Download e-book for iPad: Unlikely Environmentalists: Congress and Clean Water, by Paul Charles Milazzo

By Paul Charles Milazzo
ISBN-10: 0700622381
ISBN-13: 9780700622382
Milazzo examines a two-decade campaign to wash up the nation's water offer led by means of improvement boosters, beef barrel politicians, and the military Corps of Engineers, all of whom framed threats to the water offer as an monetary instead of environmental challenge and observed pollutants as an inhibitor of local development. exhibiting how the legislative department acted extra assertively than the administrative, the booklet weaves the heritage of the federal water toxins regulate application right into a broader narrative of political and institutional improvement, protecting all significant fresh water laws in addition to many different landmark environmental legislation.
Milazzo explains how the evolution of Congress's inner constitution after global warfare II, with its status committees and strong chairmen, finally formed the scope and substance of vital legislative regulations. He unearths how consultant John Blatnik of Minnesota, chairman of the home Subcommittee on Rivers and Harbors, shepherded the 1st everlasting water toxins keep watch over laws via Congress in 1956; how Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma embraced toxins regulate to deflect feedback of the general public works finances; and the way Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine used an undesirable toxins subcommittee chairmanship to create a extra doable federal water caliber application at a time while few americans demanded one.
By displaying even more different set of individuals and pursuits formed environmental politics than has normally been intended, Milazzo deepens our figuring out of ways Congress took the lead in addressing environmental issues, like water caliber, that finally contributed to the growth of presidency. His booklet demonstrates that the increase of the environmental regulatory country ranks as essentially the most far-reaching variations in American executive within the smooth era.