any time in letting the
reader know that the approach to the book is through the process model, a process
whereby the Congress, the president and his executive branch, and the judiciary
jostle for influence in formulating, implementing or redirecting environmental
policies (p. viii). An associate professor of political science at Northern Arizona
University, the author deploys her understanding of the history, process, and conflicting
interests that have shaped the United States' environmental policies both
at home and at the international plane, to organize the complex issues covered in
the book. The third edition is remarkable for carefully updating a book that is
reputed to be an information powerhouse regarding environmental policy, actors,
disputes, and processes, up through the final years of the Clinton administration.
It also incorporates, in each chapter, a global dimension of the main topic of the
chapter, and it revises the "Another View, Another Voice" boxes of each chapter ...