ABSTRACT
The CFC-ozone controversy took off in the United States in a specific historical and political context. This country has one of the longest histories of concern for the environment; several environmental issues had been raised and institutions had been created before similar developments took root elsewhere. The beginning of American environmental politics and policies are usually linked to two landmarks: the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962, which sounded the alarm on pesticides, and the Earth Day in 1970 (Hays 1987). In the mid-1960s, several pieces of legislation were passed: the Wilderness Act in 1964, the first Clean Water Act in 1965, the Clean Air Act in 1967, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1968. Since then, major environmental groups have emerged, mainly based in Washington and relying on legislative and litigative initiatives focused on federal government (Dowie 1995). In 1969 the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed, leading in turn to the founding of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The latter was intended to facilitate the president’s drawing up of an annual environmental report. In 1970 President Nixon recommended the formation of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to Congress. Its primary task would be pollution control. Nixon accepted that the environment is an interdependent system, so the EPA was not to be organised according to environmental media (air, water, soil), but, rather, functionally. This meant that it identified harmful chemicals, followed them through the entire ecological chain, and determined the chemicals’ effects and the interactions between them, in order to determine ultimately where in the ecological chain it was most sensible to intervene (see Hays 1987; Marcus 1991).
