Presidents and their administrations since the 1960s have become increasingly active in environmental politics, despite their touted lack of expertise and their apparent frequent discomfort with the issue. In White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, Byron W. Daynes and Glen Sussman study the multitude of resources presidents can use in their attempts to set the public agenda. They also provide a framework for considering the environmental direction and impact of U.S. presidents during the last seven decades, permitting an assessment of each president in terms of how his administration either aided or hindered the advancement of environmental issues. Employing four factors—political communication, legislative leadership, administrative actions, and environmental diplomacy—as a matrix for examining the environmental records of the presidents, Daynes and Sussman’s analysis and discussion allow them to sort each of the twelve occupants of the White House included in this study into one of three categories, ranging from less to more environmentally friendly. Environmental leaders and public policy professionals will appreciate White House Politics and the Environment for its thorough and wide-ranging examination of how presidential resources have been brought to bear on environmental issues.

Commended for its behavioral and institutional approach, abundance of case studies, and pedagogy, this new text offers a unique examination of the politics and political actors behind environmental policy-making. In order to effect change in environmental policy, it is necessary to understand the politics of environmental decision-making and how political actors operate within political institutions. American Politics and the Environment is the only text available that emphasizes these critical factors. In addition to offering a unique behavioral and institutional approach, this new text provides students with a consistent theoretical framework they can use from chapter to chapter to help them better grasp the material. Three boxed features in each chapter one highlighting a person, one presenting a case study, and another investigating the issue of air pollution offer real world examples and illustrations and provide the opportunity for student analysis. The authors end the text with a series of propositions about the future of environmental policy and politics that serve both as summary and basis for future research.

The environment figures prominently in American political debate of the twentieth century. Issues of wilderness and wetlands preservation, clean air and clean water, and the sustainable use of natural resources attract passionate advocacy and demands for national as well as local action. Presidents since Theodore Roosevelt have addressed these issues, rhetorically (though not always prominently) in their public addresses and pragmatically in their policies and appointments to pertinent positions. Green Talk in the White House gathers an array of approaches to studying environmental rhetoric and the presidency, covering a range of presidential administrations and a diversity of viewpoints on how the concept of the “rhetorical presidency” may be modified in this policy area. Tarla Rai Peterson’s introduction discusses both methodological and substantive issues in studying presidential rhetoric on the environment. In subsequent chapters, noted scholars examine various aspects of half a dozen modern presidencies to shed light not only on those administrations but also on the study of environmental rhetoric itself. The final section of the book then directs attention to the future of presidential rhetoric and environmental governance, with looks “in” at state-level environmental issues and looks “out” at the international context of environmentalism. As a whole, the volume is ideal for those looking to better understand the particular intersection of presidency, policy, and rhetorical studies.

A comprehensive and current text for environmental politics and policy courses that offers a balanced assessment of current environmental issues.

The Environmental Presidency develops a systematic understanding of how presidents have influenced the development of environmental and natural resource policy through an examination of environmental behavior and interaction patterns between the president and the American people. Looking at five presidential roles—Commander in Chief, Chief Diplomat, Opinion and Party Leader, Chief Legislator, and Chief Executive—the authors show how the modern presidency has redefined the relative strengths of each role in response to the political salience of the environment. Contributors include Chris Borick, Michael Cabral, Janet S. Conary, Byron Daynes, Andrea K. Gerlak, Mark Kelso, Ron Ketter, Carolyn Long, Brent Steel, Glen Sussman, Raymond Tatalovich, Brooks Vandivort, Mark Wattier, and Jonathan P. West.

In 1891 Benjamin Harrison, the first president engaged in conservation, had to have this new area of public policy explained to him by members of the Boone and Crockett Club. This didn’t take long, as he was only asked to sign a few papers setting aside federal timberland. But from such small moments great social movements grow, and the course of natural resource protection policy through 22 presidents has altered Americans’ relationship to the natural world in then almost unimaginable ways. Presidents and the American Environment charts this course. Exploring the ways in which every president from Harrison to Obama has engaged the expanding agenda of the Nature protection impulse, the book offers a clear, close-up view of the shifting and nation shaping mosaic of both “green” and “brown” policy directions over more than a century. While the history of conservation generally focuses on the work of intellectuals such as Muir, Leopold, and Carson, such efforts could only succeed or fail on a large scale with the involvement of the government, and it is this side of the story that Presidents and the American Environment tells. On the one hand, we find a ready environmental engagement, as in Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of Pelican Island bird refuge upon being informed that the Constitution did not explicitly forbid it. On the other hand, we have leaders like Calvin Coolidge, playing hide-and-seek games in the Oval Office while ignoring reports of coastal industrial pollution. The book moves from early cautious sponsors of the idea of preserving public lands to crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt, from the environmental implications of the New Deal to the politics of pollution in the boom times of the forties and fifties, from the emergence of “environmentalism” to recent presidential detractors of the cause. From Harrison’s act, which established the American system of National Forests, to Barack Obama’s efforts on curbing climate change, presidents have mattered as they resisted or used the ever-changing tools and objectives of environmentalism. In fact, with a near even split between “browns” and “greens” over those 22 administrations, the role of president has often been decisive. How, and how much, distinguished historian Otis L. Graham, Jr., describes in in full for the first time, in this important contribution to American environmental history.

Walter A. Rosenbaum’s classic Environmental Politics and Policy, Tenth Edition once again provides definitive coverage of environmental politics and policy, lively case material, and a balanced assessment of current environmental issues. The first half of the book sets needed context and describes the policy process while the second half covers specific environmental issues such as air and water; toxic and hazardous substances; energy; and a global policymaking chapter focused on climate change and transboundary politics. Covering major environmental policy initiatives and controversies during President Obama's two terms and capturing the sudden and radical changes occurring in the American energy economy, this Tenth Edition offers the needed currency and relevancy for any environmental politics course.