ABSTRACT

Environment politics, like other areas of political action, is a matter of forming the appropriate public opinion and seeing that it issues in appropriate action, So far, the environmental movement has concentrated on the first stage, tending to assume that there is no special difficulty about the second. Of course it is naive

to assume that our political processes naturally deliver what the public wants in any area of government, but there are features of typical environmental and ecological problems that make our usual political problems especially acute. Obvious difficulties are that environmental problems are especially likely to involve the interests of those who can have no direct representation in our present electoral systems, mute nature and future human beings. Moreover, many ecological decisions are completely irreversible, extinguishing species and initiating processes that cannot be stopped.