Environmental Sustainability and American Public Administration - by J Michael Martinez (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book discusses the many meanings of "sustainability," explores the importance of economics in environmental policy-making, and highlights the schools of thought in environmental ethics. It concludes that public administrators can play an important role in ensuring that en...

Book Synopsis

This book discusses the many meanings of "sustainability," explores the importance of economics in environmental policy-making, and highlights the schools of thought in environmental ethics. It concludes that public administrators can play an important role in ensuring that environmental sustainability is an integral part of American government.

Review Quotes

In this lucid and broad sweeping introduction to the US environmental movement, Martinez introduces the reader to the political and economic institutions undergirding the nation as necessary to understanding the environmental movement and the quest for sustainability. It is equally suited for college and advanced secondary school introductory classes and the lay reader as an approachable primer to the myriad of ideas, institutions, and seminal figures involved from the conservation movement of the early 20th century to the modern environmental and sustainability movement today.

This book illustrates the critical roles played, challenges faced, and choices made by public managers in the development of environmental policy in the United States, and that will confront them if sustainability is to become a central animating principle of governance in the United States. It is broad in intellectual scope, balanced in perspective, and written in accessible prose. Readers new to the fields of public administration or environmental governance will gain a basic a sense for major issues and actors in each, how the two relate to each other, and how both fit into historical debates over the proper role of the government in a democratic republic. They will also appreciate that linking the two to advance sustainability will not be a task for the timid, impatient, or strategically-challenged in our Madisonian system.

About the Author

J. Michael Martinez teaches political science at Kennesaw State University and works as an environmental affairs representative for a manufacturing company.