During the past two decades environmental affairs have sparked a wealth of political and governmental action. The ensuing debate has produced a massive historical record – books and articles, polemical arguments and scholarly accounts, day-by-day reports and intensive investigative journalism, newsletters and governmental records. Environmental science has generated new knowledge in fields ranging from human health to ecology, biogeochemistry to landscape architecture, the sociology and psychology of public values to the behavior of scientists and environmental managers. It is the task of this book to bring all these matters together in an integrative context in which the diverse pieces of environmental affairs might be understood as a whole.

What I encourage in the following chapters is some reflection on environmental events to understand them, even with fascination and excitement, as part of the process of history. Here is a panorama of human energy and effort, of aspiration and achievement, of deep controversy as values, policies, and programs clash. One cannot probe far into these events without confronting deeply rooted human values at work and conflicts that go far beyond merely casual matters of public affairs. My aim here is to observe environmental objectives and the resulting controversies in which they became entwined as a significant part of post–World War II America.

For the majority of readers, accustomed to environmental writings that work out policy alternatives, it seems appropriate to give more than passing emphasis to the book's focus on politics rather than policy.