ABSTRACT

If environmental advocacy groups have been the public’s chief defenders against threats to the environment and the ecosystem, it is the business community whose activities have historically been seen as principally responsible for those threats. Industrial operations inevitably generate significant levels of air and water pollution and a steady stream of wastes; and building and infrastructure construction projects impose burdens on land and reduce its capacity to control flooding, drought, and soil and beach erosion. The products they provide for a consumer-oriented society exhaust natural resources faster than they can be replenished, when they can be replenished at all, and the energy supplies upon which these activities depend impose their own risks to public health and safety, such as accidents like those at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility and the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker at Prince William Sound. Because business operations pose such risks to the environment, they have been subject to increasingly stringent and comprehensive regulation by government. As the biggest stakeholder in how environmental policy is framed, business has always been an aggressive and prominent participant in the policymaking process.